Beyond 'employability'

Concentrating on British welfare-to-work policy, the paper presentsa critique of 'employability-based' approaches to supply-sideintervention in the labour market. It is argued that the likelymacroeconomic impacts of the Blair Government's 'New Deal' programmeare being exaggerated, and that a more realistic appreciationof the limits and possibilities of such supply-side interventionsis required. Some suggestions for a reformed approach to welfare-to-workpolicy - based on a client-centred and developmental ethos,an enlarged concept of 'employment' (embracing the social economy)and active social redistribution - are proposed.     

Beyond Culture

This paper suggests that Clark's views regarding the Keynesian Revolution illuminate some of the limitations of the Keynesian orthodoxy that developed after the war, bringing more institutional detail and a greater preoccupation with dynamic analysis. Clark developed the multiplier in dynamic terms and coupled it with the accelerator to provide the framework for business cycle theory. His analysis was not formalized and emphasized time lags and non-linearities, similar to Harrod. In addition, Clark was concerned with the inflationary consequences of Keynesian policies and he was dissatisfied with those mechanical interpretations of the income flow analysis, which came to be known as hydraulic Keynesianism. Clark's policy conclusions emphasized the need of balance between employment creation and price stability, and the need of cooperation between social groups.     

Beyond Moulin mechanisms

The only known general technique for designing truthful and approximately budget-balanced cost-sharing mechanisms with good efficiency or computational complexity properties is due to Moulin [1999. Incremental cost sharing: Characterization by coalition strategy-proofness. Soc. Choice Welfare 16 (2), 279–320]. For many fundamental cost-sharing applications, however, Moulin mechanisms provably suffer from poor budget-balance, poor economic efficiency, or both.We propose acyclic mechanisms, a new framework for designing truthful and approximately budget-balanced cost-sharing mechanisms. Acyclic mechanisms strictly generalize Moulin mechanisms and offer three important advantages. First, it is easier to design acyclic mechanisms than Moulin mechanisms: many classical primal-dual algorithms naturally induce a non-Moulin acyclic mechanism with good performance guarantees. Second, for important classes of cost-sharing problems, acyclic mechanisms have exponentially better budget-balance and economic efficiency than Moulin mechanisms. Finally, while Moulin mechanisms have found application primarily in binary demand games, we extend acyclic mechanisms to general demand games, a multi-parameter setting in which each bidder can be allocated one of several levels of service.     

Beyond Behavioral Finance

Throughout its history, finance theory has made certain simplifying assumptions regarding human behavior and concerned itself with whether the implications of these assumptions were true and not with whether the assumptions themselves were. Recently, however, more interest has been shown in experimental investigation of these assumptions, and the resultant behavioral finance has been presented as a significant departure from the current research paradigm. Recent research in cognitive science, however, is finding that the mind can and does work differently than traditional finance assumes, and the differences between the behavioral assumptions of traditional finance and the supposedly more realistic ones of today's behavioral finance are frequently superficial. Knowledge and knowing are likely to be profoundly different from the forms in which we have incorporated them in our extant models, both traditional and behavioral, and they differ in ways similar to those which, for example, have differentiated corporations from corporate images in marketing. To truly understand what is going on we must go beyond behavioral finance to address these differences.     

Beyond Balanced Growth

Balanced growth models are commonly used in macroeconomics because they are consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts regarding economic growth. These models, however, are inconsistent with one of the most striking regularities of the growth process-the massive reallocation of labour from agriculture into manufacturing and services. This paper presents a simple model consistent with both the Kaldor facts and the dynamics of sectoral labour reallocation.     

在正统与异端以外——科学哲学往何处去？

本文对科学哲学上"正统"与"异端"之争的问题作了深入的探讨,文章分四个部分进行一是对近三百年科学观,包括正统与异端之争问题的一个回顾;二是对正统和异端观念的评论;第三,作者对科学整体的看法;最后,则是对科学哲学的大方向以及未来发展的讨论.     

Microfinance Beyond Group Lending

Microlending is growing in Eastern Europe, Russia and China as a flexible means of widening access to financial services, both to help alleviate poverty and to encourage private-sector activity. We describe mechanisms that allow these programmes to successfully penetrate new segments of credit markets. These features include direct monitoring, regular repayment schedules, and the use of non-refinancing threats. These mechanisms allow the programmes to generate high repayment rates from low-income borrowers without requiring collateral and without using group lending contracts that feature joint liability.     

观澜湖会籍,超乎所想

人们如果为上到太空也看不到长城而感到遗憾,也许应该到中国来看看观澜湖。——2006年9月,美国全球版《财富》杂志刊出封面专题MISSION IMPOSSIBLE,如此撰文赞叹观澜湖高尔夫球会的宏大版图和巨大成就。     

Beyond the bureaucratization of US biotechnology

Drawing upon extensive interviews with researchers, corporate executives and government oficials, this discussion sketches out several of the unresolved public policy issues associated with the development of a globally competitive biotechnology industry in the USA. Paramount among these issues are the determination of appropriate levels and types of gouernmental research support; the design of effective, as well as efJicient, regulatory regimes; and the establishment of tax, Jinancing and patent policies which facilitate the optimal industrial organization. If allowed to follow conventional patterns of resolution, these issues threaten to add to overall bureaucratization (both public and private). In turn, if bureaucratization continues unabated, it may become increas-ingly difficult to sustain the basic entrepreneurial character of the industry, as well as other elements which are crucial to scientifically intensive enterprises.     

Moving Beyond the Masculine Neoclassical Classroom

In addition to critiques of the content and methodology of neoclassical economics, feminist economists have also offered constructive reflections on the way economics is taught. The "Voluntary Economics Content Standards for PreCollege Economics Education," developed in 1997 by the U.S. National Council of Economic Education, present yet another challenge to feminist economic educators. In this paper, we first review general methods for challenging and expanding these standards. Next, we select a specific content standard and explore how it might be reworked to reflect more accurately feminist economic scholarship and pedagogy. This reformulation of the standard will help broaden the pedagogy and content that are both implicit and explicit in all of the standards, allowing for a more inclusive classroom.     

Thermoeconomics: Beyond the Second Law

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger's (1945) What is Life? has inspired many subsequent efforts to explain biological evolution, especially the evolution of complex systems, in terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concepts of ‘entropy’ and ‘negative entropy’. However, the problems associated with this paradigm are manifold. Here some of these problems will be highlighted and briefly critiqued. ‘Thermoeconomics’, by contrast, is based on the proposition that the role of energy in biological evolution should be defined and understood not in terms of the Second Law but in terms of such economic criteria as ‘productivity’, ‘efficiency’, and especially the costs and benefits (or ‘profitability’) of the various mechanisms for capturing and utilizing available energy to build biomass and do work. Thus thermoeconomics is fully consistent with the Darwinian paradigm. Economic criteria provide a better account of the advances (and recessions) in bioenergetic technologies than does any formulation derived from the Second Law.     

Product Liability: Beyond Class Action

Can punitive product liability enhance economic efficiency? A very simple economic theory, assuming that the probability and the degree of product dissatisfaction are functions only of the producer's not of the consumer's effort, is modelled and analysed in this paper. The qualitative conclusion hinges critically upon whether the legal liability is reflected on price determination. If the price of the product is insensitive to product liability legislation, then punitive liability beyond the class action (i.e., compensatory payments more than proportional representation of potentially dissatisfied consumers) can induce socially desirable levels of effort exerted by the producer firm. This affirmative effect disappears if the price fully reflects all the expected legal liabilities, whereby punitive liability tends to reduce economic efficiency by encouraging costly lawsuit.     

Beyond clusters: Crafting contexts for innovation

The Review of Austrian Economics - Innovation requires cooperation among multiple actors spread across different organizations in order to fund, research, develop, scale-up and bring new products...     

跳出“公有制”、“私有制”的所有制框架

一、现代市场经济的所有制形式不能简单地用公有制或私有制去刻划 2002年《经济导刊》第2期、第3期分别发表了董辅礽教授的《消灭私有制还是扬弃私有制?》和厉以宁教授的《进一步开展公有制形式的探讨》两篇文章,两篇义章都提出和分析了公有制的新形式,给人以很大的启发。对于公有制的新形式,笔者认为还有必要进一步研究和探讨。