Where states and markets meet: the financialisation of sovereign debt management

Financial markets play an indispensable role in the management of sovereign debt, that is, the mechanics of how and from whom governments borrow. This paper suggests a novel, two-dimensional concept to measure the financialisation of sovereign debt management (SDM): (1) the reliance on financial markets as a governance mechanism and (2) the adoption of a sense-making framework grounded in financial economics. We split this concept into nine indicators and apply it to data from 23 OECD countries between 1980 and 2010. Our analysis illustrates the predominant commonalities across countries, but at the same time, country-specific differences. We interpret them as two sides of the same coin in the light of an overarching trend of increasing alignment to financial markets. This article is not only one of the first cross-national as well as longitudinal studies of the dynamics in SDM; it also reveals that the relationship between finance and governments in the SDM is by no means one-sided.     

Qui docet discit

Academic economists play many roles; researchers, policy advisor, teacher, etc. While each of these roles is important for the career advancement of an economist, the most important role of academic economists is teaching future citizen economists. It is incumbent upon economists qua teacher to prepare them to make sense of the world they will inhabit. We must, therefore, not teach economics, at least at the introductory level, as if it is the first course on the way to a Ph.D., but as if it is the last class the students will ever take in economics. A consistently subjectivist economics is the best way to teach future citizen economists. When students understand economics as something that helps them make sense of the world, rather than a course in applied mathematics, they will be better citizen economists less likely to fall prey to those selling them free lunches.     

交易效率视角下的高校学生管理

高等学校的学生培养目标是要使其成为能独立自主发展的社会专业人才。学生个体的发展原动力并不是来源于通常意义上管理教育,而是来自学生所在大学的整体学习环境与这环境中个体间及群体间的交往水平。这种交往水平类似于经济发展中的分工水平,它既是增长的原动力,也是衡量最终个体水平的标志。交流交往的产生,一般认为是个体间各种差异的结果。实际通过超边际比较静态分析方法可以得出,这种水平的提升应为交流障碍的消除也就是制度经济学中的交易成本下降或交易效率的提升。通过不断减少交流交往的阻碍,才能真正提升学生自发交流的水平,也才能使学生在这样的交流交往中获得原发的进步。高等院校的学生管理的目标是力求学生成才,则着力点就应该是努力提升学生个体间的交流交往水平,形成群体间的交流氛围,促进学生的自我发展。     

Teaching (un)sustainability? University sustainability commitments and student experiences of introductory economics

The three largest public universities in British Columbia, Canada have signed the Talloires Declaration, committing themselves to promoting sustainability and creating expectations that they will integrate sustainability across the curriculum in order to improve students' environmental literacy and stewardship. About 40% of North American university students take a mainstream introductory economics course; few of these students take economics at more advanced levels. As such, introductory economics courses are an important vehicle for students to learn economic theory; they have the potential to contribute to the knowledge that students can mobilize to foster sustainability. Interviews were held with 54 students who had recently completed an introductory level mainstream economics course at one of the three universities. Students reported that introductory economics courses place little emphasis on the environment and sustainability, they recalled course content with normative connotations that are problematic from a sustainability perspective and they described how discussion of the limitations of mainstream theory was set aside. Student reports of the insights introductory economics offers into environmental problems imply that these courses are failing to substantively increase students' understanding of sustainability and linkages between the environment and the economy. Findings suggest that current introductory economics curriculum undermines the universities' sustainability commitments.     

The Wrong Type of Pluralism: Toward a Transdisciplinary Social Science

When heterodox economists talk of pluralism they are generally talking about pluralism within the economics profession—they are asking: how can we have a more pluralistic economics profession? This paper argues that another, perhaps more useful, way to think of pluralism and economics is from the perspective of all the social sciences. When considered in reference to the social science profession rather than in reference to the economics profession, the amount of pluralism increases significantly, since different social sciences follow quite different methodologies. But looking at pluralism from the social science perspective reveals a different type of pluralism problem in social science. While there may be plenty of pluralism within social science as a whole, there is a serious question about whether it is appropriately distributed. This paper argues that heterodox economists' agenda should be a greater blending of all the social science departments. It summarizes proposals to do so on both the undergraduate level and graduate level, and explains why supporting variations of these proposals would be a strategy that would further the objectives of most heterodox economists more than would their current strategy of pushing for more pluralism in economics.     

Influencing the perception of what and who is important in ecological economics

In a recent article using citation analysis Hoepner et al. (2012) make strong claims to have identified the most influential works, authors, journals and institutions in a hypothetical field they call environmental and ecological economics. This paper shows that their work is biased by its framing, far from the non-subjective approach they claim and highly sensitive to minor data errors. More than this the exercise can be seen as another example of how ecological economics is susceptible to suppression by a dominant mainstream economic perspective which attempts to override, belittle and dismiss a whole range of alternative thought, including that which is heterodox, interdisciplinary, from the natural sciences and based in the non-economic social sciences. Ecological economics is not the same as agricultural, resource or environmental economics, and if it were it would be pointless. Neither can it be understood or treated as a subfield of resource and environmental economics, as done by Hoepner et al. (2012). I argue that the study promotes a limited perspective on social, environmental and economic problems that includes an implicit political and ideological framing. What is most influential, important or high quality in ecological economics is certainly not defined by such work.     

关于我国林业经济管理学科建设的思考

探讨了我国林业经济管理学科建设的意义,并根据新的形势发展需要,提出进一步加强人才培养、加强学科学术队伍建设、加强科学理论研究、加强学科间的交流与合作以及构建现代教学体系和科研体系的建议,以推动林业经济管理学科的发展,使之为现代林业建设做出贡献。     

The impact of economics on management

This article analyzes the impact of economics on management by examining citations of 71 management journals. AER, JPE, Econometrica and QJE have the highest impact. Industrial organization journals also have a particularly large impact. The share of economics in management citations drops from 9.91 percent until 1995 to 5.70 percent for 1996–2005. Three possible explanations for this decrease are analyzed: economics research became more mathematical; because management is a younger discipline, it grew faster than economics in quantity and quality of research; and interdisciplinary spillover of research is slower than the spillover within a discipline. Only the second explanation is supported by the data.     

Dynamic management view: logic of profit seeking based on adaptation to technological change and needs evolution through needs-focused innovation

Scrutinising well-known models/theories in strategic management, this paper proposes dynamic management view (DMV) on the premise profit comes from adaptation to technological change and needs evolution through needs-focused innovation in a dynamic world. It firstly sets up the theoretical framework of DMV by taking business model to embrace explicit needs (the ultimate source of profit) and needs-focused innovation (the ultimate driver of profit seeking) as the very causal mechanism at the micro-foundations level, and technological change and needs evolution as the direct causal mechanisms of profit at the macro-foundations level from which it draws the universal and contingency rules of needs-focused innovation, derives the propositions about the adaptive goodness between explicit needs and needs-focused innovation, shows it works as the determinant of profit with the industrial experiences, and concludes DMV provides the rationale for a firm’s sustainability, the strategic decision rules for business model innovation and the theoretical foundation to build dynamic theory of profit seeking.     

Institutions in the economy and some institutions of mainstream economics: From the late 1970s to the 2008 financial and economic crisis

This article proposes a conceptual and theoretical institutional approach to the relations between the economy and economics and uses it to examine, through a structured survey of the literature, the relations between institutions in the economy and the institutions of mainstream economics, macroeconomics, and financial economics, highlighting issues related to the financial and macroeconomic crisis and focusing on the United States from the late 1970s to 2008. Institutions are socially shared systems of rules of behavior or of thought. Some systems of mental and behavioral rules are socially shared among economic agents and policymakers in part because they are socially shared among academic economists. They may exert on economic agents and policymakers some of the same types of influence they have on economists. On the other hand, there are important limits to the influence of the institutions of economics outside academia, and institutions in the economy also influence the institutions of economics.     

New human resource management practices, complementarities and the impact on innovation performance

In this paper, we take our theoretical point of departure inrecent work in organisational economics on systems of humanresource management (HRM) practices. We develop the argumentthat just as complementarities between new HRM practices influencefinancial performance positively, there are theoretical reasonsfor expecting them also to influence innovation performancepositively. We examine this overall hypothesis by estimatingan empirical model of innovation performance, using data froma Danish survey of 1,900 business firms. Using principal componentanalysis, we identify two HRM systems which are conducive toinnovation. In the first one, seven of our nine HRM variablesmatter (almost) equally for the ability to innovate. The secondsystem is dominated by firm-internal and firm-external training.Of the total of nine sectors that we consider, we find thatthe four manufacturing sectors correlate with the first system.Firms belonging to wholesale trade and to the ICT intensiveservice sectors tend to be associated with the second system.     

Personalist economics is human economics because it puts the human person at the center of economic affairs

The hard core of conventional economics consists of a set of four main premises regarding the economy. Simply put they are the law of nature, the individual, certainty, and contracts. Juxtapositioned to these four premises of conventional economics, there are four from personalist economics: institutions, the person, uncertainty and status. In sharp constrast with the overwhelming majority of our contemporaries in economics whose views on economic affairs are grounded in individualism, we think about economic affairs in a market system in terms of personalism. Personalist economics is human economics because it puts the human person at the center of economic affairs. Here our presentation focuses on three central economic activities: consumption, work and leisure. In addressing these activities we emphasize that (1) human persons are materialized spirits and (2) human nature is two dimensional — individual and social. In our remarks we rely heavily on Emmanuel Mounier and John Paul II.     

经济增长的根源：投资推动抑或消费拉动--一个思想史的梳理和辨析

现代主流经济学不区分投资支出和消费支出,更不区分消费的不同类型,而是将所有支出都视为经济发展的动力,甚至将消费乃至奢侈性消费当作拉动经济增长的主要动力。与此不同,古典经济学将投资支出视为经济发展的根本,从而对奢侈性消费持强烈的批判态度。究其原因,古典经济学的研究对象是国家组织,核心议题是国民财富的增长,而组织运行的有效性和劳动生产率的提高都取决于社会分工水平和生产迂回程度,都以不断积累和投入的资本为基础。而现代主流经济学仅仅关注当下的个人福利或效用,仅仅关注已经存在的有效需求不足问题,从而看不到奢侈性消费和破坏性支出在本质上的浪费性和损坏性。同时,不同于凯恩斯主义经济学,古典经济学的投资支出依赖于没有消费掉的剩余产品及其在生产中的投入,而不是从民众中转移而来的税收或从未来转移而来的国债。因此,古典经济学的“投资推动增长论”有助于我们认识现代主流经济学无法解释的一系列社会经济现象,也能为“供给侧改革”提供理论基础。     

The rule approach in evolutionary economics: A methodological template for empirical research

Dopfer and Potts (2008) have proposed a new analytic foundation to evolutionary economics based on the unified rule approach. While they contend that their approach is ontologically and analytically coherent and useful, scholars sympathetic with it, e.g., Ostrom and Basurto (2011), have called for further methodological and empirical specification. In the same vein, this paper seeks to develop the Dopfer-Potts framework by proposing an analytic methodology to translate their rule-based approach into an operational method for identifying and testing hypotheses that relate to rules. It does so by defining a methodology connecting explanandum (response rule) and explanantia (factor rules) at the same level of rules. The concept of a ‘savings rule’ serves as a roving example that later is extended into a case study. The paper offers a methodological template for applied evolutionary analysis in economics.     

Comment

Opposite to mainstream economics, (post-) Keynesian economics has defended the need of a discretionary fiscal policy that helps to maintain economic activity at a full employment level, offsetting the cyclical deviations from that level of output. In this sense, it is implicitly assumed that any discretionary management of public finance is, by definition, efficient. The Spanish case shows that public authorities can make an inefficient use of the discretionary room of fiscal policy, thus exacerbating the existing macroeconomic and fiscal imbalances. Consequently, there is a need for rules that constrain the discretionary management of public finance.     

经济学必须全面更新—兼论大协调经济学

全球化的经济活动,冲击着自然界和人类社会,造成了各种全球问题,已经危及人类的生存与发展,反弹回来,又冲击着人类的经济思维和经济学。经济学必须全面更新,才能适应建立全球化协调的经济机制,帮助统筹解决和预防各种全球问题,实现可持续发展。本文在这个大尺度上,对全新的经济学的概念、框架、体系,作了专题的系统研究,并拓宽了进一步研究的思路与合作途径。     

In Memory of Michael Watts (November 3, 1950–December 5, 2014)

In an experimental economics simulation, Ukrainian teachers of economics chose free riding responses at a rate similar to those found by Leuthold in an undergraduate class on public economics at the University of Illinois. The authors speculate that those who become academic economists may do so because they have certain insights in deductive logic.     

The Economic Emergence of Women: Bergmann's Six Commitments

I suggest in this essay that Barbara Bergmann's approach to the economics of women is characterized by six striking dimensions, or what I call 'commitments', namely: (1) a willingness to incorporate values into her analysis openly; (2) a commitment to applied economics - economic analysis that supports policy change that will improve women's and children's lives; (3) a commitment to empirical economics, i.e. to data collection and data-based analysis; (4) a commitment to communication with the public; (5) a commitment to the truth even if it challenges convenient orthodoxy; (6) a commitment to focus on how change can occur - to be positive not defeatist. A review of these six commitments, I demonstrate, reveals that they are held together by the first one, her willingness to incorporate values into her scholarly work openly.