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on Post Keynesian Economics |
| By: | William H. Lazonick |
| Abstract: | In my research on innovative enterprise and sustainable prosperity, I use the "theory of innovative enterprise" to examine how modes of corporate finance--founder investments, private placements, initial public offerings, retained earnings, secondary stock issues, employee stock options, short-term debt, long-term debt, and derivatives--support or undermine the three social conditions of innovative enterprise: strategic control, organizational integration, and financial commitment. In this paper, I focus on the role of the stock market in corporate finance, arguing that, in the United States, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the National Association of Security Dealers Automated Quotation (NASDAQ) system have functioned far more as value-extracting institutions (draining issuer companies of cash distributed to shareholders) than as value-creating institutions (providing issuer companies with cash to invest in productive capabilities). As an important example, I delve into how Apple, Inc. transformed from one of the most innovative companies in history to one the most financialized ones, reflecting a widespread change in the US economy from corporate innovation to corporate financialization. The stock market has become an institution that supports "predatory value extraction"--most impactfully manifested by the phenomenon of stock buybacks completed as open-market share repurchases. I conclude with brief statements on three major lessons related to economic ideology, economic performance, and economic policy that one can learn from my study of corporate finance in the theory of innovative enterprise. |
| Keywords: | Innovative enterprise; strategic control; organizational integration; financial commitment; corporate financialization; stock buybacks; Apple Inc. |
| JEL: | D2 D3 D46 G3 N22 O3 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:wrkpap:wp_1113 |
| By: | Pavlina R. Tcherneva |
| Abstract: | The job guarantee (JG) has long been theorized as a cyclical stabilizer, a buffer stock of publicly employed workers that expands in downturns and contracts in booms. That framing was useful but is no longer sufficient. This paper reframes the JG as a permanent structural reform--a new labor standard and an institutional anchor for rebuilding the public sector from the ground up--rather than as a safety valve or transitional employment. The argument proceeds on two fronts. The JG must shift focus from its anti-cyclical features and toward its structural role in re-engineering the precarious labor market. Precarity is the business model. No cyclical stabilizer addresses the systemic levers firms use to suppress labor costs: wage theft, irregular scheduling, chronic misclassification, and the denial of basic benefits. The JG can be designed in such a way as to remove that leverage. At the same time, the JG must be decisively married to the direct provision of public services that markets either overprice or refuse to supply altogether. After decades of austerity and deliberate dismantling of federal capacity, the public sector must itself be rebuilt. It needs to be staffed, funded, and directed toward the concrete, unmet needs of American families: healthcare, childcare, housing, elder care, and energy security. The JG is the institutional mechanism that does both at once--not as a patchwork of separate interventions, but as the foundation of an economy that finally works for the people who do the work. |
| Keywords: | job guarantee; Employer of Last Resort; labor standards; precarious employment; socialization of investment; affordability crisis; public sector capacity |
| JEL: | E24 E61 E62 H55 I38 J08 J21 J38 J48 J58 |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:wrkpap:wp_1112 |
| By: | Allisson, François; Chassonnery-Zaïgouche, Cléo |
| Abstract: | Maurice Dobb’s Wages, a short textbook-style work commissioned by John Maynard Keynes for the Cambridge Economic Handbooks series, was first published in 1928. It went through six revised editions by 1959, along with numerous reprints and translations up to the 1980s. This paper analyses the evolution of the book’s content in order to question the status of economic theory in relation to the study of labour issues. The first section examines the making of the handbook and shows how Wages addressed the usefulness of economic theory, particularly price theory. The second section traces the evolution of Dobb’s views on wages, shaped by his controversy with John Hicks in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The third section explores the growing scepticism of Wages across its subsequent editions and translations, following its trajectory from the centre to the periphery of economics. |
| Keywords: | Dobb (Maurice); textbook; wages; labour economics; wage theory |
| JEL: | B13 B24 J30 |
| Date: | 2026–05–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138374 |
| By: | Dimitri B. Papadimitriou |
| Abstract: | There seems to be a building consensus of global uncertainty and instability. This can be observed not only from surveys, the media, and country reports, but in the recent speeches by members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The Fed speeches focus on financial stability, not the usual price stability, but that of the financial system. Not surprising, given the unstable conditions of the US economy emanating from the geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, is the excessive volatility and overvaluation of the equity markets and the public sector's erratic fiscal and trade policy stance. Reports show that equity funds loaded with AI investments--what we may call "emotional investments"--are now looking to unload them in the financial market, adding more fuel to market volatility that may cause a financial crisis, reminiscent of previous crises. The solution may lie in the implementation of a totally new economic regime in answer to recurring macroeconomic fragility. This paper considers the current conditions of macroeconomic fragility. It explores the challenges and risks to financial system stability that emerge from innovation-developed and increasingly decentralized finance--including the effects of cryptoassets, tokenization of digital assets, and artificial intelligence. |
| Keywords: | Minsky’s instability; decentralized finance; behavioral finance; financial system stability; cryptocurrencies; Artificial Intelligence |
| JEL: | E42 E58 G41 G23 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:wrkpap:wp_1114 |
| By: | Alla Semenova |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the growing impacts of climate change in the US homeowner's insurance industry. As climate change-driven weather extremes and natural disasters have accelerated in their frequency and severity, they have inflicted increasingly more residential property damage and destruction, leading to surging losses and claims payouts for the US homeowner's insurance industry. Faced with worsening underwriting performance, the US home insurers have responded with higher homeowner's insurance premiums, reduced home insurance coverage, policy non-renewals, exits from high-risk geographic areas, and other changes to their business practices. Such climate-driven actions by home insurers have led to a crisis of homeowner's insurance affordability, availability, and protection. This crisis further undermines homeownership affordability, eroding homeowner finances, and threatening the stability of the US financial system. By focusing on the US homeowner's insurance industry, this paper provides a case study on the growing economic costs and impacts of climate change. |
| Keywords: | climate change; extreme weather; homeowner’s insurance; home ownership affordability; homeowner finances; financial stability; federal policy |
| JEL: | D14 E31 E44 G01 G21 G22 G28 G51 G52 Q54 R31 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:wrkpap:wp_1115 |
| By: | Snower, Dennis; Thomas, Margo (Women's Economic Imperative) |
| Abstract: | The article argues that the erosion of the postwar rules-based order is giving rise to a new, networked form of colonialism, characterized by extraction, asymmetry, and transactional power. Unlike classical empire, this "new colonialism" operates through digital infrastructures, financial systems, and geopolitical influence rather than direct territorial control. The authors interpret these dynamics as a pathological concentration of agency that undermines human flourishing. They propose "recoupling" collective capacities with collective challenges—through distributed agency, coalition-based governance, and multidimensional wellbeing metrics—as a pathway toward a more inclusive, post-colonial global order. |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:amz:wpaper:2026-11 |
| By: | Oleg V. Pavlov; Robert Y. Cavana; I. David Wheat; Khalid Saeed; Michael J. Radzicki; Brian C. Dangerfield |
| Abstract: | System dynamics is a methodology that is widely used in many academic fields. It explains the behavior of social and economic systems with models that capture complex causality and feedback effects. This 'practice paper' discusses the opportunities and barriers for introducing feedback thinking and system dynamics models in the economics curriculum. We start by providing a pricing feedback model that illustrates some of the benefits that system dynamics can provide in enhancing economics education. Then we summarize the experiences of each of the authors in teaching system dynamics on economics educational programs. This includes different approaches to teaching economics with system dynamics that depend on the learning objectives, the preparation of students, and the background of the instructor. We also develop a four-level course hierarchy for using system dynamics in economics teaching. We then point out the tradeoffs that instructors must consider as they introduce new pedagogies for delivering economics material. Finally, we provide some concluding comments with some suggestions for future work. The expected audiences for this paper are instructors as well as graduate students who are considering academia as a profession. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.06757 |
| By: | Quinn, Joseph M (University of South Carolina); Barron, Valerie K. |
| Abstract: | Inequalities in the classroom often reflect broader societal biases and prejudices, in part because they are reproduced through everyday interactions amongst students and instructors. Students in groups make rapid judgments about who is competent, who should lead, and who can be ignored. These judgments can map onto status distinctions like race and gender, turning active learning groups into sites that reify rather than challenge broader inequalities. Researchers and practitioners often look to intergroup contact theory (IGCT) when designing interventions to reduce prejudice in the classroom. The theory proposes that contact between different groups is most effective under conditions of equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support. Yet these conditions are not self-executing: IGCT describes the qualities of ideal contact but does not explain the micro-level interactional mechanisms that produce such contact in classroom groups. Nor does it clearly explain when and how positive interactions between dissimilar peers may lead to more than ephemeral changes in cooperation and prejudice-reduction – that is, when intergroup exchanges may alter the status beliefs and performance expectations that students bring into future interactions beyond the classroom. Sociological theories of social commitment and status construction help clarify these processes and offer a ground-up basis for strategies that can heighten intergroup cooperation while reducing status-related biases within, and perhaps beyond, interactions in the classroom. In this article, we link the Theory of Social Commitments (TOSC) and Status Construction Theory (SCT) to IGCT to show how instructors can reorganize intergroup contact through intentional learning group composition, interdependent tasks, and feedback that both rewards cooperation and makes bias-disconfirming competence observable. |
| Date: | 2026–05–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:yw963_v1 |
| By: | Heng-fu Zou (The World Bank, Washington, D. C., 20433, USA) |
| Abstract: | This paper argues that Francis Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis no longer provides an adequate framework for understanding the contemporary world. In place of liberal convergence, the twenty-first century has revealed the return of great-power rivalry, civilizational self-assertion, strategic rearmament, and competing projects of world order. To explain this transformation, the paper develops a composite framework drawing on Hobbes, Schmitt, Nietzsche, and the Chinese idea of Tianxia. Hobbes clarifes the structure of insecurity in a world without a common superior power. Schmitt clarifies sovereignty, decision, and the renewed centrality of political enmity. Nietzsche clarifies rank, command, greatness, decadence, and the production of higher civilizational types. Tianxia expands the analysis beyond the Roman-Western horizon by introducing a broader imagination of world order grounded in civilizational totality. On this basis, the paper offers a comparative interpretation of China, Rome, Spain, Britain, Russia, the United States, Iran, Japan, India, and Vietnam as distinct but interacting forms of imperial or civilizational power. Its central claim is that modernity has not abolished empire or grandeur. It has multiplied their forms. The present age is therefore better understood not as the end of history, but as the return of history in a more openly Hobbesian, Schmittian, Nietzschean, and civilizationally plural world. |
| Keywords: | Nietzsche; Tianxia; Fukuyama; Hobbes; Carl Schmitt; empire; civilizational state; great-power rivalry; world order; Rome; China; America; Russia; political theology; realism; end of history |
| JEL: | B15 F51 F52 P16 N40 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cuf:wpaper:809 |