After Shleifer,who needs Mises?

The demise of socialism in Eastern Europe and the transition to a market economy in China and India marked the end of traditional comparative economics as a field. The debate between capitalism and socialism was settled. The economic calculation argument of Ludwig von Mises seemed no longer relevant. In its place, the new comparative economics (NCE) arose. The NCE focuses on the institutional differences that affect the protection of contract and property rights. The research program of Andrei Shleifer has provided numerous insights into how markets operate. This paper examines the Shleifer-inspired program in comparative economics in light of the economic calculation argument Mises made. Although the recent developments in comparative economics have extended and complemented the contributions of Mises, it has not displaced them. An account of the economic calculation problem is still missing in the new comparative economics.     

经济学制度分析的源流、误识及其未来

文章的主旨是梳理当代经济学制度分析的思想史。通过文献考据文章主要论证了以下四个观点:第一,虽然凡勃伦的《有闲阶级论》通常被认为是第一部经济学制度研究著作,但是他的理论本身实际上是"反制度主义";第二,美国制度学派(旧制度经济学)内在的思想渊源之间的冲突决定了其无法建构起有效的理论体系;第三,"科斯定理"是一个被过度诠释的概念;第四,"交易成本"概念的形成是经济学内部不同研究领域之间相互影响的结果,并且正因为如此,才使得新制度经济学融入了主流理论。文章的结论是,应当抛弃以交易成本为中心的制度解释,转向"深描"的经济学制度分析。     

Behavioral Economics and Institutional Innovation

Behavioral economics has played a fundamental role historically in innovation in economic institutions even long before behavioral economics was recognized as a discipline. Examples from history, notably that of the invention of workers' compensation, illustrate this point. Though scholarly discussion develops over decades, actual innovation tends to occur episodically, particularly at times of economic crisis. Fortunately, some of the major professional societies, the Verein für Sozialpolitik, the American Economic Association, and their successors, have managed to keep a broad discourse going involving a variety of research methods, including some that may be described today as behavioral economics, thereby maintaining an environment friendly to institutional innovation. Further, the broad expansion of behavioral economics that is going on today can be expected to yield even more such important institutional innovations.     

中国行政改革与经济发展之间的相互影响

改革开放初期,行政改革所带来的制度变迁有力地促进了中国经济的增长,但随着中国经济的增长,行政改革却举步维艰。近年来在行政改革滞后的情况下中国经济依然保持了高速的增长,经济增长与行政改革的滞后形成了强烈的落差。这种落差使得中国的行政改革滞后与经济增长之间形成了一种畸形的关系。行政改革滞后所带来的各种社会问题需要维持高速的经济增长来解决,而经济的增长则不断强化现有的制度安排,使得行政改革的阻力增大。打破行政改革滞后与经济增长之间的依赖关系迫切需要新的制度创新。     

Property Rights Reform in Rangeland China: Dilemmas On the Road to the Household Ranch

This paper contributes to the debate over land tenure in rural China by extending its spatial coverage to the country’s extensive rangeland regions. Key characteristics of pastoral tenure, identified from field appraisals in western China, include group tenure and fuzzy boundaries. Although these characteristics give rise to efficiency concerns, from a new institutional economics perspective they also facilitate the realization of certain benefits, benefits that could represent opportunity costs of further exclusiveness. The strengthening of rangeland co-management may constitute a more appropriate path to institutional improvement than the establishment of the household ranch, the current goal of national rangeland policy.     

Beyond privatization: Institutional innovation and growth in China's large state-owned enterprises

This article demonstrates that China's large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are not stagnant fossils waiting to die. Under economic reform policies this sector has undergone large change due to enhanced enterprise autonomy, the impact of market forces, rapid growth of domestic demand for upstream products, strategic integration with the world economy and the state's policy to promote large businesses. China's large SOEs are developing new institutional forms that do not neatly fit into existing patterns. China is experimentally changing its institutions through a combination of central policy, local initiative and interaction with international investment. This presents a challenge to the “transitional orthodoxy” and to ideas concerning property rights in development economics. There is not a universal model of property rights and government action that works best in all circumstances. China's experience with the reform of large SOEs shows the diverse possibilities for effective industrial institutions.     

新制度经济学视角下的苏联经济史——对我国政治经济体制改革的启示

本文透过新制度经济学的视角对苏联经济史进行概要分析与研究,特别是运用诺思的制度变迁理论对斯大林模式的僵化导致苏联国民经济低绩效进行历史主义的分析论证,旨在揭示制度变迁与制度创新对经济绩效和经济增长的重要作用。同时,也从另一个角度证实了中国30年改革开放及一系列制度变迁对我国经济发展的积极推动作用。笔者希望通过对苏联经济发展史的制度性分析,能够对当前中国政治经济体制改革有所启示。在我国的改革与制度变迁的历程中,应发挥市场机制的积极作用和社会主义制度的优越性,在政治经济体制不断改革与创新的背景下,推动国民经济的持续、健康发展。     

M. Hadi Soesastro: Indonesian public intellectual,Asia Pacific visionary

This note commemorates and celebrates the life and contribution of M. Hadi Soesastro, a Bulletin board member who passed away on 4 May 2010. Hadi was arguably Indonesia's leading public intellectual in the fields of international economic policy and political economy, ASEAN economic cooperation, and East Asian economic integration. He made seminal contributions in these fields, and on the political economy of reform in Indonesia, the economic development of East Timor, and energy economics. He also played a major role in institutional development, most notably at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, and in many other official, academic and research endeavours in Indonesia and East Asia.     

Home economics and development

The development of home economics shows that the satisfaction of people's social and economic needs has always been its broad aim through history. Home economics focuses on the family as ecosystem and the improvement of the individual's interaction with the environment. Effective management of available resources in order to satisfy the food, housing and clothing needs of the family is an important factor in the improvement of quality of life and also of the functioning of families within the community. Home economics extension helps to maintain the balance between economic and social factors in community development. The learning of physical skills or tasks to satisfy short terms needs therefore serves as the starting point for ultimately developing people's abilities, attitudes and values which will lead them to self‐determination.     

Problem-oriented approach to political economy

The research paradigm of economics in China is facing great changes. In this article, we analyzed that dilemma of China's current major economics paradigms was inability to analyze and solve the economic problems for the neglect the importance of problem-oriented. The analysis on the two great flourishes of economics shows that theoretical innovation based on the problem-oriented approach in these two periods provide economic explanation for China's historical transformation. Chinese economists should adhere to the problem-oriented approach by generalizing typical facts, analyzing system characteristics, using modern economic analysis tools and producing original economic theories formed with uniqueness refined from major issues.     

Peasant communes and factor markets in late nineteenth-century Russia

The peasant land commune was the emblematic institutional feature of agrarian Russian society before the Revolution of 1917. Economic historians have long blamed the commune for restricting household behavior in ways that contributed to Russia's economic “backwardness” by the late 19th century. Drawing on new household-level data collected from archival sources in Moscow province, this article provides the first microeconomic analysis of local factor markets and household behavior within the institutional context of the Russian peasant commune. The empirical evidence indicates that peasant households did have substantial flexibility when it came to allocating their land and labor holdings. In response to mortality shocks or lags in the communal adjustment of land, households engaged in land rentals and off-farm labor market transactions to improve upon suboptimal factor endowments. Although these findings do not imply that the resulting allocation of resources was fully efficient, they do illustrate how peasants made rational factor market transactions in a seemingly inhospitable institutional environment.     

Economic calculation and transaction costs: The case of the airline oversales auction system

According to Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps (2013, p. 123), Mises's critique of economic calculation under socialism renders him the originator of the economic analysis of property rights. This paper also suggests that implicit to Mises's impossibility theorem was also the origins of the theory of transaction costs. This raises the following question: what is the relationship, if any, between the process of economic calculation and the concept of transaction costs? Filtered through a Misesian lens, we argue that transaction costs are the costs of engaging in economic calculation. We illustrate our theoretical point utilizing the case of airline oversales auction system first proposed by Julian Simon (1968). In doing so, we reframe the problem of airline oversales from a transaction-cost approach, one in which property rights in airline seats are initially poorly defined. By doing so, we illustrate that resources expended to discover the valuable attributes of a good (in this case airline seats), the terms of exchange between potential trading partners, as well as enforcing the terms of an exchange, all of which are transaction costs, are also, by definition, the costs of calculating the exchange value of goods. Thus, the airlines oversales auction system is illustrative of an institutional solution to the problem of economic calculation via a reduction of transaction costs.     

新制度经济学的本质及其对中国经济改革的影响评析

文章在联系当前世界经济危机产生引起对新自由主义经济学反思的背景下,通过分析作为新自由主义代表的新制度经济学的演进、理论体系的伪科学性及其与此次世界金融危机的关系,对我国目前经济体制改革中照搬西方新制度经济学理论、主张全面私有化的思维提出批评。     

Common Institutional Ownership and Earnings Management*

This study examines the relation between earnings management and block ownership of same‐industry peer firms by a common set of institutional investors (common institutional ownership). This relation is important given the tremendous growth of common institutional ownership and the significant influence of blockholders on financial reporting. We hypothesize that common institutional ownership mitigates earnings management by enhancing institutions' monitoring efficiency and by encouraging institutions to internalize the negative externality of a firm's earnings management on peer firms' investments. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that higher common institutional ownership is related to less earnings management. Analyses of a quasi‐natural experiment based on financial institution mergers show that this negative relation is unlikely to be driven by the endogeneity of common institutional ownership. Cross‐sectional tests provide evidence that the negative relation is stronger among firms for which common institutional ownership is likely to generate a greater reduction in institutions' information acquisition and processing costs, and among firms whose severe financial misstatements are more likely to distort co‐owned peer firms' investments, supporting both mechanisms underlying our hypothesis. Our findings inform the ongoing debate on the costs and benefits of common institutional ownership by highlighting an important benefit: the enhanced monitoring of financial reporting.     

Between micro and macro — what economic history can learn from modern economics

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the role of economic history to modern economic theory. Taking my point of departure from the division that still haunts economic history — between micro and macro approaches — the paper argues that economic theory today is significantly different from what it was only twenty or thirty years ago. Hence, for example, the division between micro and macro has been upset in modern economics. Also the development of institutional economics, the use of concepts like “bounded rationality” or “path dependence” makes it necessary for economic historians to learn from and confront modern economic theorizing. Many economic historians criticise a version of (neo-classical) economics) that belongs rather to the past than to the present.     

以人为本:社会主义市场经济生产观新论

社会主义市场经济发展到新阶段,赋予了以人为本新的内涵。文章梳理了中国20世纪80年代关于社会主义生产目的的论战,结合新的时代背景,发展马克思劳动价值论,提出社会主义生产劳动新内涵;依据生产劳动新内涵重新表述与之吻合的社会主义生产目的新论,以987—2007年中国政治经济学国民收入账户计算结果及收入分配状况为例,研究以人为本的来源和新内涵。文章认为,应以以人为本的社会主义生产观,从民生生产观、民本分配观、民权交换观和民计消费观来构建社会主义国家发展的方向。     

制度变迁与内生经济增长

本文将制度变迁引入了内生增长模型,刻画了制度影响经济增长的内在机制,求解了社会计划者问题的均衡解,并对解的经济含义进行了讨论。模型的基本结论是,制度变迁是经济增长的决定性因素,政府可以通过合理配置人力资本来促进经济增长。     

马克思经济学与新制度经济学“人的本质”思想比较——兼论科学发展观“以人为本”思想的科学内涵

文章通过对马克思经济学经典著作中“人的本质”思想的解读,并与新制度经济学关于人的本质与人的行为假定进行比较,说明马克思关于“人的本质”思想的主要内容和基本特征。在此基础上,运用马克思“人的本质”思想阐释“以人为本”这一科学发展观的核心,以此说明科学发展观关于发展基础、发展目的和发展条件的科学内涵。     

Substituting for the state: Institutions and industrial development in eastern Nigeria

This article examines the recent dynamic industrialization experience in one town, Nnewi, part of eastern Nigeria's “industrial axis.” The article suggests that insights from institutional economics can be used to help explain the case of dynamic industrialization in an unpromising economic environment. Nnewi industrialists have successfully filled the gaps left by failures of both the market and the state. In particular, by using both international linkages and alternative, culturally-based networks, they have reduced information uncertainties and principal-agent problems, lowering the transaction costs faced by other would-be industrialists in Nigeria.