Heterodox Microeconomics http://lists.repec.org/mailman/listinfo/nep-hme Heterodox Microeconomics 2026-05-25 Marx’s political economy from the perspective of dynamical systems theory https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rtr:wpaper:0292&r=&r=hme The paper advances novel interpretations of Marx’s original insights by situating them within the horizon of contemporary scientific approaches, notably dynamical systems theory and statistical physics. Marx’s dialectical method is a mode of analysis predicated on the insight that relations among parts cannot be adequately grasped in abstraction from the relation between the whole and its constituent elements – a defining feature of modern systemic approaches. This perspective renders it possible to reinterpret many of Marx’s key concepts as emergent properties of economic systems. The paper further contends that Marx conceived capitalist development as an intrinsically dynamic process that precludes the notion of equilibrium as a state of rest. In this light, the centrality of disequilibrium within the Marxian framework brings it into an alignment with contemporary theories of deterministic chaos, wherein systems persistently far from equilibrium are nonetheless amenable to rational analysis through the concept of attractors. Giovanni Scarano Complex systems, holism, reductionism, structuralism, disequilibrium 2026-05 Long-run Stages of Capitalist Development. https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129013&r=&r=hme Since the 16th century, several forms of the capitalist mode of production have shaped the evolution of the human species. Any closer inspection of the concept of evolution reveals that it is a name for a dynamic, which incorporates several underlying contradictions. Seen from a larger perspective, a unifying characteristic of the evolution of capitalism is necessary to justify the use of a common name for this time period. But parallel to this necessity, partly contradicting it, a set of shorter stages of capitalism is needed to understand how the long-run phenomena could emerge at all. During each of these stages, some well-working mechanisms can be identified, which first led to a surge of this stage; and later, due to their working, these same mechanisms led to a partial collapse of the stage. In these shorter revolutionary intermezzi that often took several decades, new mechanisms were entering social evolution to maintain capitalism’s basic thrust and, at the same time, to overcome the obstacles of the previous stage. There clearly is a kind of fractal structure in such a historical treatment of capitalism’s evolution: Within each stage of capitalism, mid-range pulsations, sometimes called business cycles, can be observed which resemble the characteristics of the stage within which they are embedded. Of course, capitalism is a broad social formation and cannot be reduced to a simple core of stylised economic behaviour in the fashion of ‘achieving the highest output with scarce resources’. It extends to geopolitical power constellations as well as to cultural traits of capitalism’s stages. Capitalism, in its long-run evolution, in its historical mission, brought about mainly two achievements: A tremendous increase in labour productivity and a more and more sophisticated design for a global democratic institutional framework guiding the species into the next, non-capitalist mode of production. Evolutionary and institutional economics are the sub-disciplines of political economy that traditionally assembled research in this area. And the consideration of the stages of capitalism is the place where the inner workings of the dialectics of continuity and break can be best investigated. Hanappi, Hardy Stages of Capitalism 2026-05-07 One Movement, Two Registers: Scholarship, Advocacy, and their Division of Labor in the Pluralism-in-Economics Movement https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ico:wpaper:181&r=&r=hme This chapter examines the coexistence of scholarly and advocacy “registers” within the pluralism-in-economics (PiE) movement and argues that distinguishing between them is both philosophically defensible and strategically necessary. The movement combines academic debates on pluralism, methodology, and epistemology with activist efforts aimed at institutional reform in economics. This dual structure creates two central challenges. The first, termed structural entanglement, refers to the unavoidable intertwining of epistemic and normative arguments in a policy-relevant discipline where the same actors move between scholarly and political roles. The second, epistemic capture, occurs when the authority of scholarly discourse is used to legitimize conclusions whose warrant is primarily normative. Rejecting both positivist claims of value-free science and relativist attempts to collapse the fact-value distinction, the chapter defends a middle position inspired by Veblen, Myrdal, feminist standpoint theory, and perspectival realism. This approach acknowledges the inevitability of value-ladenness in inquiry while maintaining the possibility of evaluating claims according to epistemic standards. Building on this framework, the chapter proposes a “perspectival adequacy assessment” based on procedural openness to criticism and cross-perspectival comparison. Empirically, the chapter discusses examples of blurred scholarly and advocacy functions within and around the PiE movement. As a constructive response, it advocates “register transparency” and a division of labor between scholarly and advocacy functions. The chapter concludes that preserving a distinction between epistemic and normative warrant is essential for maintaining the analytical credibility and transformative potential of pluralist economics. Claudius Gräbner-Radkowitsch 2026-05 Economics Education under Algorithmic Power: Moral Judgment, Pluralism and the Political Economy of AI https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:exe:wpaper:2605&r=&r=hme The rapid diffusion of generative artificial intelligence in higher education is reshaping not only assessment practices but the epistemic and normative foundations of disciplinary knowledge. In economics education, where the distinction between positive analysis and normative judgment has long structured curricula, algorithmic systems risk amplifying theoretical monocultures, obscuring value assumptions, and privileging procedural fluency over critical reflection. This article argues that AI is not a neutral pedagogical tool but a sociotechnical infrastructure embedded in corporate power, data regimes, and the broader political economy of AI. The paper addresses three questions: How does algorithmic power reconfigure the moral architecture of economics education? Can AI strengthen rather than narrow pluralist inquiry? What institutional conditions are required for coherent and sustainable integration? Drawing on pluralist and heterodox economics, philosophy of economics, critical scholarship on the political economy of AI, and empirical research in economics education and assessment, the article develops a Moral-AI Pedagogy Framework embedding normative transparency, structured pluralism, critical AI literacy, and assessment reform centred on justificatory reasoning. Extending beyond classroom design, the analysis examines curriculum governance, faculty incentives, and digital procurement. When calculation accelerates, the cultivation of moral judgment becomes more, not less, essential. Stephane Hlaimi John Maloney economics education, political economy of AI, algorithmic power, pluralism in economics, moral judgment, heterodox economics, higher education governance, assessment reform 2026-05-14 Beyond Interruption: Care, Epistemic Distance and the Temporal Politics of Academic Value https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:9yxju_v1&r=&r=hme Academic careers are commonly evaluated through temporal norms that privilege continuity, acceleration and cumulative output. Within such regimes, care-related non-linearity is often framed as interruption, absence or reduced productivity. This article develops a feminist conceptual analysis of care, time and academic value, drawing on care ethics, feminist epistemology and scholarship on academic labour, to challenge this deficit framing. Rather than asking only how care constrains academic participation, it examines how care-shaped trajectories expose the assumptions through which productivity becomes academic value. The article advances three arguments. First, it distinguishes care as relational ontology, social practice and epistemic orientation, arguing that care reshapes not only the conditions of academic work but also the forms of attention and knowledge-making it can sustain. Second, it conceptualises academic productivity as a temporal and epistemic value regime that shapes what kinds of knowledge become recognisable and institutionally valuable. Third, it introduces epistemic distance as a temporally produced condition through which assumptions of academic value become available for critique. The article contributes to feminist debates on academic labour by shifting analysis from participation to epistemic recognition, showing how care-related non-linearity reveals what academia is willing, or unable, to know under dominant productivity regimes. Almeida, Patrícia Albergaria 2026-05-13 Donut-Ökonomie https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:set:wpaper:5&r=&r=hme Die von Kate Raworth entwickelte Donut-Ökonomie markiert eine konzeptionelle Wende in der Klimadebatte, indem sie das Ziel eines grünen BIP-Wachstums durch ein vieldimensionales Verständnis von sozial-ökologischem Wohlstand ersetzt. Kern des Ansatzes ist das visuelle Modell einer doppelten Grenze: Ein innerer Ring definiert soziale Mindeststandards, während ein äußerer Ring die ökologischen Belastbarkeitsgrenzen des Planeten markiert. Der daraus resultierende „safe and just space“ dient als multidimensionaler Kompass für eine regenerative und distributive Wirtschaft. In der Praxis wird dieses Modell, koordiniert durch das Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), zunehmend auf kommunaler Ebene – etwa durch Instrumente wie das „City Portrait“ – zur Steuerung von Transformationsprozessen eingesetzt. Die Stärke des Konzepts liegt in seiner hohen Anschlussfähigkeit und Kommunikationskraft, doch wird kritisch angemerkt, dass die konzeptionelle Offenheit auch Risiken birgt. So können hinter einer scheinbar objektiven Indikatorik handfeste Macht- und Verteilungsfragen verschwinden, was die Gefahr einer Depolitisierung oder eines rein symbolischen „Doughnut-Washings“ befördert. Letztlich erweist sich die Donut-Ökonomie als wertvoller Orientierungsrahmen, dessen transformative Wirkung jedoch maßgeblich von der politischen Konsequenz in der lokalen Anwendung abhängt. Claudius Gräbner-Radkowitsch David J. Petersen 2026-03 The Gilded Enclave: A Quantitative Analysis of Linkage Elasticity, Crowding Out, and Structural Transformation https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:vm73f_v1&r=&r=hme This dissertation examines the structural implications of developing countries' services-led growth model through the lens of structural transformation. India has achieved significant export growth in services, particularly IT and business process outsourcing. This expansion has occurred alongside limited industrial deepening and uneven labour absorption. This dissertation aims to introduce structurally introduce the concept of a service enclave economy: a highly productive sector globally and nationally but one that isn't deeply embedded in terms of the backward and forward linkages it produces in the domestic economy, limiting its potential as the engine for structural transformation. This paper further dives into the structural, political economy, macroeconomic as well as coordination implications of such enclaves. Using input-output tables, eigenvector centrality as well as a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM), the paper introduces the concept of linkage elasticity of growth to capture the extent to which sectoral expansion generates additional domestic economic activity as well as an enclave index. The analysis finds that India’s leading export sector, IT services, exhibits high value added intensity but relatively low domestic linkage density and embeddedness domestically, showing strong enclave-like characteristics. In contrast, manufacturing sectors such as motor vehicles and textiles display stronger backward linkages. Further, the paper documents significant asymmetries in tax burdens, export orientation, and import dependence across sectors. The paper delves into the political economy aspects as well as welfare aspects of such growth, highlighting the potential distortionary behaviour that may emerge from 2nd order consumption including potential systemic credit channels, unequal distribution of growth as well as spatial crowding out. In this regard, this paper also introduces the concept of attention crowding out, a political economy phenomenon of uneven allocation of political attention, structurally favouring certain industries while potentially not capitalising on transformational gains for the broader economy The findings suggest that India’s growth trajectory is characterised by the expansion of a globally competitive but domestically weakly integrated service sector alongside an underdeveloped industrial base. This paper argues that such a configuration may constrain the depth of structural transformation by limiting both the propagation of growth through domestic linkages and the broad distribution of income. The results contribute to the literature on structural transformation by highlighting the role of sectoral linkage structures in shaping development outcomes in services-led economies. Grewal, Praduman 2026-05-12 Mitigating through the market: The EU's emissions trading system https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:ipewps:341097&r=&r=hme The European Union (EU) Emissions Trading System (ETS) is an example of market-based environmental governance. While it has delivered measurable emission reductions in covered sectors, especially after major post-2013 reforms, its fairness, legitimacy, and transformative capacity remain contested. Therefore, this paper asks to what extent the EU ETS has contributed to emission reductions in the EU and what limitations emerge when it is assessed from a social-ecological economics (SEE) perspective. Using a qualitative, literature-based approach, it combines empirical studies on environmental and economic impacts of the ETS with a comparative theoretical framework that contrasts neoclassical environmental economics with SEE. The analysis shows that, on neoclassical terms, the ETS qualifies as a relatively efficient and adaptive carbon market, achieving targeted abatements at limited aggregate costs. However, when evaluated against broader criteria of ecological adequacy, distributional justice, governance and power, transformation potential and precaution, the system's marketcentred architecture commodifies atmospheric capacity, leaves the scale of socioeconomic metabolism and growth dependence largely untouched, and only partially addresses inequalities through ex post correction. In doing so, the paper bridges mainstream carbon pricing debates with SEE, arguing that emissions trading can support mitigation but must be subordinated to more far-reaching strategies of regulation, sufficiency, and socio-ecological provisioning if the EU is to align climate policy with planetary boundaries and social justice. Aryee-Boi, Nii Lantey Malik Hauck, Isabella Noisten, Anna Lotta Weinhold, Maurice Emissions Trading, neoclassic, socio-ecological economics, European Union 2026 Dynamic Macroeconomics with Multiple Regimes https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.15644&r=&r=hme Macroeconomic dynamics is typically modeled under the assumption that the economy evolves according to a single invariant law of motion. This paper shows that this assumption imposes a structural restriction. We develop Dynamic Macroeconomics with Multiple Regimes (DMR), a framework in which economic evolution is governed by multiple regime-specific propagation operators. As a result, trajectories arise from ordered compositions of heterogeneous operators rather than from the iteration of a single mapping. We establish three structural results. First, invariant-law and regime-dependent systems are not topologically equivalent. Second, regime dependence is dynamically irreducible: it cannot be eliminated through any injective transformation of the state space. Third, whenever regime operators fail to commute, there exists no map $F:\mathbb{R}^n\to\mathbb{R}^n$ whose iterates reproduce all regime-admissible trajectories. These results establish a structural separation between invariant-law macroeconomics and regime-dependent dynamics, implying that stability, policy evaluation, and structural characterization must be conducted at the level of interacting propagation operators rather than within a single invariant mapping. Jorge R. Ch\'avez F 2026-05 Measuring the Total Opportunity Costs of Cultural Expenses: An Empirical Exercise for the Spanish Economy https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aub:autbar:979.26&r=&r=hme The present analysis uses an extended version of the restricted demand-driven Input-Output multipliers to compute the economy-wide opportunity costs of households cultural expenses. We then present a novel methodology that allows capturing the direct and indirect costs associated to movements along the Households expenditure possibilities frontier. To this end, we use a Social Accounting Matrix for the Spanish economy. Apart from computing the total opportunity costs of cultural expenses for the average Spanish Household, we have evaluated these total costs for eight different Households categories classified according to its monthly net income. In our view, the results are useful not only to understand what justifies the different consumption patterns regarding cultural expenses in a specific region, such as Spain, but also across Households categories. In addition, our findings may serve to increase the degree of efficiency of those policies that seek to increase cultural expenses in an economy because of both the total economy-wide effects and the positive indirect externalities that culture generates. Ana-Isabel Guerra Alfredo Mainar Maria Teresa Alvárez Martínez Patricia Saguar 2026-05-15 GeomHerd: A Forward-looking Herding Quantification via Ricci Flow Geometry on Agent Interactive Simulations https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.11645&r=&r=hme Herding -- where agents align their behaviors and act collectively -- is a central driver of market fragility and systemic risk. Existing approaches to quantify herding rely on price-correlation statistics, which inherently lag because they only detect coordination after it has already moved realised returns. We propose GeomHerd, a forward-looking geometric framework that bypasses this observability lag by quantifying coordination directly on upstream agent-interaction graphs. To generate these graphs, we treat a heterogeneous LLM-driven multi-agent simulator -- each financial trader instantiated by a persona-conditioned LLM call -- as a forecastable world, and evaluate the geometric pipeline on the Cividino--Sornette continuous-spin agent-based substrate as our headline financial testbed. By tracking the discrete Ollivier--Ricci curvature of these action graphs, GeomHerd captures the structural topology of emerging coordination. Theoretically, we establish a mean-field bridge mapping our graph-theoretic metric to CSAD, the classical macroscopic herding statistic, linking GeomHerd to downstream price-dispersion measurement. Empirically, GeomHerd anticipates herding long before aggregate market baselines: on the continuous-spin substrate, our primary detector fires a median of 272 steps before order-parameter onset; a contagion detector ($\beta_{-}$) recalls 65% of critical trajectories 318 steps early; and on co-firing trajectories the agent-graph signal precedes price-correlation-graph baselines by 40 steps. As a complementary indicator, the effective vocabulary of agent actions contracts during cascades. The geometric signature transfers out-of-domain to the Vicsek self-driven-particle model, and a curvature-conditioned forecasting head reduces cascade-window log-return MAE over detector-conditioned and price-only baselines. Lake Yang Junwei Su Jingfeng Zeng Wenhao Lu Xingzhi Qian Weitong Zhang Chuan Wu Dunhong Jin 2026-05 “Like a pancake on wet pavement”: everyday resonance, asymmetric mobilisation, and the failure of alternatives to neoliberalism in Western Europe, 1973-83 https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138150&r=&r=hme This paper investigates the origins of neoliberalism in Western Europe from a new perspective, by highlighting and explaining the rejection of a family of alternatives to neoliberalism in the 1970s and early 1980s. These policies for the ‘socialisation of investment’ made diagnoses that were similar to neoliberal diagnoses, particularly emphasising the tension between policies that challenged the interests of capital and reliance on that capital for investment. However, whereas neoliberal policies answered this problem by facilitating the interests of capital, these alternatives sought to extend state and workers’ control over investment. Focusing on cases in the United Kingdom and Sweden, the paper explains why Socialist parties in these countries discussed but ultimately rejected socialisation of investment as a basis for their economic strategies. Comparing the processes of rejection in these cases, and comparing them to policies that these parties did implement, it argues that these proposals were rejected because of asymmetries in resonance and mobilisation on the question. Owners and managers of capital mobilised strongly against socialisation. By contrast, most Socialist politicians, voters, and union members saw control over investment as abstract and distant from their everyday priorities, and did not provide the support needed to counteract resistance. Warner, Neil neoliberalism; socialisation of investment; socialist parties; policy resonance; 1970s 2026-05-08 Measuring Services Complexity:A Novel Machine Learning Approach Using U.S. Input–Output Data. https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ude:wpaper:0126&r=&r=hme A stylized factin modern economies is that the more developed a country is, the greater the weight of the service sector.The economics of complexity has provided a new perspective that explains this growth in modern economies.However, thestudy of economic complexity through the standard measure of thecomplexity index presents an increasingly relevant omission in understanding the economic process and its growth.Ingeneral, the data used to measure the EconomicComplexity Index(ECI) are based on information about goods;however, there is a lack of informationon services.This paper proposes an ew methodology to retrieve information on the economic complexity in services.Forthis purpose, the US input-output matrix is used.This work is novel because, thanks to the structure of the data as a network, it is possible to infer them is sing information on the complexity of services. Using a machinelearning method, it ispossible to impute the complexity index for 146services, a level of disaggregation, that is strikingly higher than in other works.The index recovered by this method is consistent with previous results that found service sectors to be more complex than goods.The second result shows that the more restricted the core is in the center of the network, the greater the centrality of services and their complexity.Finally, the results confirm the relevance of the economic complexity index. However, the ECI forservices is better than the ECI for goods for predicting growth;aone-unit increase in the ECI of services increases GDP growth by more than 1 percentage point. Santiago Picasso Economic Complexity; Services Sector; Input–Output Networks; Machine Learning; k-Nearest Neighbors; Structural Transformation; Economic Growth; Spatial Econometrics 2026-02 Statistical Model Checking of the Keynes+Schumpeter Model: A Transient Sensitivity Analysis of a Macroeconomic ABM https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.10447&r=&r=hme Agent-based models (ABMs) are increasingly used in macroeconomics, but their analysis still often relies on ad hoc Monte Carlo campaigns with heterogeneous statistical effort across parameter settings. We show how statistical model checking (SMC), implemented through MultiVeStA, can provide a principled analysis layer for a realistic macroeconomic ABM without rewriting the simulator in a dedicated formalism. Our case study is the heuristic-switching Keynes+Schumpeter(K+S) model, analysed hrough a transient sensitivity campaign over one-parameter sweeps, two macro observables (unemployment and GDP growth), and one auxiliary micro-level probe (market share) on the post-warmup phase of a 600-step horizon. The analysis is driven by reusable temporal queries, observable-specific precision targets, and confidence-based stopping rules that automatically determine the simulation effort required by each configuration. Results show a clear contrast across parameter families: macro-financial and structural sweeps produce the strongest transient effects, whereas several heuristic-rule sweeps remain much weaker under the same precision policy. More broadly, the paper shows that SMC can support reproducible and informative quantitative analysis of substantively rich economic ABMs, while making uncertainty estimates and simulation cost explicit parts of the reported results. Stefano Blando Giorgio Fagiolo Mauro Napoletano Tania Treibich Andrea Vandin 2026-05 Engineering Economy: A New Paradigm for Escaping the Middle-Income Trap https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.09145&r=&r=hme This paper introduces the concept of Engineering Economy as a new paradigm for understanding and managing macroeconomic policy in middle-income countries seeking to escape the middle-income trap. Drawing on Turkiye's post-2001 economic trajectory and South Korea's successful transition from a low-income to a high-income economy, the study argues that conventional frameworks whether the Washington Consensus's market liberalization prescriptions or the institutionalist critique alone are insufficient. Instead, it proposes treating the economy as a dynamic control system requiring continuous calibration rather than static equilibrium. The paper develops a road-surface metaphor (highway, side-road, off-road) to characterize different global economic regimes and presents eleven interconnected policy pillars spanning venture capital formation, regulatory sandboxes, technology-focused industrial policy, and human capital development. By synthesizing insights from endogenous growth theory (Romer), institutional economics (Acemoglu), the catching-up literature (Lee), cybernetic systems theory (Wiener), and Schumpeterian creative destruction, the framework reconceptualizes macroeconomic instruments through control-engineering analogies: interest rates as energy gradients, fiscal policy as energy flow, exchange rates as balance motors, and regulation as adaptive suspension. The analysis demonstrates that Turkiye's structural challenge is not merely institutional weakness but a systemic absence of R&D demand from its dominant enterprise structures, creating a vicious cycle that conventional reforms cannot break. Seven specific opportunity windows arising from US-China technological rivalry are identified, and a phased implementation roadmap is proposed. Mustafa Ergen 2026-05 The Agentic Economy: Humans, AI Agents, Robots, and the Measurable Transition toward Distributed Economic Action https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.18935&r=&r=hme This article develops the concept of the agentic economy and diagnoses its measurable preconditions: a transition in which economic action is increasingly distributed among humans, AI agents, industrial robots, executable protocols, compute infrastructures, and energy systems. The paper argues that classical categories such as labour, capital, firm, market, productivity, and trust remain necessary but incomplete when technologies prepare decisions, coordinate workflows, support tasks, verify transactions, and reshape responsibility. Methodologically, the study uses a conceptual-empirical quantitative diagnostic design rather than a causal econometric model. It relies on public institutional data on AI investment, AI adoption, robot installations and operational stock, data-centre electricity demand, and labour-market reallocation. The reported values are transformed through transparent indicators such as relative growth, CAGR, growth multipliers, stock-flow ratios, concentration ratios, and HHI. The results show that AI adoption is accelerating, AI investment signals broad capital allocation, industrial robots represent persistent cyber-physical action capacity, compute expansion increases data-centre electricity pressure, and labour projections are more consistent with task reallocation than labour disappearance. The article contributes an action-capacity framework linking model/software-agent capacity, robotic capacity, compute-energy coupling, protocolisation, auditable trust, and human sovereignty. It concludes that the agentic economy is not yet a completed global order, but its transition pressure is measurable enough to require a distinct economic vocabulary, reproducible diagnostics, and future sector-level measurement. Davit Gondauri Mikheil Batiashvili 2026-05 Digital Infrastructures and Technological Debt: Data Centers, AI, and the Displacement of Disorder https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129034&r=&r=hme Existing analyses of digital infrastructures often treat materialist critique, opacity studies, and environmental footprint accounting as separate approaches, thereby missing the broader regime that connects them. This paper applies the framework of anthropy — the hypothesis that social systems displace disorder rather than resolve it — to contemporary digital infrastructures: data centers, generative AI, material supply chains, host territories, and public guarantee mechanisms. Drawing on six core bodies of work — Marquet, Mah and Wang, Diguet and Lopez, Gabor, Lemoine, and Monnin — the paper traces a unified chain of manufacture, exposure, commitment, guarantee, stabilisation, and politicisation. It shows how investability emerges from the coupling of a contemporary mechanism, derisking, with a longer institutional formation: the credit-disciplined state. The paper's main contribution is a testable grid of four coupled cost registers — energy, matter, territory, and attention — and a formalisation of the transformation of cost into debt through commitment, guarantee, and irreversibility. Lalut, Stéphane anthropy; digital infrastructures; data centers; generative AI; derisking; technological debt; displacement of disorder 2026-05-08 Beyond Membership: The Institutional Embeddedness of Trade Unions and Their Persistence in Financialised European Banking https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129025&r=&r=hme This paper investigates the persistence of trade unions in European banking despite sustained declines in membership density, falling labour-capital ratios, and increasing financialisation of the sector. While existing research consistently documents long-term decline in the unionisation rate across advanced economies, it offers limited understanding of how unions continue to exert influence in highly financialised and technologically transformed industries such as banking, where traditional foundations of collective organisation have been significantly weakened. Addressing this gap, the paper develops an institutionalist framework that shifts analytical attention from membership density to institutional embeddedness within governance and bargaining structures. It argues that union influence in European banking is not primarily determined by membership base but by the degree of structural integration into sectoral bargaining systems, organisational routines, and procedural rights integrated in restructuring processes. Within this configuration, unions operate as intermediary actors that buffer adjustment pressures, enable coordination, and shape the implementation of organisational change. The main hypothesis is that union persistence in European banking is explained primarily by institutional embeddedness rather than membership density, and that integrated unions function as stabilising actors within financialised organisational environments. An auxiliary hypothesis proposes that declining labour-capital ratios increase the functional relevance of unions by intensifying coordination challenges and raising demand for procedural mechanisms of restructuring and employment adjustment. Methodologically, the study adopts a multi-layered mixed-methods design combining quantitative sectoral indicators—union density, employment trends, banking assets, and labour–capital ratios— with qualitative evidence drawn from comparative analysis of collective bargaining systems, country case studies, semi-structured interviews, and survey data. This design enables a structured multi-level analysis linking macro-structural financialisation dynamics with meso-institutional arrangements and micro-organisational processes. The paper contributes to three strands of literature. First, it challenges density-centred accounts of union decline by demonstrating that organisational erosion does not necessarily imply institutional marginalisation. Second, it extends research on financialisation by showing how structural transformation in banking coexists with persistent forms of procedural labour inclusion. Third, it contributes to comparative political economy by conceptualising unions as embedded institutions that enhance coordination and systemic stability in financialised capitalism. Overall, the findings show that union power in European banking is not disappearing but being reconfigured through institutional integration within contemporary governance structures, producing a systematic decoupling between organisational size and institutional influence. Discanno, Francesco Trade unions; European banking; institutional embeddedness; financialisation; collective bargaining; labour–capital ratio; industrial relations; governance; systemic stability; decoupling 2026-05-04 The new politics of EU industrial policy: from the regulatory state to a transformational state https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138096&r=&r=hme Across advanced economies, states are reasserting a more directive role in shaping markets. One prominent expression of this shift is the resurgence of industrial policy as a form of interventionist economic governance. This introduction develops a tripartite framework to analyze contemporary industrial policy in terms of goals, instruments, and authority structures—asking for what ends states intervene, through what means, and by and for whom. Applying this lens to Europe and the European Union (EU), the special issue shows how a polity long seen as the archetype of the regulatory state is increasingly departing from this model through a renewed embrace of industrial policy. We identify four ideal‐typical phases of EU industrial policy since the postwar era and argue that, since the 2020s, the EU has entered a distinct Transformational Phase. This phase is marked by the geopoliticization of interventionist goals, hybrid fiscal, geoeconomic and regulatory instruments, and a vertical and horizontal decentering of European market interventionism. Together, the introduction and contributions to the special issue offer a conceptual and empirical lens on industrial policy as a defining feature of twenty‐first‐century activist economic governance. Di Carlo, Donato McNamara, Kathleen R. Moschella, Manuela economic governance; state capitalism; European Union; industrial policy; political economy; market interventionism 2026-07-31 Market Makers and Risk Aversion: A Hamiltonian Approach to the Excess Volatility Puzzle https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.15767&r=&r=hme In this article we model chaotic dynamics in financial markets by treating the market price, and market makers' inventory, as anharmonic oscillators with a nonlinear coupling. The market makers' risk appetite being the key parameter that determines the degree of chaos in the system. The article demonstrates that whilst external shocks and random noise are important in the treatment of financial time-series, they are not necessary in order to generate unpredictable price changes. Will Hicks 2026-05 Following the Crowd: Literature Support and the Capabilities of Autonomous Research Agents https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gii:giihei:heidwp14-2026&r=&r=hme Machine-learning models often perform poorly when asked to generalize beyond the support of the training distribution. This paper asks whether the same limitation shapes the research capabilities of autonomous large language model (LLM) agents: do they perform better when generating papers that follow research paradigms already well represented in the literature? I study this question using evidence from the Autonomous Policy Evaluation (APE) project, an open platform developed by the Social Catalyst Lab at the University of Zurich in which LLM agents generate empirical economic policy papers and compete in a tournament-style evaluation against human-written benchmarks. I construct a measure of literature support by locating each paper abstract in the semantic space of economics using a comprehensive corpus of English-language economics abstracts from OpenAlex. This measure captures whether a paper lies in a crowded or sparse region of the discipline’s existing research landscape. I then test whether literature support predicts tournament performance. I find that literature support shows a statistically significant positive association with performance for AI-generated papers, but not for human-written papers. Because outcomes are assigned by an LLM judge, this relationship could partly reflect evaluation bias toward more familiar topics. However, the absence of a comparable pattern among human papers suggests that the result is not purely judge-side. The evidence is more consistent with a production-side interpretation: autonomous research agents perform better when operating in areas that are more densely represented in the existing literature and, plausibly, in model training data. The findings shed some light on both the promise and the limits of agentic LLM systems as producers of scientific research. Michele Zampa LLM agents; AI-generated research; economics of science; semantic embeddings; scientific novelty 2026-05-18 Persuasion Processing Intuitions: How People Judge the Morality of Persuasive Messages https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:asx:nugsbw:2026-09&r=&r=hme People encounter persuasion on a daily basis, but often resist persuasion attempts that clash with their moral intuitions. How do people make these moral judgments of persuasion? Four studies (N = 1, 103) show that these judgments depend on metacognitive beliefs about how the persuasion is processed. If people think persuasion aims at their emotions and intuition - bypassing deliberative reasoning - they evaluate it as more immoral and manipulative than persuasion believed to be processed deliberately. This is because people find System 1 processing (fast and effortless, such as encountering an emotional appeal ad) more autonomy-threatening than System 2 processing (slow and effortful, such as reading about a product's features). Since System 2 (vs. System 1) persuasion is considered less immoral, it yields more positive attitude change than that of System 1 (no matter if the latter is positively valenced, such as humor, or negatively valenced, such as appeal to pity). These findings contribute to research on moral judgment, lay theories of cognitive processing, psychology of autonomy, and resistance to persuasion. Zarema Khon Haiming Hang Samuel G. B. Johnson persuasion, morality, perceived autonomy, reactance, dual-process theory, lay theories, metacognition 2026-05 Know Thyself: A Methodological Manifesto for Teaching Microeconomics Through Epistemic Provocation https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:war:wpaper:2026-14&r=&r=hme This paper documents and formalises the Know Thyself method, a teaching approach developed through more than thirty years of university teaching practice. Its starting diagnosis is that students often learn economic models without experiencing the assumptions that make those models necessary. The method reverses the usual sequence: experience before theory, data as a mirror before abstraction, and questions before answers. Its empirical core is not the experiment narrowly understood, but ad hoc research: classroom experiments, surveys, simulations, valuation tasks, and replication laboratories that make learners’ own assumptions visible. Four case studies — expected value, ergodicity, market equilibrium, and the rationality of altruism — illustrate how the method converts declarative knowledge into reflective practice. Artificial intelligence gives the method scale by lowering the cost of surveys, dashboards, simulations, and replication protocols. The paper’s practical conclusion is simple: change the order. Ask first. Teach later. Tomasz Kopczewski economics education, epistemic provocation, experiential learning, replication, expected value, ergodicity, market equilibrium, AI in education, science curiosity 2026 Philosophy as Cognitive Assay: Measuring the Delegation Legitimacy Boundary in AI-Assisted Knowledge Work https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:e9qw5_v1&r=&r=hme This article operationalizes the concept of a delegation legitimacy boundary — the structural line along which human judgment can and cannot be legitimately delegated to artificial intelligence — and proposes a minimal scoring protocol for locating it within any knowledge-work task. Building on the Mekiki framework (Tomita 2026), which distinguished specification — the task-defining substrate of domain expertise — from externalization cost — the technical barrier that AI selectively removes — the present article derives a further decomposition within specification itself. Drawing on case-study evidence in which recorded specification judgments contain separable factual components (Sein-type: what the data structure affords, how users will perceive a display) and value-laden components (Sollen-type: what information ought to be excluded, which priority ranking is appropriate), the article grounds this distinction in Hume’s is–ought separation and Kant’s Sein/Sollen architecture, and redeploys it as the axis of a cognitive assay — a measurement system in which philosophical categories serve not as normative prescriptions but as diagnostic coordinates. The resulting five-step scoring protocol assigns Sein-type components to AI evaluation and Sollen-type components to domain-expert evaluation; this asymmetry is not a design choice but a structural consequence of the boundary itself, which holds as long as legitimacy over value judgments remains institutionally human-attributed. Most individual judgments are hybrid, carrying both components in varying ratios; the protocol therefore yields ratio profiles rather than binary classifications. As a first application, the article re-describes the four processes of Nonaka and Takeuchi’s Socialization–Externalization–Combination–Internalization (SECI) model through the assay, deriving as an analytic consequence the finding that AI acceleration of Externalization and Combination shifts the effective rate-limiting stage to Socialization and Internalization — both human-limited cognitive and social processes that cannot be accelerated by AI investment alone. Tomita, Kengo 2026-05-15 El desarrollismo ante el desafío de su reconstitución como actor político 1962-1966 https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ake:iiepdt:2026-121&r=&r=hme La crisis política y económica de 1962-63 desestabilizó al país, marcada por una profunda fractura militar, violencia reaccionaria y una macro en recesión inflacionaria. Ante la urgencia de una salida institucional, el gobierno impulsó una salida electoral sin reglas claras. Con vistas a esta se formó el Frente Nacional y Popular que integraba al peronismo con la UCRI de Arturo Frondizi. Finalmente Perón decidió el retiro de esta coalición de los comicios de 1963 y facilitó el triunfo de Arturo Illia (UCRP). De esta manera se frustró el retorno del peronismo a la vida política. La UCRI se dividió y el frondizismo ya definido como desarrollismo se reorganizó en abierta oposición al gobierno radical, al que consideraba un obstáculo para el desarrollo nacional. En noviembre de 1964 se fundó el Movimiento de Integración y Desarrollo (MID) que consolidó dentro del desarrollismo la preeminencia del sector frigerista y su enfoque técnico-económico sobre el relato partidario tradicional. Pese a su llegada al establishment, este partido no alcanzó suficiente arraigo popular. La crisis política iniciada en 1962 no se había resuelto ya que los militares seguían dominando la vida institucional; ello culminó en 1966 con un golpe militar, que Frondizi y el MID no contaron con la condena de Frondizi y el MID. Anibal Jáuregui Roberto Dante Flores Instituciones políticas; Fuerzas Armadas; Partido Político; Radicalismo Intransigente; Desarrollo económico y social 2026-05 Marx in the anthropocene: towards the idea of degrowth communism, by Kohei Saito, Published by Cambridge University Press, 2023, 300 pp. https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:123678&r=&r=hme Bokes, Jakub 2024-07-31 A Global Commons Framework for Systems Transformation toward the SDGs: Operationalizing pathways through coupling data infrastructures, integrated modelling, co-design, and sustainable financing https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aue:wpaper:2613&r=&r=hme The world faces a convergence of interconnected crises (climate change, biodiversity loss, sovereign debt stress, food-energy-water insecurity, widening inequalities, wars and geopolitical instability) interacting through nonlinear feedbacks to produce cascading effects invisible to sector-by-sector analysis. Despite the comprehensive vision of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), global implementation lags, constrained less by a lack of knowledge than by weak operational frameworks capable of translating systemic evidence into coordinated action. Influential sustainability transition frameworks such as the "Six Transformations" of 2019, and the "entry points and levers" of the 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) have organized what needs to change, but the categories they prescribe are imposed a priori on diverse country contexts and offer limited guidance on how to operationalize change. This Perspective argues that the persistent implementation gap is, at its core, an operational gap: entry points and levers should be the outcomes of measurement and modelling within a country-specific feasible set, not inputs assumed in advance. We propose a three-step operational framework: continuous monitoring and assessment, science-based co-designed transformation pathways bridging modelling and stakeholder engagement, and aligned financing and governance mechanisms, all delivered through an open-access digital Global Commons. Drawing on the architecture of the SDSN Global Climate Hub, we demonstrate how coupling data infrastructure, interdisciplinary modelling chains, digital twins, and stakeholder co-design processes can produce spatially explicit, policy-relevant, and implementable sustainability pathways at national to global scales. We further argue that embedding ecosystem services valuation into macroeconomic assessments and reforming the global financial architecture are essential complements to this approach. The framework is designed not as a universal prescription but as a replicable, adaptive methodology that can bridge the persistent gap between scientific assessment and policy delivery in the final push toward 2030 and beyond. Phoebe Koundouri Angelos Alamanos Conrad Landis Digital Global Commons, AE4RIA-SDSN Global Climate Hub, Systems Transformation, WEF Nexus, Beyond-GDP Computable General Equilibrium, Sustainable Finance, Participatory Co-Design, Accountability 2026-05-13