Economic Consequences of Armaments Production: Institutional Perspectives of J.K. Galbraith and T.B. Veblen

J.K. Galbraith’s short book, How to Control the Military, boldly championed political and institutional reforms to curb “the military power.” Galbraith stood out among economists for his advocacy of arms reduction negotiations with the Soviet Union. He rejected the hypothesis that the Soviet Union nurtured an aggressive expansionary military policy. At the same time, he maintained that the tenor of national policy and the shaping of national priorities emanated from the Pentagon. Galbraith’s assertion that the military was the dominant force within the “military-industrial complex” was never empirically demonstrated. Nor did he adequately address the crucial role that military outlays played in advancing major technological innovations which underwrote the accumulation process. Veblen offered a more comprehensive analysis of the role of military expenditures, correctly showing that forms of “waste” are highly functional to the institutional and ideological structure of the U.S. economy. Military Keynesianism constituted the evolution of his conceptualization.     

The Narrative of Complexity in the Crisis of Finance: Epistemological Challenge and Macroprudential Policy Response

Official accounts of the 2007–8 financial crisis have recurrently referred to ‘complexity’ in the nature of the securities transacted and in the structure of the financial industry as a way to convey difficulty to understand or apprehend, and thus to predict financial dynamics and regulate financial institutions. On the one hand, the complexity metaphor – as other crisis metaphors commonly do – naturalised turmoil and obscured agency as it subjectified complexity itself as a key driver of instability. On the other hand, it marked a departure from narratives of recent crises insofar as it has pointed explicitly to an epistemological crisis underlying financial turmoil. Such framing of the crisis yielded a powerful theoretical challenge to classical neoliberal assumptions about the exogenous nature of financial turmoil and helped shape a new consensus around the imperative of macroprudential regulation. However, the embrace of the complexity lens may remain relatively ambiguous. Though highlighting properties that render the financial system ‘complex’ and hence unpredictable, it ambitions to ‘manage’ complexity with better methodological tools.     

Stabilizing Endogenous Instability: Proposals for An Institutionalist Reform of Financial Regulation

A major and persistent question behind economic theories and related policies is whether the market can self-regulate without any restrictive exogenous intervention or whether regular and binding public regulation is necessary for ensuring the reproduction of the economic system in a sustainable way over time. This article considers this question with regard to the working of financial markets in a liberalized environment. Drawing upon an institutionalist stance, the article shows why the operation of a financialized capitalist economy usually leads to systemic imbalances and crises. The article then suggests an alternative framework for a consistent financial regulation that could prevent market actors from developing short-sighted strategies and gambling on macro stability.     

The New Political Economy of the Macroprudential Ideational Shift

From late 2008 onwards, in the space of six months, international financial regulatory networks centred around the Swiss city of Basel presided over a startlingly rapid ideational shift, the significance and importance of which remains to be deciphered. From being relatively unpopular and very much on the sidelines, the idea of macroprudential regulation (MPR) moved to the centre of the policy agenda and came to represent a new Basel consensus, as the principal interpretative frame, for financial technocrats and regulators seeking to diagnose and understand the financial crisis and to advance institutional blueprints for regulatory reform. This article sets out to explain how and why that ideational shift occurred. It identifies four scoping conditions of presence, position, promotion, and plausibility, that account for the successful rise to prominence of macroprudential ideas through an insiders' coup d'état. The final section of the article argues that this macroprudential shift is an example of a ‘gestalt flip’ or third order change in Peter Hall's terms, but it is not yet a paradigm shift, because the development of first order policy settings and second order policy instruments is still ongoing, giving the macroprudential ideational shift a highly contested and contingent character.     

The Role of Ethics in Economics and Management: Galbraith–Drucker approaches

Ethics has been linked to virtue, considering it within an individual sphere. It has also been related to good social behaviour or even religious factors, and so on. In general, economic thinkers have not questioned some of the basic principles which help to shape the fundamental ethical criteria in economic behaviour. The pursuit of individual interest has been identified as pecuniary profit maximization and, in this sense, Peter Drucker states that this has been the fundamental motivation of any economic agent, even before capitalism was born and Galbraith pointed out that the lack of consideration of other motivations, apart from earning money, has been one of the biggest mistakes in economics. The main goal of this paper is to analyse the Drucker and Galbraith approaches on ethics.      

The Evolution of the Veblenian Dichotomy: Veblen,Hamilton, Ayres,and Foster

One of the most troubling developments in recent years has been widening income inequality in the United States and elsewhere. We argue Post Keynesian Institutionalism (PKI) provides insight into the causes of increasing income inequality and our contribution is threefold. First, we compare PKI to the “financialization” literature, noting key similarities and differences. Second, we examine changes in financial structure and income inequality for a sample of developed nations, showing that financialization has increased in nearly all the countries sampled and that this increase has generally been accompanied by a rise in income inequality. Third, we demonstrate that the development of modern financial structures does not preclude an expansive welfare state and egalitarian public policies. Our finding is congruent with Hyman Minsky's conception of PKI, which stressed both that “economic systems are not natural systems” and that capitalism comes in as many varieties as Heinz has of pickles.     

The Global Governance of Systemic Risk: How Measurement Practices Tame Macroprudential Politics

ABSTRACT

This article explores how systemic risk has been governed at the international level after the financial crisis. While macroprudential ideas have been widely embraced, the policy instruments used to implement them have typically revolved more narrowly around the monitoring of risk posed by discrete ‘systemically important’ entities. This operational focus on individual entities sidelines the more radical implications of macroprudential theory regarding fallacies of composition, fundamental uncertainty and the public control of finance. We explain this tension using a performative understanding of risk as a socio-technical construction, and illustrate its underlying dynamics through case studies of systemic risk governance at the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF or Fund). Drawing on official reports, consultation documents and archival sources, we argue that the FSB’s and IMF’s translations of systemic risk into a measurable and attributable object have undermined the transformative potential of the macroprudential agenda. The two cases illustrate how practices of quantification can make systemic risk seemingly more governable but ultimately more elusive.     

The Institutionalist Theory of Capital in the Modern Business Enterprise: Appropriation and Financialization

We seek to expand and update Baldwin Ranson and Philip Klein’s articles on capital formation and power, published in the Journal of Economic Issues in 1987, by incorporating the importance of intangible assets in the process of capital formation, accumulation, and what we refer to as capital appropriation.     

Narrating Crisis,Constructing Policy: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in Syria

During crises, ideas play a decisive role in shaping radical paradigm shifts in economic governance. However, not all crises immediately produce such ‘great transformations’. Why do some ideas result in incremental rather than abrupt change after crisis? To identify mechanisms potentially explaining this variation, I conduct an exploratory process tracing of an understudied case of incremental institutional change: post-independence Syria. Competing political actors in Syria converged on identical policy responses to crisis despite their very different interpretations of its causes. Although power oscillated between these increasingly bitter rivals in the early 1950s, their ideational consensus on economic issues nevertheless led to a decade of steady institutional change that transformed previously fragile government institutions into powerful vehicles of statism. I derive from this analysis the potential causal significance of two new variables – crisis narrative and crisis response – and hypothesise that their configuration can explain variation in post-crisis patterns of institutional change. Ideas can explain not only the new direction of economic governance after crisis, but also the speed and scale of its movement.     

The State,Public Policy and Heterodox Economics: An Introduction

While most heterodox economists endorse some amount of policy activism, there is no unified conception of the state and public policy in heterodox economics. To help clarify the similarities and differences within heterodoxy – and between heterodox and mainstream economics – a panel addressing this subject was convened in 2007 at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Institutional Thought. This article introduces the essays prepared for that symposium. They include an examination of the position of Marx and Engels, a clarification of the institutionalist views of Veblen and Commons, an outline of the perspective of Post Keynesian Institutionalism, and an account of some essential contributions of Classical Pragmatism (a major school of thought within the philosophy of science). The collection advances what Robert Heilbroner called “the worldly philosophy” by seeking to understand the role of the state in a world where institutions, defined broadly as social habits, adjust to other institutions.

Worker Cooperatives in the Theory of the Firm: Marx and Veblen on Technological Determinism

This article contends that, in their treatments of worker cooperatives, the predominant theories of the firm adhere to the logic of technological determinism, and can accordingly be evaluated using the ideas of Thorstein Veblen and Karl Marx. Invoking these patriarchs’ respective distinctions between instrumental and ceremonial institutions and between the technical and social relations of production, the article argues that, contrary to contemporary theories of the firm, worker cooperatives possess an inherent but often latent advantage in implementing bureaucratic organizational structures, enjoying their instrumental/technical benefits for technology and coordination without incurring their ceremonial/social drawbacks for behavior and cooperation.     

Varieties of Economic Crisis,Varieties of Ideational Change: How and Why Financial Regulation and Macroeconomic Policy Differ

One of the principal tasks facing post-crash academic political economy is to analyse patterns of ideational change and the conditions that produce such change. What has been missing from the existing literature on ideational change at times of crises however, is a sense of how processes of persuasive struggle, and how the success of those ‘norm entrepreneurs’ arguing for ideational change is shaped by two contextual variables: the most immediate material symptoms and problems that a crisis displays (the variety of crisis); and the institutional character of the policy subsystem that agents have to operate within to affect change. Introducing these two variables into our accounts of persuasive struggle and ideational change enables us to deepen our understanding of the dynamics of ideational change at times of crisis. The article identifies that a quite rapid and radical intellectual change has been evident in the field of financial regulation in the form of an embrace of a macroprudential frame. In contrast in the field of macroeconomic policy – both monetary and fiscal policy, many pre-crash beliefs remain prominent, there is evidence of ideational stickiness and inertia, and despite some policy experimentation, overarching policy frameworks and their rationales have not been overhauled. The article applies Peter Hall's framework of three orders of policy changes to help illuminate and explain the variation in patterns of change in the fields of financial regulation and macroeconomic policy since the financial crash of 2008. The different patterns of ideational change in macroeconomic policy and financial regulation in the post-crash period can be explained by timing and variety of crisis; sequencing of policy change; and institutional political differences between micro policy sub systems and macro policy systems.     

Original Institutional Economics and Political Anthropology: Reflections on the Nature of Coercive Power and Vested Interests in the Works of Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Clastres

Our inquiry advances a comparison of the anthropological content of Thorstein Veblen’s evolutionary perspective with the foundations of the political anthropology drawn from selected works of Pierre Clastres. We seek to establish that what can be referred to as a clastrean reference can simultaneously offer new perspectives on institutionalism, while maintaining a radical and emancipatory understanding of Veblen’s writings. In this sense, we seek to reconsider and reevaluate the role of economic surplus drawn from Veblen’s anthropology, while also offering a general and critical perspective for understanding the emergence of coercive power within societies.     

Theory of Competition Policy: A Confrontation of Economic,Political and Legal Principles

Thorstein Veblen was a founding father of original, or old, institutional economics. The social and evolutionary usage of things and thoughts are at the center of Veblen's approach. In his studies, he dealt with psychological, social, anthropological and economic issues. The psychological content of Veblen's writing takes instinctive and habitual issues into consideration. The proposal of this paper is to revisit the psychology of Veblen's conspicuous consumer. In such a task, this paper discusses the role of observation and cognition in habit building, and their influence on the conspicuous consumer. It also introduces a psychological explanation of the importance of the leisure class to the conspicuous consumer. In order to build the analysis, this paper takes into account elements of Albert Bandura's vicarious learning. These elements are introduced to highlight vicarious observation as a key component of Veblen's conspicuous consumer.     

政策支持、创业激情与技术创业成功：政策感知的调节作用

为了厘清政策支持对技术创业成功的作用机制,将创业激情作为中介变量、政策感知作为调节变量,构建政策支持影响技术创业成功的理论模型,并结合云南地区291家技术创业企业数据开展实证研究。结果表明：政策支持促进技术创业成功;政策支持通过激发技术创业者创业激情进而促进技术创业成功;政策感知强化政策支持对技术创业成功的正向影响,同时增强政策支持对创业激情的正向影响,对创业激情的中介过程具有调节作用,即在不同水平政策感知下,创业激情的中介效用存在明显差异。     

The Mind of the Social Individual: A Comment on Sherman and Hodgson

In the Spring 1998 (56(1): 47-57) and Fall 1998 (56(3): 295-306, 307-310) issues of this review, Howard Sherman and Geoffrey Hodgson debated, inter alia , the extent to which Veblen-Ayres institutionalism is compatible with Marx and recent Marxist work. This paper argues that the differences between Hodgson and Sherman"s positions do not rely on assumptions of "illogical" behavior, individualist arguments or structural conceptions of the individual. Instead, the debate turns on the authors' respective conceptions of the formation and role of the human mind in what it is to be a social individual.     

Price Clustering of Chinese IPOs: The Impact of Regulation,Cultural Factors,and Negotiation

During June 2009–May 2012, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) suspended window guidance that limits issue prices. Using this regime change as a natural experiment, we test the combined effects of regulation, culture, and negotiation on price clustering of Chinese IPOs. The proportion of IPOs priced on round number 0 increases from 42.58% during sample periods with window guidance to 79.81% during sample period without window guidance, a level similar to that reported in developed markets . Moreover, we document a connection between whole CNY pricing of Chinese IPOs and several uncertainty measures including a unique uncertainty proxy defined as the time gap between the IPO date and the listing date. Second to the round number 0, issuing firms favour number 8 that associates with fortune, particularly during sample periods with window guidance. Our findings that price restrictions limit the power of negotiations but not the influence of cultural factors contributing to the understanding of price formation process.     

管制、竞争与民营银行的发展

金融深化的基础是管制与竞争的均衡。计划体制下,国家对金融业一直采取国有控股或国家垄断,因而产生民营银行压抑现象。市场化改革显化了金融制度与经济制度的摩擦,因而民营银行发展在金融深化中具有现实性,也是金融基础设施建设的重要组成。从竞争的角度看,放松民营银行进入壁垒,有助于金融业适度竞争,同时也是国有银行改革的重要组成部分。当然,金融本身的脆弱性说明银行民营化过程也是管制重建的过程。     

政府管制负担、融资约束与企业增长——基于企业调查数据的经验分析

本文利用世界银行对我国投资环境的调查数据,使用联立方程组控制融资约束、投资规模和企业增长之间的内生性,检验政府管制负担对企业增长的影响。研究发现,政府管制负担和法律保护程度都对企业增长产生影响,并且政府管制负担的作用力更强;政府管制负担不仅增加了企业的融资约束程度,而且降低了企业投资规模,这都会抑制企业的增长速度。本研究的政策启示是,政府在进行经济管制时,要以不增加企业负担为前提,否则,不但不能弥补市场机制的不足,而且会抑制企业增长速度。     

人民币即期汇率与境内外远期汇率动态关联——NDF监管政策出台之后

文章运用Granger因果检验方法和DCC-MGARCH模型,对外管局禁止境内机构从事NDF交易后人民币对美元即期汇率市场、境内远期汇率市场和境外NDF市场之间的动态关联关系进行了实证研究,研究发现:市场间常条件和动态条件相关系数随着合约期限的增长呈递减态势,即期市场与NDF市场之间的相关性最强,境内外远期市场之间的相关性最弱;虽然即期市场存在对NDF市场的信息波动溢出效应,但从总体上看,NDF市场的价格引导力量强于即期市场和境内远期市场,处于市场价格信息的中心地位。