Personalist Economics: Unorthodox and Counter-Cultural

There are two reasons why personalist economics lies outside the mainstream. Personalist economics (1) rejects the premises of mainstream economics, and (2) takes exception to certain dominant values of today's culture whereas the mainstream is much more at ease with contemporary Western culture. This paper addresses both reasons and is organized accordingly. In it the author argues that the individualism and the autonomous individual of mainstream economics have their roots in the seventeenth-eighteenth century Enlightenment, that is well before the development of electronic means of communication. Personalism and the acting person of personalist economics emerged during the electronic stage of communication and, the author argues, are much better suited to the twenty-first century. The author calls for a reconstruction of economics which would replace the autonomous individual with the acting person.     

Real Indeterminacy in Monetary Models with Nominal Interest Rate Distortions

This paper demonstrates that in a standard flexible-price monetary model there exists real indeterminacy whenever the nominal interest rate moves too closely with either current or forecasted inflation. However, an aggressive response to lagged inflation will ensure determinacy. These conclusions are robust to a wide range of calibrations, and a monetary environment that allows for endogenous velocity. The results are affected by the inclusion of investment spending in the transactions constraint. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E4, E5.     

Jacob Mincer: A Founding Father of Modern Labour Economics

Dennis Robertson's cycle theory, particularly as developed in A Sludy of Industrial Fluclualions (1915) and Bankins Policy and the Price Lcucl (1926) is described, and the affinity between his treatment of forced saving and that of Hayek and Robbins is noted. Robertson's theoretical eclecticism and policy pragmatism are contrasted with the more rigid positions of the Austrians. It is argued that the similarities between their work stem from the common influence of English classical economics. Finally, it is suggested that Robertson, and by implication Keynes, had little to learn from the Austrians in the early 1930s.     

A Goldsmith Exercise for Learning Money Creation

In this article, the authors outline a classroom exercise involving goldsmiths designed to improve undergraduate students’ understanding of how banks create money. This concept is important to macroeconomics and money and banking courses, yet students frequently struggle with it, largely due to the nonphysical nature of deposits and reserves. In contrast, gold-based banking systems tend to be more intuitive because of the physical nature of gold. By simulating interactions among a goldsmith, a depositor, a merchant, and a borrower in a gold-based system, students gain a deeper understanding of reserves and money creation. In particular, the exercise illuminates the intricate link between lending and the creation of new money, and highlights the importance of fractional reserve banking and reserve deposits.     

Natural Images in Economics: A Review Essay

An extended review of Philip Mirowski's edited collectionNatural Images in Economic Thought. Examines the roles of metaphors; the relationships between metaphors of the “natural” and the “social”; the significance of metaphoric reasoning, for economics, with regard to questions of meaning, ontology and epistemology; the discursive, or rhetorical, nature of economic theory; and significant historical and interpretive issues pertinent to economic thought.     

Evaluating monetary policy with financial stability objective: rules vs. discretion

This article explores whether adding the goal of financial stability to the more traditional goals of output and price stability could improve optimality of monetary policy. A Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model that endogenously incorporates financial frictions is used to derive optimality conditions across rule-based and discretionary monetary policy environments. The results indicate that it is optimal for the Central Bank to keep output below the potential level in the short term so as to dampen the inflationary effects arising from supply and financial shocks. When the economy is exposed to a financial shock, both leverage and credit spread rise significantly, thereby tipping the economy into a financial crisis and raising the probability of macroeconomic risk.     

The Histonomic Approach to Economics: Beyond Pure Theory and Pure Experience

This article starts off with the distinction between logico-deductive and empirico-deductive approaches to economic theory. The logicodeductive approach, for instance neoclassical economics, uses an axiomatic framework that has only little empirical substance. The empirico-deductive approach, for instance, Ricardian economics, attempts to state economic theory as a “typical” structure of reality. It appears that the latter approach touches reality more closely and is more sensitive to intellectual enrichment and to substantial empirical evidence. However, both approaches operate within the basic assumption applied in classical physics, that theory must represent an invariant structure of reality—highlighting in this case economic phenomena that do not change over time. In the following, the induction issue is given new life, suggesting its validity under the non-conventional assumptions ofvariancy and time-asymmetry. A “histonomic” approach stressing the importance of making theoretical (-nomic) statements about economic phenomena that are basically historical (histo-) in their non-classical properties of variancy and time-asymmetry is favored.     

The Challenge of Social Economics: A Review Essay

This paper starts from the perspective that giving meaning to life is a key function of religion: through its narratives, rituals, creeds, and practices, religion clothes life in a meaningful frame. Interestingly, though, meaning of life has not yet appeared in studies on the relation between religion and economic behavior. As meaning of life may prove to be a crucial factor in understanding this relation, this paper seeks to develop a new approach to understanding the link between religion and economic behavior from the viewpoint of meaning of life.     

保险经济学研究述评

保险经济学是用一般经济理论来研究有关保险领域问题的一门学科。作为一门独立的学科 ,保险经济学在国外已经得到较大的发展 ,它所探讨的问题和分析方法在主流经济学和金融经济理论中也占有很重要的位置。然而在我国 ,该学科的研究还很不充分 ,很少有人使用规范的经济学研究范式对我国的保险业进行深入而细致的分析。本文按照保险经济学历史发展的逻辑顺序 ,对该学科发展过程中的几个重要方面做了简要评述 ,在此基础上分析了保险经济学在结合我国的实际情况时应注意的几个方面 ,以期引起这方面更深入的讨论。     

2005年诺贝尔经济学奖得主--罗伯特·J.奥曼学术思想述评

罗伯特·J.奥曼(Robert J.Aumann)教授是2005年度诺贝尔经济学奖得主之一,其研究领域主要涉及博弈论、预期效用理论和完全竞争经济理论.奥曼教授对这些研究领域内许多理论的构筑和发展都作出了重要贡献.本文对奥曼教授的主要学术思想进行了简要梳理和评论.     

银行商誉资本与货币竞争性发行——来自中国白银风潮前夕银行微观数据的经验证据

1976年哈耶克提出了货币非国家化理论 ,主张赋予私人银行独立的货币发行权以约束政府滥发货币的行为 ,但反对者认为追求私利的发钞行必将无限增发货币引致通胀.文章将银行的发行和信贷统一起来分析银行声誉如何影响其发行行为,研究表明:在竞争性发行条件下 ,声誉机制能够有效地约束发钞行的行为,银行因追求长远收益而稳健发行.进而,文章以银行的生存历史和是否为上海银行公会会员度量声誉 ,利用白银风潮前夕中国34家发钞行和150家银行的微观数据检验声誉机制的作用 ,研究发现:声誉越好的银行,兑换券发行越稳健;声誉为银行带来了诸多经营优势,如更多的实收资本、盈余积累和存款 ,以致声誉好的银行贷款规模更大 ,利润水平更高 ;发钞行确实是因追求长远收益而稳健发行.根据民国时期银行竞争性发行的历史经验 ,文章首次为货币非国家化理论提供了微观证据 ,也为当前的货币政策制定和人民币国际化提供了启示.     

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.     

中国银行业竞争的外部性经济学溯源

中国金融业全面对外资开放,银行业的竞争格局面临重塑.分析了中国银行业竞争态势,揭示了中外银行业竞争格局异同的深层文化因素和外部性理论的起源及其在金融产业经济中的发展过程,提出外部性理论演进对中国银行业竞争的启示.     

史蒂文·莱维特的政治经济学述评

本文介绍并简要评述了第28届克拉克奖得主史蒂文·莱维特教授(StevenD.Levitt)在美国政治制度、标准化考试中的教师作弊行为这两个政治经济学主题上的研究。作为实证经济学家,莱维特最重要的贡献在于他把经济学的研究方法,尤其是经济计量方法成功地运用到这些通常认为难以进行实证检验的领域中。这些方法的运用,使莱维特不仅对一些有争议的理论进行了检验,澄清了一些悬而未决的问题,而且还开创性地将这种方法运用于教师作弊行为的研究,开创了新的研究领域。     

The Inflation Game: Targets,Practices and the Social Production of Monetary Credibility

In recent years, central banks have continued to preach inflation targeting even as they have pursued a wide range of unorthodox inflation-management policies. As the disconnect between discourse and practice grows, there is a growing risk of a serious credibility gap. This article seeks to shed some light on these dilemmas by looking backwards, focusing on the ‘Great Inflation’ in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s and the successive failures of Labour’s incomes policy and the Conservatives’ monetarist experiment. These historical experiences suggest that for inflation policy to work it needs to be both understood as and made credible—which means that key actors need to not only learn that this is how the inflation game works, but also put into place a whole range of supporting practices that reflect and reproduce this conviction. In spite of the many claims by economists and central bankers to the contrary, quantitative targets do not in fact anchor inflationary expectations – social practices instead play that crucial anchoring role. At the same time, these cases both underline the particular dilemmas associated with a reliance on hard quantitative targets in times of social instability – lessons that do not bode well for our present moment.