The myths of the Chicago School

Reconstructions of ‘Chicago School’ sociology perpetuate certain myths about the nature and style of the sociology carried out at the University of Chicago. These views have been analysed and four elements have been identified. These are that Chicago sociology was reformist in orientation, atheoretical, ethnographic and influenced by the pragmatism of G.H. Mead. These elements of myth are scrutinised in terms of their genesis and substance.     

Monopolistic Competition and Public Good Provision with By‐Product Firms

I develop a model in which the voluntary contributions mechanism for the provision of public goods totally breaks down in a large society. A by‐product firm sells a private good and uses its profits to provide a public good. By‐product firms compete with for‐profit firms in a monopolistically competitive industry. If the number of by‐product firms is proportional to the size of the society, then public good provision rises without bound as the society grows large. This stands in strong contrast to the results under the voluntary contributions mechanism.     

品牌竞争的经济学分析

从经济学和商业生态的角度看,品牌竞争的实质是厂商实现买方价值需求能力的竞争,是以品牌为主体的商业生态关系的竞争。厂商的品牌竞争策略应该以增强实现买方价值需求的内在能力为基础,关注与上下游厂商以及最终消费者之间商业生态关系的维护和改善。     

The Chicago School after the crisis of the new millennium

After the self-criticism of Richard Posner (A failure of capitalism. The crisis of ’08 and the descend to depression. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2009a and some later papers), a position shared in part by Gary Becker, it is right to ask what exactly remains of the Chicago School, which came into being in the early 1930s with Knight and made a name for itself in the 1980s as the new orthodoxy with Lucas (Reh) and Fama (Emh). The financial crisis has, in this sense, cast the debate between the Saltwater school (the American universities on the coast) and the Freshwater school (the universities near the Great Lakes, including Chicago) in a new light. This article traces the development of the Chicago School, the consolidation of conservative think-tanks (especially the Mont Pelerin Society whose members have included, among others, von Hayek and Friedman) and the more recent positions of the School, including some that are less organic (Diamond, Kashyap, Rajan, Zingales). At the centre of the debate is the question of the failures of the State vs the failures of the market and the role of institutions. On a methodological level the relationship between law and economics (L&E) is also in discussion, which leads to an interesting comparison between Chicago (again Posner, past and present) and Yale (Calabresi). After having described the echoes of the debate across the Atlantic (with particular reference to Italy), it will be asked if the anomalies that can be found in the consolidated paradigm (Reh, Emh, but also L&E) will lead to the abandonment of pre-constituted models in favour of a less rigid theoretical framework (Ike together with Keynes and the Chicagoan Knight, but also to a certain extent, von Hayek) or simply a pause for reflection.     

The Chicago School Lessons from the Thirties for the Eighties

The influential Chicago School of Professors Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, Gary Becker and others largely grew out of the work of Henry Simons in the 1930s. Chris Tame, Secretary of the Libertarian Alliance and a graduate in American Studies, examines the origins of Chicago economics and shows their importance for the 1980s.     

The Case for International Competition Among Economic Policy Makers

How can governments and civil servants be controlled? Professor Roland Vaubel, of the University of Mannheim, explains how competition between nations improves economic policy.     

从德国历史学派看经济学说的国度性与特殊性

长期以来,西方经济学是英美的普世经济学。而在19世纪的德国,出现了以李斯特为代表的非主流经济学——德国历史学派。德国历史学派的经济学家们提倡贸易保护主义,以捍卫德国产业资本的利益,并对抗亚当·斯密的经济自由主义。由此,德国的经济得以迅速发展,并在世界上占有一席之地。德国历史学派将经济理论的国度性和特殊性上升到了最高的高度。而对于中国现在出现的依附型经济学,我们应学习德国历史学派的研究方法,为现阶段中国经济的发展提供坚实的理论基础。     

我国学校体育运动会发展思考

文章通过对我国中学生运动会的发展历史、全国中学生运动会的特点、我国中学体育运动会面临的问题等情况的分析与研究,为中运会提出一定的改革措施。     

Random Advertising and Monopolistic Price Dispersion

We investigate the role of price advertising in a market where consumers are imperfectly informed about prices. We consider a monopolist whose demand depends on price and advertising expenditure. This demand function is derived from optimizing behavior of consumers. Uninformed consumers may pay a cost to visit the seller and obtain price information. Advertising enables the monopolist to increase the number of informed consumers. In equilibrium the uninformed consumers form rational price expectations, and the seller necessarily adopts a random pricing and advertising strategy.     

Two Twists in Economic Methodology: Positivism and Subjectivism

A bstract . AS the contradictory evidence gathered by other social scientists has continued to accumulate, two new twists have been added to the methodology of neoclassical economics. From Milton Friedman's positivism came the twist that "unrealistic" assumptions can be ignored, prediction is all that really matters. From the Austrian School's subjectivism came the twist that since economic theory is the a priori logic of subjective individual choice, the theory cannot be tested in the scientific sense at all. Neither qualitative historical evidence nor quantitative prediction can yield a scientific test of theory. At least Friedman's positivism allows for predictive testing, even though decisive tests are seldom found in social science. But Austrian subjectivism insulates economic theory completely from scientific testing. Neither methodology is conducive to scientific progress.     

Nonparametric Methods for Evaluating Economic Efficiency and Imperfect Competition

This article unifies and extends ideas from nonparametric production analysis and DEA for testing organizational efficiency. We show how the admissible price set can be restricted to account for prior information on prices. These restrictions may relate prices to input and output quantities in order to test noncompetitive behavior of the evaluated decision making unit. While the resulting efficiency tests cannot always be cast into linear programming problems, we discuss various solution strategies for the tests. Thereby we consider the question when does local optimality of the result guarantee global optimality. We also show how the decision maker's preferences, for example ranking information, can be adopted into DEA models in a simple manner. Finally, the approach with price restrictions is illustrated with an application to test noncompetitive behavior of the pulp and paper industries in Finland.     

金融发展与经济增长的非线性关联研究——基于门限模型的实证检验

本文对Odedokun(1996)的理论模型进行了扩展,并利用多元门限模型对我国金融发展与经济增长之间的非线性关联进行了考察。实证结果表明金融发展和经济增长之间呈现出显著的非线性关联,这就否定了通常将两者关系设定为线性的研究模式。进一步的分析表明单纯在总量关系上讨论我国金融发展和经济增长关联性的意义并不明显,这启示我们在日后的研究中应该更加重视金融发展作用于经济增长的途径和机制问题。     

经济全球化与竞争国际化背景下我国物流业人才发展战略研究

文章通过定量与定性相结合的研究方法,对中国物流业如何在继承传统、发扬优势的基础上,建立适应经济全球化与竞争国际化的物流人才战略,进行了系统性的研究,得出了我国物流业应建立分类、分层的符合中国物流业发展趋势和适应经济全球化和竞争国际化的物流人才培养与建设体制的结论。     

基于土地出让行为的地方政府竞争与经济增长

本文利用2004～2009年中国地级及以上城市的面板数据,实证分析了地方政府通过土地价格竞争和土地财政支出竞争两种方式吸引投资、促进增长的策略,评估了两种策略在全国和地区尺度上的实施效果及其区域差异。研究发现,在全国尺度上,土地价格竞争和土地财政支出竞争两种手段都对城市经济增长产生了显著的促进作用。地区层面的进一步分析发现,土地价格竞争的经济增长效应主要体现在中部地区,而土地财政支出竞争则在东部和西部地区对经济增长有显著的影响。     

On the Determinants of School District Efficiency: Competition and Monitoring

A number of researchers have asserted that inefficiency in the U.S. school system arises from a lack of incentives for public schools to behave efficiently. This paper uses a Shephard input distance function to model educational production, and a switching-regressions estimation to explore the relationship between school district efficiency and two existing incentive mechanisms—competition and voter monitoring. We find evidence that ease of monitoring enhances both technical and allocative efficiency of urban school districts, and that increased competition reduces allocative inefficiency in communities above a competitive threshold. We find no evidence that competition is related to technical inefficiency.     

质量竞争战略--现代企业竞争战略的新选择

质量竞争战略是在新经济背景下,从质量的角度来阐述企业发展的新思路,新选择.本文通过对质量的经济学内涵的解析,在对传统企业竞争战略的回溯与思考中,演绎了质量竞争战略及其策略的发生机制.