Teaching the Concept of Demand: Another Approach

Using a market with which the students themselves are familiar, the author describes a lecture exercise that helps explicate the concepts of demand, elasticity, and price setting.     

An Alternative Approach to the Institutional Economics of the Eurozone Crisis

I argue that the Eurozone crisis is neither a crisis of European sovereigns in the sense of governmental over-borrowing, nor a crisis of sovereign debt market over-lending. Rather, it is a function of the “sovereign debt market” institution itself. Crisis, I argue, is not an occurrence, but an element fulfilling a precise technical function within this institution. It ensures the possibility of designating — in the market’s day-to-day mechanisms rather than analytical hindsight — normal (tranquil, undisturbed) market functioning. To show this, I propose an alternative view on the institutional economics of sovereign debt markets. First, I engage literature on the emergent qualities of the institutions “market” and “firm” in product markets, concluding that the point of coalescence for markets is the approximation of an optimal observation of consumer tastes. I then examine the specific institution “financial markets,” where the optimal observation of economic fundamentals is decisive. For the specific sub-institution “sovereign debt market,” I conclude that the fundamentals in question — country fundamentals — oscillate between a status of observable fundamentals outside of markets and operationalized fundamentals influenced by market movements. This, in turn, allows me to argue that the specific case of the Eurozone crisis is due to neither of the two causes mentioned above. Rather, the notion of “crisis” takes on a technical sense within the market structure, guaranteeing the separation of herd behavior and isomorphic behavior on European sovereign debt markets. By the same token, the so-called Eurozone crisis ceases to be a crisis in the conventional sense.     

An Alternative Approach to Valence Advantage in Spatial Competition

This paper explores a two‐candidate spatial voting model, where one candidate has a valence advantage. Contrary to previous models, we introduce a multiplicative advantage, rather than an additive one. This takes into account the possible interaction between the quality of a candidate and his policy platform. This leads to a strikingly different model, in which all extreme voters support the favored candidate.     

The Measurement of Prices of Production: An Alternative Approach

This paper analyzes the theoretical and methodological issues related to the empirical measurement of prices of production and wage-profit curves. A number of shortcomings of the standard approach are discussed, focusing in particular on the neglect of capital stock matrices and on the empirically objectionable assumption of uniform profit rates. An alternative approach for the empirical analysis of wage-profit curves and prices of production is proposed and its main properties are investigated using a new dataset on the German economy (1991–99). It is suggested that a Leontief-Bródy approach (augmented by profit rate differentials) is more appropriate for the analysis of wage-profit curves and prices of production than the purely theoretically oriented Sraffa-von Neumann framework.     

Alternative Models of Recreational Off-Highway Vehicle Site Demand

A controversial recreation activity is off-highway vehicle use. Off-highway vehicle use is controversial because it is incompatible with most other activities and is extremely hard on natural eco-systems. This study estimates utility theoretic incomplete demand systems for four off-highway vehicle sites. Since two sets of restrictions are equally consistent with utility theory both are imposed and the best fitting restrictions are identified using Voung’s non-nested testing scheme. The demand system is modeled using both Poisson and negative binomial II distributions. Data are provided by a survey conducted at four recreational off-highway vehicle (OHV) sites in western North Carolina.     

另类法律文化研究中的爱悦与规训——读《爱悦与规训：中国现代性中同性欲望的法理想象》

《爱悦与规训：中国现代性中同性欲望的法理想象》一书开拓了或者说“显化”了一种新的法学作品的写作模式,运用文化研究的进路,检视中国语境下同性恋身份的法律建构,动摇了异性恋正统制的霸权地位。作者对同性婚姻的论证却也在一定程度上揭示了批判性“文化研究”进路在法学领域里的限度。     

An extension of quasi-hyperbolic discounting to continuous time

Two-Stage Exponential (TSE) discounting, the model developed here, generalises exponential discounting in a parsimonious way. It can be seen as an extension of Quasi-Hyperbolic discounting to continuous time. A TSE discounter has a constant rate of time preference before and after some threshold time; the switch point. If the switch point is expressed in calendar time, TSE discounting captures time consistent behaviour. If it is expressed in waiting time, TSE discounting captures time invariant behaviour. We provide preference foundations for all cases, showing how the switch point is derived endogenously from behaviour. We apply each case to Rubinstein's infinite-horizon, alternating-offers bargaining model.