Workfare,welfare, agency,and well-being

Workfare programs are state-instituted programs that require able-bodied persons with children of school age who wish to claim welfare payments to participate in job training programs, and, eventually, to enter the work force. The philosophy of workfare is based on the value of work and the goal of self-determination. However, as a mandatory program for welfare recipients, workfare requires of those recipients certain duties which, according to those who challenge workfare, interfere with the freedom to choose what one will do with one's life. Whether some form of workfare will be adopted as part of our national welfare system remains to be seen. What the debate about such a program suggests is that welfare, in itself, by ignoring the necessity of security and education for full human agency, neither satisfies basic needs nor prepares its recipients for any life other than that of dependency. With all its difficulties workfare nevertheless presents an alternative to welfare that, at least in theory, more closely identifies its purpose with the values of our society.     

Externalities, Indivisibility, Nonreplicability, and Agglomeration

In this paper we argue that the impact of external scale economies and diseconomies on city size is not nearly as clear-cut as it is tacitly believed in urban economics. Similarly, city-size distortions are not caused by externalities alone. Indivisibility and nonreplicability, which prevent establishing the “right” number of cities, may represent a source for city-size distortions which can be stronger than the standard resource misallocation resulting from external scale economies and diseconomies. It follows that a direct population dispersion policy is not just an inferior substitute to Pigouvian taxes and subsidies but rather a useful complement.     

Dialectics, Functionalism, and Structuralism, in Economic Thought

A bstract . "Structuralism" and "functionalism" facilitate an analysis of the evolution oi economic thought as a series of cultural, institutional , and socioeconomic challenges and responses. The methodologies of "structuralism" and "functionalism," like Hegelian dialectics, ¹ to which they are closely related, do not consider thought systems or socioeconomic systems in terms of fixed and stable relationships but in the light of dynamic processes of change. They emphasize communication, feedback , and continuity. The aim of these methodologies is to facilitate the analyses of changes in interrelationships which constitute the processes of evolution. The economist is concerned with the theoretical analysis of socioeconomic processes. His task can be facilitated by describing and analyzing structural-functional relationships of the economy and its parts. However, the methodologies of structuralism and functionalism cannot be used to predict theoretical developments. At best they can be utilized to select from some set of possible alternatives.     

Returns to specialization,competition, population,and growth

Using an expanding-variety endogenous growth model with purposive human capital accumulation, this paper provides an alternative explanation of why we may observe an ambiguous correlation between product market competition (PMC) and economic growth, and between population and economic growth rates. Our explanation is based on the notion of ‘returns to specialization’. Under the model's assumptions, PMC and economic growth are ambiguously correlated when returns to specialization are decreasing, whereas population growth and productivity growth are ambiguously correlated when returns to specialization are increasing. From a theoretical point of view, these results are explained by the presence or absence of an ‘increasing production-complexity’ effect associated to the use of a larger number of intermediate-input varieties in the same production process.     

Entrepreneurial orientation,intermediation services,microfinance, and microenterprises

This study was conducted to examine the influence of intermediation services on microfinance‐supported microenterprises. Information was collected by using a structured pretested questionnaire from a random section of 366 respondents (from 366 enterprises) from 2 Indian states. Econometric models were used to test the hypotheses, and reliability and validity testing and data analysis were also performed. It was noticed that proactiveness and risk‐taking ability of microenterprises were enhanced when intermediaries emphasize more on the business development services, financial intermediation services, and social intermediation services. Intermediation services of intermediaries impacted on entrepreneurial orientation of microenterprises where networking of microentrepreneurs positively moderated the relationship.     

McJob, McCheque, McWonderful

'McJob' is sometimes used in a pejorative sense. But an examination of the job-creating ability of McDonald's, its policies towards its employees (including an emphasis on education and training) and its provision of the first rung on the employment ladder for many people suggests that this form of job should be regarded much more positively     

Mean, median, mode

Summary This note is an attempt to avoid doing the same search for the third time. It happened twice in my life that I wished to prove that the median is located between mean and mode for certain B -distributions: first in 1953, next in 1976. For arbitrary distributions the result is sometimes referred to as F echner's theorem. Of course it does not hold in general. In order to prove the result for particular distributions one can often use an elegant theorem of T imerding . There is a nice relationship with the standardized third central moment.     

Taxes, Federal Grants, Local Public Spending, and Growth

In a dynamic model with both private and local public capital accumulation, this paper examines how federal and local income taxes, local consumption tax, and federal matching grants for local public consumption and local public investment affect the long-run equilibrium (equilibria) of private consumption, private capital accumulation, local public consumption, and local public capital stock.     

Strategic entrepreneurship: Content,process, context,and outcomes

Strategic entrepreneurship (SE) is typically defined as organizationally consequential innovations within existing firms that involve the combination/integration of opportunity- and advantage-seeking behaviors. Focused on the transformation of organizations through innovation, SE is a construct that has generated much practitioner and scholarly interest in the preceding decades. Building upon the many contributions already observed on the topic, this paper aims to identify current limitations and central research issues of SE. Borrowing a framework from the change management literature, I diagnose current conceptualizations of SE and promote future research through careful consideration of the content, process, context, and relevant outcomes of SE. Examination of the extant literature would suggest there is still ample room for scholars to contribute to properly defining SE, understanding exactly how SE is manifest in organizations, uncovering relevant and opportune internal and external environments for SE to pervade, and identifying pertinent consequences and results from successful SE.     

Deficits,expected deficits,financial markets,and the economy

This paper assesses the implications of U.S. budget and current account deficits for financial and economic stability. The primary focus is on the behavior of interest rates in response to deficits, then effects on the economy through the financial system. The paper argues, and shows with empirical evidence, including from a large-scale econometric model, that expected, but not realized, budget deficits affect interest rates. Under certain circumstances, particularly near full employment, sustained budget and current account deficits can lead to financial disarray and a severely constrained economy.     

Investment, expropriation, and unionization

In this paper, I examine an economy where output is produced from labor, capital and public services, and where firms and labor unions bargain over labor conditions and lobby the government over union bargaining power and public services. I compare three institutional cases: (a) competitive wage settlement, (b) bargaining over wages and employment, and (c) bargaining over wages only. I show that in cases (a) and (b) the government expropriates investment rents, but right-to-manage bargaining (c) protects investors from this expropriation.      

The Nexus of Population,Energy, Innovation,and Complexity

For the past 200 years, humans have benefited from the abundant, inexpensive, and easily obtained energy of fossil fuels. Energy surpluses such as this are unusual in human history. In systems with little surplus energy, population growth is low and complexity emerges slowly due to the energetic costs it carries. On the rare occasions when energy is readily available, societies respond by growing rapidly. They must become more complex in response to the social, economic, and resource challenges of dense population. More complex societies are more expensive, requiring greater energy per capita. The process of increasing complexity necessitates greater energy production, creating a positive feedback cycle. Past societies have collapsed under such pressures. Population and complexity grew rapidly when the Industrial Revolution replaced economies based on annual solar radiation with economies fueled by fossil energy. The Green Revolution of the 20^th century is credited with preventing mass starvation, but it has made food production and sustaining population ever‐more dependent on high‐energy (low‐entropy) inputs. Some believe innovation will overcome the limitations of resources and permit unchecked growth. However, increases in complexity, innovation, and fossil energy are all subject to diminishing returns, and cannot continue to support population at current levels.     

Sociology,Economics, and Gender

This article explores the profoundly gendered nature of the split between the disciplines of economics and sociology that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, emphasizing implications for current efforts to bring the fields more closely together. Drawing on historical documents and feminist studies of science, it investigates the gendered processes underlying the divergence of the disciplines in definition, method, and degree of engagement with social problems. The recently developed field of economic sociology and other efforts to bridge the disciplinary gap have the potential to heal this disciplinary split, if they are broadened, deepened, and made wiser and more self-reflective through the use of feminist analysis.     

Impatience, pollution, and indeterminacy

This paper examines an equilibrium growth model in which production activities generate environmental pollution that has a negative welfare effect and in which individual households' subjective discount rate is a function of individual consumption, which is internal to each household, and of total pollution, which is an external factor to the individual agents. It is shown that there may exist multiple steady states and that the dynamic equilibrium may display indeterminacy, depending on the properties of the discount-rate function, the pollution-capital relationship in production technology, and the pollution-consumption relationship in instantaneous utility. The long-run effects of tighter environmental policy are subsequently examined, and the results are also found to be dependent on the above factors.     

Creative Destruction,Economic Insecurity,Stress, and Epidemic Obesity

The percentage of Americans who are obese has doubled since 1980. Most attempts to explain this “obesity epidemic” have been found inadequate, including the “Big Two” (the increased availability of inexpensive food and the decline of physical exertion). This article explores the possibility that the obesity epidemic is substantially due to growing insecurity, stress, and a sense of powerlessness in modern society where high‐sugar and high‐fat foods are increasingly omnipresent. Those suffering these conditions may suffer less control over other domains of their lives. Insecurity and stress have been found to increase the desire for high‐fat and high‐sugar foods. After exploring the evidence of a link between stress and obesity, the increasing pace of capitalism's creative destruction and its generation of greater insecurity and stress are addressed. The article ends with reflections on how epidemic obesity is symptomatic of a social mistake—the seeking of maximum efficiency and economic growth even in societies where the fundamental problem of material security has been solved.

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Prediction,Estimation, and Attribution

The scientific needs and computational limitations of the twentieth century fashioned classical statistical methodology. Both the needs and limitations have changed in the twenty-first, and so has the methodology. Large-scale prediction algorithms—neural nets, deep learning, boosting, support vector machines, random forests—have achieved star status in the popular press. They are recognizable as heirs to the regression tradition, but ones carried out at enormous scale and on titanic datasets. How do these algorithms compare with standard regression techniques such as ordinary least squares or logistic regression? Several key discrepancies will be examined, centering on the differences between prediction and estimation or prediction and attribution (significance testing). Most of the discussion is carried out through small numerical examples.     

Association,agreement, and equity

The paper attempts to make a clear distinction between three broad families of statistical indices: association, agreement, and what one may call equity. The need for this distinction arises in social research, for example, where reliability (accuracy, reproducibility, and stability) is assessed by measures of association rather than agreement. In this application, the assumptions built into an association measure conflict with the reality that gives rise to reliability data. A second motivation for this distinction is that association measures tend to express chance as the product of two potentially very different frequency distributions, agreement as the product of two identical distributions, and equity ignores such distributions altogether. A third motivation for this distinction is that the probability distribution of such measures does not depend on whether they are linear or non-linear, symmetrical or asymmetrical, or whether they express predictability or the extremality of a frequency distribution, but on their family membership. Notions of association, agreement, and equity have inherently nothing to do with the (nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio) ordering in data. The 2-by-2 case is therefore chosen as the basis of the proposed distinction. All statistical indices, whether they are designed to characterise multivariate data or to identify complex orderings, ought to be applicable to this most reduced case of two variables, making one distinction in each. To test a coefficient's membership in one of the three families, nothing more complex is needed.     

Streets, Malls, and Supermarkets

We develop a model of competition between shopping centers, comparing competitive outcomes in three alternative modes of retail organization, namely: streets (in which neither developers or retailers internalize agglomeration effects between products); malls (in which developers internalize); and supermarkets (in which both developers and retailers internalize). For a fixed number of centers: (i) converting streets to malls intensifies developer (but not retailer) competition, which increases product range (i.e., the number of shops built by the developers) and consumer surplus, reduces profits, and has ambiguous effects on welfare; (ii) converting streets to supermarkets intensifies retailer and developer competition, has ambiguous effects on product range (number of shops), reduces profits, and increases social welfare. With free entry both conversions reduce the number of centers and, if there is excess entry, conversion to supermarkets (but not malls) unambiguously increases welfare.