Changing of the guards: New coaches in Austria’s premier football league

Professional team sports provide an ideal real world experiment to explore the effect of top executive replacement due to the availability of excellent performance data. This paper investigates how replacing the coach affects the performance of football teams. Analyzing almost 2,000 matches of the Austrian premier football league by ordinal (probit) regression techniques we find that a new coach tends to enhance team performance in home matches but to weaken it in away matches. However, neither of these effects turns out to be statistically significant. Nevertheless, the much discussed coach effect—ousting an underperforming coach in order to improve team performance at least temporarily—may make sense despite the costs involved by providing stronger ex-ante incentives for effort.

The People’s bank of China’s response to the coronavirus pandemic: A quantitative assessment

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) has implemented numerous measures to cushion the impacts of the COVID-19 health crisis on the Chinese economy. Since the current monetary policy framework features a multi-instrument mix of liquidity tools and pricing signals, we employ a dynamic-factor modelling approach to derive a composite indicator of China’s monetary policy stance. Our quantitative assessment shows that the PBoC’s policy response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has been swift and decisive. Specifically, our estimates reveal that the PBoC has implemented novel policy measures to ensure that commercial banks maintain liquidity access and credit provision during the COVID-19 crisis.     

Marcelo Diamand’s contributions to economic theory through the lens of the classical Keynesian approach: a formal representation of unbalanced productive structures

Abstract:

We examine both conceptually and in formal terms the contributions by the structuralist economist Marcelo Diamand, which all revolve around the notion of unbalanced productive structure, and its implications on income distribution, the general price level, and output dynamics in Latin American countries, with a special focus on Argentina. We argue that Diamand’s work provides a very useful framework to understand why institutionally and historically determined real wage and real exchange rates can, on the one hand, explain the relatively low productivity of the industrial sector and, on the other hand, cause devaluations to be both inflationary and contractionary, as has been the case in many Latin American countries that attempted to initiate an industrialization process by import substitution.     

A subjectivist’s solution to the limits of public choice

In light of Wittman (1995) and Caplan (2007) this paper contends that the rational-choice approach to political science (“Public Choice theory”) has reached a dead end. By critiquing their treatment of rationality, knowledge assumptions, and views of the democratic process, an alternative is presented based on the core insight of the “Epistemic Primacy Thesis”. This subjectivist approach to political economy is introduced in light of an existing debate between the compatibility (or otherwise) of Austrian economics and Public Choice theory.     

On the ‘Origins’ of Sraffa’s Production Equations: A Reply to de Vivo

In this rejoinder to de Vivo’s comment on Gehrke and Kurz (2018, ‘Sraffa’s constructive and interpretive work, and Marx.’ Review of Political Economy) we first ask what could possibly be meant by seeking to identify the ‘origins’ of Sraffa’s production equations. We then show that in his comment de Vivo has abandoned his original view, according to which the magnitudes in Sraffa’s ‘first equations’ are to be interpreted in Marxian (labour) value terms, without advising the reader. In addition, we show that his ‘new’ view is not supported by evidence from Sraffa’s papers. De Vivo misconstrues several propositions of Sraffa and misunderstands his ‘reduction method’ by means of which the values of commodities are reduced to some basic product or to labour. The criticisms de Vivo levels at the interpretation advocated by us are without any foundation.     

The New Division of Labor in the Globalized Economy: Women’s Challenges and Opportunities

The way in which the new international division of labor (NIDL) in the globalized economy affects gender inequalities has not been sufficiently explored yet. The body of literature on commodity chains that has attempted to assess the welfare effects of the NIDL, especially in less developed countries, has paid sparse attention to gender issues. Globalization has entailed the deverticalization of commodity supply chains and the emergence of highly concentrated financial groups and transnational companies linked to a network of firms operating as affiliates and suppliers, namely the global commodity chains. The NIDL could worsen gender inequality, due to the particular organizational strategies in global commodity chains that privilege power, instead of trust and market exchange, as the major form of governance and means for resource allocation. Because women represent the poorest swathe of the world’s population, they suffer the most from the growing wealth inequality and the concentration of power produced by the NIDL. Moreover, because of the traditional sexual division of labor and because of their low status in society, women are the most harshly exploited subjects in the system. The general conclusion of the paper is that in the NIDL the main means of resource allocation are not competitive markets, as often suggested by the GCV literature and mainstream economics, but are instead power relations that ultimately stem from the patriarchal culture of violence and domination.     

The New Division of Labor in the Globalized Economy: Women’s Challenges and Opportunities

The way in which the new international division of labor (NIDL) in the globalized economy affects gender inequalities has not been sufficiently explored yet. The body of literature on commodity chains that has attempted to assess the welfare effects of the NIDL, especially in less developed countries, has paid sparse attention to gender issues. Globalization has entailed the deverticalization of commodity supply chains and the emergence of highly concentrated financial groups and transnational companies linked to a network of firms operating as affiliates and suppliers, namely the global commodity chains. The NIDL could worsen gender inequality, due to the particular organizational strategies in global commodity chains that privilege power, instead of trust and market exchange, as the major form of governance and means for resource allocation. Because women represent the poorest swathe of the world’s population, they suffer the most from the growing wealth inequality and the concentration of power produced by the NIDL. Moreover, because of the traditional sexual division of labor and because of their low status in society, women are the most harshly exploited subjects in the system. The general conclusion of the paper is that in the NIDL the main means of resource allocation are not competitive markets, as often suggested by the GCV literature and mainstream economics, but are instead power relations that ultimately stem from the patriarchal culture of violence and domination.     

Money in occupied New Orleans, 1862–1868: A test of Selgin’s “salvaging” of Gresham’s Law

We examine the monetary experience of New Orleans when it was occupied during and immediately following the Civil War, using newly assembled data regarding the quantity and market value of the city’s municipal notes and the city’s fiscal position. Municipal notes, acceptable for taxes, circulated at face value in retail transactions (and at only a small discount in broker transactions) as long as their supply was sufficiently limited, and they fell out of circulation and were priced at a discount relative to interest-bearing municipal bonds, when concern arose about their overissue. The spontaneous rejection of New Orleans municipal notes exemplifies how choice in currency works when insufficiently backed money is not supported by legal tender laws.     

The Index of “Economic Independence”: A New Measure of an Economy’s Ability to Survive Unilaterally

The objective of this article is to fill an existing gap in the literature by constructing an index which attempts to assess the degree of a nation’s immunity to economic risk by quantifying its level of economic independence and its ability to survive unilaterally. To do so, and following the conventional methodology of indices, the article first identifies the dimensions underlying economic independence and then selects the various indicators that best reflect each dimension. It then normalizes each indicator by using its highest and lowest historic goalposts. Finally, it averages the composite index using specific weights assigned first to each indicator and second to each dimension. The economic independence index, which was constructed for 112 countries, provides a gauge to such countries on where they stand in terms of economic resilience and how much risk they face if they were to stand alone economically, or pursue policies that are undesirable from the perspective of more economically powerful countries. This index thus provides a tool for governments to measure the direction and magnitude of government action needed to improve their respective nations’ level of economic independence.     

Thomas DeGregori’s “Back to the Future”: A Comment

A fundamental principle of Karl Polanyi's institutional outlook is that any economic system has to be considered as a whole and as a historically specific social organization. This principle implies a comparative method and a critique of conventional economics. Besides, the problem of the interrelation between the economic system and other aspects of social life cannot be avoided. On this basis, Polanyi points out the peculiar "economic" nature of the market-capitalist society and explains the institutional transformations characterizing its history. The opposition "embedded/disembedded," used by Polanyi to distinguish pre-modern economies from the market economy, has been widely adopted in recent times, particularly by economic sociologists, as a key for understanding current complex economic phenomena. However, the reference to Polanyi often presupposes a distorted interpretation of his theory, and a different kind of institutional approach.     

Silk Roads and Strings of Pearls: The Strategic Geography of China’s New Pathways in the Indian Ocean

Control over access to the Indian Ocean is often seen through a highly securitised lens. Strategic actors have long sought to use geographical constraints to maintain the region as a relatively enclosed strategic space. It has only a few narrow maritime entrance points and the littoral is not well connected to the interior of the Eurasian continent. These factors have contributed to the historical domination of the Indian Ocean by a succession of extra-regional maritime powers and the virtual exclusion of Eurasian land powers such as China and Russia. This paper considers how the physical geography of the Indian Ocean has contributed to its control by some powers and the exclusion of others. It then discusses China’s Maritime Silk Route/One Belt One Road initiative, which includes growing interests in Indian Ocean ports and plans to build new overland pathways to connect China with the Indian Ocean. The paper concludes that while China’s growing maritime interests in Indian Ocean are strategically important, it is the new overland routes connecting the Eurasian hinterland with the ocean that have the potential to change the entire geostrategic character of the region.     

Putting the ‘Amsterdam School’ in its Rightful Place: A Reply to Juan Ignacio Staricco’s Critique of Cultural Political Economy

This article responds to Staricco’s critique of cultural political economy (CPE) for being inherently constructivist because of its emphasis on the ontologically foundational role of semiosis (sense- and meaning-making) in social life. Staricco recommends the Amsterdam School of transnational historical materialism as a more immediately productive and insightful approach to developing a regulationist critique of political economy. Both lines of criticism of CPE are addressed. First, Staricco misinterprets the implications of treating semiosis and structuration as ontologically equal bases of social life. Second, Staricco mistakes our criticisms of the ‘Italian School’ in international political economy for criticisms of the Amsterdam School – an approach we have always warmly endorsed. He therefore misses our more nuanced claim that while the Amsterdam School emphasises the importance of semiosis, it has fewer concepts to explain how semiosis matters and why only some imagined class identities and concepts of control are selected, retained, and institutionalised. CPE addresses this lacuna by integrating critical semiotic analysis into political economy. Third, we provide the first detailed comparison of the Amsterdam School and CPE to provide a better understanding of the merits of each approach and to indicate where they might complement each other without claiming one to be superior to the other.