The economic content of G.D.H. Cole’s guild socialism: behavioral assumptions,institutional structure,and analytical arguments

Despite a utopian tendency, G.D.H. Cole’s Guild Socialist writings exhibit considerable economic content. After sketching the historical context of Cole’s Guild Socialism and its broad ideology, we address its economic content by: 1. Cataloging Cole’s assumptions concerning worker motivation and utilitarian norms; 2. Clarifying the economic problems Cole sets out to address; 3. Describing the institutional structures of Cole’s Guild Socialism; 4. Exploring Cole’s theoretical contributions and their relation to modern constructs such as the economics of the employment relationship; and 5. Evaluating the extent to which the resulting body of theory is coherent, non-trivial, and normatively attractive.     

Right-Wing Populism and Neoliberalism in Germany: The AfD’s Embrace of Ordoliberalism

This article analyses the ambiguous relation between right-wing populism and neoliberalism in Germany. It concentrates on the connections between and convergence of right-wing populism and ordoliberalism, a specific type of neoliberalism that was developed by the Freiburg School since the late 1920s and which the new right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) explicitly focuses on in its economic programme. In its attempt to analyse the affinity of the AfD to ordoliberalism, this study relies on Michel Foucault’s account of ordoliberalism in his book The Birth of Biopolitics and his concept of governmentality. It was found that the AfD wants to bring ordoliberalism into service of an authoritarian project in Germany and beyond. This economic approach combines neoliberalism with authoritarian forms of government through the governmentalisation of the state. Ordoliberals prescribe a regulatory framework for the economy which is centred on the creation of a competitive order. It is meant to produce and justify social differences. Right-wing populists connect the economic differentiation system provided by ordoliberalism with the differentiation systems of nation, race, religion and culture. Thus, the neoliberal principle of competition is used not only to justify inequality among German citizens but also among European countries.     

Cross-country performance of Lévy regime-switching models for stock markets

This article compares the performance of regime-switching Lévy models across sixteen (16) international stock markets. From a cross-country perspective, the empirical application is dedicated to the study of equity markets in the Americas, Asia and Europe. The results are of interest for a financial audience in order to document the sensitivity of stock indexes to the intensity of jumps, under changing economic regimes (expansion or recession). We pick up singularities in Japan and Malaysia compared to other countries and regions of the world.     

Return of the State? The G20, the Financial Crisis and Power in the World Economy

The Group of Twenty and the new world order it is meant to signify have prompted a wave of triumphalism around the world from those who, like French President Nicolas Sarkozy, bemoan the influences of ‘Anglo-Saxon capitalism’ and from neo-Marxists, who view the economic crisis as a harbinger of the resurgence of states over markets. A little over a decade ago, however, the late doyenne of international political economists, Susan Strange, wrote eloquently about the reasons why the state was in retreat, its structural power draining away in favour of markets. Have the intervening dozen years, with their recurrent crises in markets and corporate governance, demonstrated the need for a return of the state? This analysis of the G20 London communiqué, using criteria that Strange advanced, suggests that far from asserting a return of the state, the G20 signifies its persistent weakness and concludes that the G20 leaders, at least, sense a more complex network of power relationships, and that structural power rests in the network.     

Why Crisis Continue?——The Endogenous Reason of Financial Crisis and Evolution to the Debt Crisis and the Enlightenment

当前欧债危机越演越烈,需要重新思考金融危机爆发并且演化为主权债务危机的内生性根源.此次金融危机中,资本主义社会的基本矛盾是危机发生的制度性根源.这一矛盾外化为“相对过剩”.经济机制层面,新自由主义影响下的自由市场经济体制放大了市场经济固有的缺陷,为危机的爆发积累了机制性原因.微观市场层面,缺乏金融监管、不当的房地产和货币政策则是诱发危机的直接原因.高赤字和高负债的背景下,一些国内经济和社会矛盾突出的国家发生主权债务危机是金融危机深化的必然结果.处理好自由市场经济和规制市场经济、金融创新和金融监管、实体经济和虚拟经济的关系以及地方债务问题是此次金融和债务危机给我国的最大启示.     

The ‘Global Food Crisis’ and the Geopolitics of Food Security

Growing anxieties over food security have recently brought sharp geopolitical overtones to debates about the agro-food sector. Contending that this ‘geopolitical moment’ highlights the mutually constitutive nature of geopolitics and political economies of food, we examine how dominant geopolitical framings of food security extend and deepen neoliberal models of agro-food provisioning, and highlight the need for further attention to these dynamics from political geographers. We develop a preliminary research agenda for further work in the field, focusing on the recent spate of global farmland acquisitions, questions of agro-food governance, the securitisation of hunger and obesity, and the environmental impacts of dominant agro-food systems. Throughout, we highlight the value of a counter-geopolitics of food security for re-situating agro-food politics outside hegemonic policies and institutions, and of the alter-geopolitics of food pursued by communities embodying concrete alternative food production and consumption systems.     

Is the Pareto–Lévy law a good representation of income distributions?

Mandelbrot (Int Econ Rev 1:79–106, 1960) proposed using the so-called Pareto–Lévy class of distributions as a framework for representing income distributions. We argue in this article that the Pareto–Lévy distribution is an interesting candidate for representing income distributions because its parameters are easy to interpret and it satisfies a specific invariance-under-aggregation property. We also demonstrate that the Gini coefficient can be expressed as a simple formula of the parameters of the Pareto–Lévy distribution. We subsequently use income data for Norway and seven other OECD countries to fit the Pareto–Lévy distribution as well as the Generalized Beta type II (GB2) distribution. The results show that the Pareto–Lévy distribution fits the data better than the GB2 distribution for most countries, despite the fact that GB2 distribution has four parameters whereas the Pareto–Lévy distribution has only three.     

Crisis and self-fulfilling expectations: The Turkish experience in 1994 and 2000–2001

In this paper we analyze the role of fundamentals and self-fulfilling expectations in the crisis episodes of Turkey in 1994 and 2001. The question is how much of the occurrence of a crisis can be attributed to market expectations and how much to fundamentals. The model is estimated using a Markov switching framework in which the devaluation expectations affect crisis probability via three different specifications. Such a framework which allows for sunspots performs better than a purely fundamental-based model. The study shows that besides the fundamentals in the economy, shifts in agents' devaluation expectations have played a crucial role and that a Markov switching model with constant transition probabilities provides better estimates for the Turkish currency crises.     

Equilibrium asset pricing under the Lévy process with stochastic volatility and moment risk premiums

In this paper, we extend Zhang, Zhao and Chang's (2012) production-based equilibrium asset pricing model from a jump diffusion setting to a Lévy process with stochastic volatility. This paper is a further extension of Fu and Yang (2012), which is under a Lévy process with a constant volatility. Using newly developed closed-form formulas of equity premium and pricing kernel, we are able to price Schouten's (2005) moment swaps analytically. Numerical results show that our pricing formula performs very well. Our model explains Zhao, Zhang and Chang's (2013) empirical observations on moment risk premiums.     

Research,teaching, and ‘other’: what determines job placement of economics Ph.D.s?

This article examines job placement for Economics Ph.D.s seeking junior-level positions using a data set constructed from job candidate vitas, public websites, and queries to programme directors. Based upon multinomial logit estimation, being from highly ranked graduate institutions and having high quality publications has a significantly positive effect on placement at a top 20 academic institution or Doctoral-level institution. Teaching experience – as a teaching assistant (TA) or independent instructor – has a significantly positive effect on placement, but only for institutions ranked below the top 60, Masters and Baccalaureate institutions, and non-tenure track academic positions. We find little evidence on the effect of teaching in tenure track hires for departments with Doctoral programmes or mid-tier prestige. Moreover, teaching experience has a significantly negative effect on placement in the top group of academic institutions in Economics.     

The Books of Crisis and Tooke–Newmarch excerpts: a new aspect of Marx's crisis theory in MEGA

Abstract

The paper explores a new aspect of the development of the Books of Crisis: the fact that Marx’s empirical research on the 1857 crisis in these notebooks was undertaken as the direct continuation of his study of Thomas Tooke and William Newmarch's A History of Prices. Our investigation will provide clues to better understand the structure and contents of the documents. Particularly, we provide new evidence for why Marx started his research on the 1857 crisis with the French economy, which managed to steer clear of the crisis, rather than with England, which was already acutely affected by it.     

The Empirical Research on U.S. Financial Crisis Impact on China＇ s Import and Export

中美两国互补型的直接贸易关系紧密,美国金融危机导致美国国内收入水平的下降、美元贬值以及物价水平波动易通过直接贸易溢出对中国进出口贸易状况形成冲击。研究发现,危机通过收入效应对我国贸易状况产生的溢出较弱,而通过价格效应对我国贸易状况产生了明显溢出,并且对我国的出口贸易冲击较大。出口贸易对美国价格水平变化冲击的响应强度、持续时间和衰减方式都发生了显著变化。     

The changing economic status of U.S. disabled men: Trends and their determinants, 1982–1991

We track the level of economic well-being of the population of men who began receiving Social Security Disability Insurance benefits in 1980–81 from the time just after they became beneficiaries (in 1982) to 1991. We present measures of the economic well-being of disabled individuals and their nondisabled peers as indicators of the relative economic position of these two groups. These measures also provide an intertemporal comparison of well-being and hardship as disabled persons and their nondisabled peers age and retire. We first show several economic well-being indicators for new male recipients of disability benefits in 1982 and 1991. We then compare their economic position to that of a matched group of nondisabled males with sufficient work histories to have been disability-insured. Because labor market changes over this decade have led to a relative deterioration in the position of younger and less-educated workers, we compare men with disabilities to those without disabilities and distinguish different age and educational levels within the groups. We conclude by assessing the antipoverty effectiveness of Social Security income support for both younger and older male SSDI recipients. First version received: May 1998/final version received: July 1999