Roman roads to prosperity: Persistence and non-persistence of public infrastructure

In this paper, we explore the link between public transport infrastructure investments made during antiquity and the presence of infrastructure today; as well as the link between early infrastructure and economic activity, both in the past and in the present. We examine the territory under dominion of the Roman Empire at the zenith of its geographical extension (117 CE), and find a remarkable pattern of persistence showing that greater Roman road density goes along with (a) greater modern road density, (b) greater settlement formation in 500 CE, and (c) greater economic activity in 2010–2020. Exploiting a natural experiment, we find that persistence in road density and the strong link between early road density and contemporary economic development weaken to the point of insignificance in areas where the use of wheeled vehicles was abandoned and caravan trade routes replaced road-based trade from the first millennium CE until the late modern period. Studying channels of persistence, we identify the emergence of market towns during the early medieval period and the modern era as a robust mechanism sustaining the persistent effects of the Roman roads network. Our results contribute to a deeper understanding of the channels through which persistence in comparative development comes about.     

Sewage pollution and institutional and technological change in the United States, 1830–1915

This article examines institutions for water pollution control and their interaction with water supply and sanitation technologies in the United States before the First World War. The article discusses how growth of settlements polluted waters and created pressure to adopt local institutional responses and networked water supply and sewerage technologies in the mid-19th century. However, the new urban technologies undermined local institutional responses and expanded the scale of water pollution problems they were expected to resolve. Water companies, households and local governments litigated their water pollution conflicts in the courts in the absence of other alternatives. In the end of the 19th century, many states adopted water pollution policies. At first, public health authorities enforced the new policies to protect public water supplies from sewage contamination. However, when the effectiveness of filtration and chlorination of drinking water was demonstrated in the early 20th century, public health authorities ceased to enforce discharge prohibitions and instead pressured water companies to adopt the new technological measures to protect public health.     

Reprint of: Sewage Pollution and Institutional and Technological Change in the United States, 1830-1915

This article examines institutions for water pollution control and their interaction with water supply and sanitation technologies in the United States before the First World War. The article discusses how growth of settlements polluted waters and created pressure to adopt local institutional responses and networked water supply and sewerage technologies in the mid-19th century. However, the new urban technologies undermined local institutional responses and expanded the scale of water pollution problems they were expected to resolve. Water companies, households and local governments litigated their water pollution conflicts in the courts in the absence of other alternatives. In the end of the 19th century, many states adopted water pollution policies. At first, public health authorities enforced the new policies to protect public water supplies from sewage contamination. However, when the effectiveness of filtration and chlorination of drinking water was demonstrated in the early 20th century, public health authorities ceased to enforce discharge prohibitions and instead pressured water companies to adopt the new technological measures to protect public health.     

Alienation and the Soviet Economy,toward a General Theory of Marxian Alienation,Organizational Principles,and the Soviet Economy

The work of the French economist François Perroux has not given rise to a strong consensus in the academic world of economists. Thus, to appreciate the scope of Perrouxian thought, it is necessary to defuse the intellectual debate by exploring the ideas that are part of the current institutional issues. I seek to demonstrate the theoretical interest of the conceptualizations proposed by Perroux in terms of power analysis to understand the political, human, and social dimensions of the institutions of capitalism. In this view, I endeavor to shed light on the Perrouxian institutional legacy regarding the social cooperation/resistance issue, the institutional structure of production, firm theory, agonism theory, economic pluralism, and modern formalization techniques.     

Marriage,Divorce and Prostitution: Economicc Sociology in Medieval England and Enlightenment Spain

“Marriage, Divorce and Prostitution: Economicc Sociology in Medieval England and Enlightenment Spain” by Robert B. Ekelund,Jr., Donald R. Street and Audrey B. Davidson.

This paper studies the medieval insititutions of marriage, divorce and prostitution through the prism of the economic sociology and rent-seeking behaviour on the part of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. Regulation by Church or state-Particular prohibitions and regulation of recontracting – created costly alternatives and substitutes for low-cost recontracting of marriage vows. In addition to a brief survey of the instititional situation in medieval England, we bring to light the economic sociology of the Spaniard Francisco de Cabarrùs relating to the marriage market and marital utitlity. Indirectly we suggest that exogenous restrictions in marriage markeers create unappropriated costs and the impetus for change in social institutions over time over time.     

Does the recognition of indigenous territories impact household economic situations? Evidence from western Panama

The Government of Panama created a semi-autonomous indigenous area in 1997. The establishment of this region institutionalizes indigenous authorities and prohibits land privatization. This study investigates the effect of the recognition of common property land to indigenous groups on economic performance. By using difference-in-differences approach at household-level data, I find that non-migrant indigenous households living in the semi-autonomous territory declined their consumption relative to their counterparts living outside. Further, indigenous households living in the semi-autonomous territory have lower access to public goods and are less likely to participate in agricultural market activities.     

中国股票市场的制度供给与需求分析

在中国股票市场从传统的计划经济体制向现代市场经济体制的转变过程中 ,制度短缺成为一种普遍现象。在其制度变迁中 ,政府是中国股票市场制度供给的主体 ,而股票市场市场化和国际化则是制度需求的动力。分析中国股票市场的制度供给与创新 ,有助于我们探寻一种适合中国股票市场健康成长的强制性的制度变迁模型     

From the Tribal to the Open Society: The Role of Medieval Craft Guilds in the Emergence of a Market Order

The emergence of a legally constituted State in 16th century western societies represents the final lap of a process extending the sphere of the indivudal freedoms necessary for the emergence of the market order. A peculiar stage of this process came in the form of guilds. They materialised into a need for emancipation from the values of the archaic society and became the keepers of a peace and a justice on the market by ensuring the respect of new rules of conduct (1). This analysis of the behaviour of craft guilds will illustrate the question of the possibility of rational economic activity in medieval society (2).     

A bioeconomic study of numeracy and economic calculation

Systems of numerical representation and computation are crucial for the operation of modern market economies. Surprisingly, however, numerical institutions and people’s numerical abilities are usually taken as given in economic analysis. To develop a richer vision of economic agents, this article investigates the interplay of biological and economic factors in the development of systematic numerical cognition and economic calculation in human societies. In investigating the economic basis of numeracy, we emphasize that it is the relevance of economic objects to need satisfaction and their scarcity that initially makes people seek to quantify goods and to develop numerical tools. As for biological aspects, we identify the pre-numerical (iconic) quantitative capacities that we share with other species as part of our biological endowment. We then investigate the fully-fledged symbolic systems of numerical representation that are unique to humans. We examine the scope for economic exchange in societies in which agents are endowed with natural iconic means for representing set sizes but lack a conventionalized number system. We also investigate the minimal set of quantitative representations that people need to have in order to engage in monetary exchange and precise economic calculation.      

Information, organization, and freedom: Explaining the great reversal

We suggest, in a Coase-Demsetz perspective, that the social demand for individual rights??or freedoms (whether civil, political or economic)??is derived from, because complementary to, the changing size of hierarchical organizations. The general downsizing and decentralization process observed worldwide after 1975 is itself the result of the information revolution and the resulting abundance of information. It follows that social demand for freedoms depends in turn??and inversely??on the cost of information (and thus on market imperfection) as well as on traditional determinants such as the distribution of resources and human capital. This implies that freedoms are adopted, implemented, or ??produced?? by various political regimes according to an objectively observable and contingent determinant. We believe this approach can shed light on the reason for the waxing and waning of freedoms in modern history.     

Conditions For Successful Technology Policy In Developing Countries—Learning Rents,State Structures,And Institutions

The paper develops an analysis of the economic, political, and institutional conditions for successful design and implementation of technology policy in developing countries. After a brief introduction (Section I), we discuss contending economic theories of technological change and technology policy (Section 2). It is concluded that, despite many pro-market arguments, market imperfections inherent in the process of technological change make the creation of learning and innovation rents by the state potentially very beneficial, especially in developing countries. The next section (Section 3) analyses the political and institutional factors that determine how effectively such rents can be created and managed. After an assessment of technology policy record in developing countries (Section 4) we discuss how the scope of such policy is affected by the recent changes in domestic and international policy contexts such as domestic deregulation and the emergence of a ‘liberal’ world order represented by the WTO (Section 5). The paper ends with a brief conclusion (Section 6).     

司马迁的因俗以治思想及其现实镜鉴?

作为一种非正式制度,习俗在国家的社会经济发展和治理中起着非常重要的作用,在我国的古代社会尤其如此。司马迁较早注意到了俗与治的内在关联,但学术界忽视了其在司马迁经济思想中的重要地位。文章对司马迁的经济思想谱系中“俗”与“治”两大重要范畴进行了关联阐述,介绍了司马迁“因俗以治”治道思想的源流和主张,并结合现代经济学理论对其进行延伸与扩展,探讨其现实意义。研究发现：(1)司马迁的治道思想兼容了道家与儒家的无为而治思想的不同侧面,而其“善因论”的要义正在于“俗之所欲,因而予之”。(2)因俗以治的核心是因循人“生有欲”和“皆为利”的本性及民间习俗来因地制宜、因时制宜地立俗施事,以达至“事少而功多”的理想治理效果。(3)由于司马迁的经济思想带有浓厚的经验色彩和朴素性质,而且中国古代社会缺乏良好的市场环境,因此其在近代以前始终未得到重视和采纳。(4)司马迁“因俗以治”思想给现代国家治理带来了众多启示：一是要尊重风俗习惯并加以因势利导;二是要注重习俗等非正式制度与正式制度的兼容;三是要让好的习俗成为一种稳态均衡而固定下来并延续下去。文章不仅是对司马迁经济思想研究的丰富和拓展,而且对中国国家治理能力的提升也提供了有益的历史借鉴。     

The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory

The hypothesis of this paper is that a detailed history of a specific location and period is more effective for isolating the important characteristics of institutions than studies which span multiple millennia across the globe. To illustrate this hypothesis, I examine three Italian city-states in the period between eleventh and sixteenth centuries. This was a time when the "commercial revolution" was underway in these city-states. As a result, there were institutional innovations in settlement patterns, work organization, and self-governing institutions to help provide for mutual defense and for the internalization of gains from long-distance trade. I contrast this case study with the methodology and findings employed by Douglass C. North, John J. Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast (2009) in Violence and Social Orders. Rather than analyze the importance of beliefs and the protection of property rights as in prior work of theirs, the authors here focus on the "Schumpeterian competition" between impersonal organizations as an effective institutional form to control violence. Moreover, the timeframe of their book extends to "all recorded human history." In contrast to North, Wallis, and Weingast's approach, I concentrate on Genoa, Florence, and Venice in an effort to explain more effectively the emergence of the public/private divide and the relationship between politics and economics in modern industrial society. Experimentation in medieval Italy in mediating conflict between newly emerging classes, innovating in public finance to support the military, and focusing on broad civic participation in the political process had a lasting impact on the development of the state as an institution.     

The evolution of markets and the revolution of industry: a unified theory of growth

This paper puts forth a theory of the Industrial Revolution whereby an economy transitions from Malthusian stagnation to modern economic growth as firms implement cost-reducing production technologies. This take-off of industry occurs once the market reaches a critical size. The mechanism by which market size affects process innovation relies on two overlooked facts pre-dating England??s Industrial Revolution: the expansion in the variety of consumer goods and the increase in firm size. We demonstrate this mechanism in a dynamic general equilibrium model calibrated to England??s long-run development, and explore how various factors affected the timing of its industrialization.     

Making profits working on patients’ expectations, a behavioral analysis of pharmaceutical clinical research

This paper presents a model that demonstrates how pharmaceutical companies can make profits from human experimentation by working on patients?? expectations and physicians?? inability to evaluate innovations in medical knowledge. In order to understand how profits can be made, it is important to analyze the effect the physician??s expectations have on patients, both in the enrolment process and in the collected effectiveness, as well as the nature of the physician??s interest in producing this effect. Starting from the process through which companies collect clinical evidence, the analysis will focus on the economic use of that data on the drug market and the national drug agency??s role. A model illustrates the companies?? potential opportunistic strategies as well as what the public stakeholder??s target should be. Is public intervention really necessary in order to regulate the imperfect market of drugs? In other words, taking imperfection due to the expectation process in human experimentation into account, is there another practicable path? The final normative analysis will try to answer these questions.     

Decentralization,agency costs,and the new economic constitution of China

This article examines the evolution of the rules that govern central-local government relations in the Chinese political economy. Although the federalism that accompanied China’s market reforms has substantially facilitated economic growth, it has also created powerful incentives for local authorities to abuse their powers, significantly increasing the agency costs to the central government of maintaining political stability and creating a national market. This article analyzes the institutional design of the nascent Anti-Monopoly Law (AML), known to officials and academics as China’s new “Economic Constitution”. It demonstrates that the major purpose of the AML is to break up the so-called “administrative monopolies”, or bureaucratic fiefdoms over local economies. In contrast to existing academic treatment, it will study the AML in the framework of competition for influence over economic policy between rent-seeking central and local actors. It argues that the AML, despite its stated purposes, is indeed designed to reduce the policy-making powers of the regions to the comparative advantage of the central government. The AML can thus be modeled as a new constitutional contract that the center wishes to enter into with the localities in order to repeal the existing rules of decentralization. It will be further shown that the AML, reflecting the allocation of power in the Chinese state, prioritizes the political imperatives of recentralization over the facilitation of competitive markets.     

Decentralization and regional government size in Spain

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of fiscal decentralization on the size of regional governments in Spain, by controlling for economies of scale, interregional heterogeneity and institutional framework. We study it over 1985 to 2004 using a panel dataset of seventeen spanish regions. The results can be easily summarized. Firstly, it supports the classic public goods theory of a trade-off-between the economic benefits of size and the costs of heterogeneity. Secondly, it doesn??t reject the ??Leviathan?? hypothesis and neither does the ??common pool?? hypothesis. Thirdly, by contrast, the paper partly rejects the ??Wallis???? hypothesis. It argues that government size is mediated by financial resources obtained through intergovernmental grants, consistent with welfare economics and positive economic policies. We conclude that later advances in the decentralisation process must be compatible with the goal of reducing fiscal imbalances that emanate from the vertical structure of fiscal power.     

A Critical Analysis of Peltzman’s “The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation”

Karl Polanyi considered that the relationship between the markets and their societies was a central feature of any social order. He studied what he called "ancient societies," to compare them with his own times, in an effort to understand that subject. This paper aims to show, following Polanyi's work on Classical Greece, that it is possible to make a clear analogy between the Athenian state and economy with the modern Welfare State. First, we present Polanyi's study of the early Athenian economy, focusing on the coexistence of a kind of state economic planning and a market. Second, we show how this relates to Polanyi's emphasis in the comparison of different societies and times. Third, we characterize the contemporary Welfare State to make an analogy between these two forms of economic organization. We conclude by underlining the relevance of this analogy in understanding the societies of today.