Enigma in the Origins of Paul Sweezy's Political Economy

Paul Sweezy's work on the history of the British coal industry gave rise to his doctoral thesis and a published monograph at exactly the same time that he was making the transition from mainstream economics to Marxist political economy. This note explores the peculiar disappearance of this work from his subsequent contributions despite its apparent influence upon and consistency with it.     

Beyond Brenner's investment overhang hypothesis: the case of the steel industry

This article challenges the way liberal economic governance has come to be theorised as a passive and depoliticised form of governance. Using the classic case of the gold standard, it shows how state intervention came to be shaped by considerations of state power and diverged considerably from the traditional emphasis on free markets and stable conditions of investments. As I argue, the gold standard was constructed through political struggles over monetary governance which involved significant constraints for capitalist investors. Its institutions helped establish a new structure for exerting control over finance. By resituating the gold standard in a broader historical perspective, I show how nineteenth-century monetary governance, far from leading to a retreat of the state, established in fact the foundations of a new form of state intervention: modern central banking.     

农民住房财产权抵押能否激发农村金融市场——基于银行贷款数据的实证分析

扩展抵押品范围是缓解农村金融困境的重要途径。在这一思路下,农民住房财产权抵押被寄予厚望,成为近年来农村政策改革的重要方向。本文使用2010—2016年1 024家农信社和农商行的数据,利用2015年12月国务院在天津市蓟州区等59个试点县(市、区)开展为期两年的农民住房财产权抵押贷款试点这一"准自然实验",对农民住房财产权抵押对涉农贷款供给的影响进行了检验。本文认为,现阶段农民住房面临着价值评估难、抵押物处置难的问题,抵押效果不佳。实证结果显示,农民住房财产权抵押没有显著增加涉农贷款供给,对农村金融的供给作用有限。本文在考虑了农民住房财产权抵押对其他担保方式的替代作用、农地经营权抵押和"三块地"改革的影响之后,上述结果依然稳健。本文的政策启示是,政府应着力做好农房抵押贷款改革的配套措施,推动宅基地制度改革,探索扩大农民住房财产权的受让范围,充分挖掘住房财产权的价值潜力,缓解抵押物处置难问题。     

Declining Discount Rates: The Long and the Short of it

The last few years have witnessed important advances in our understanding of time preference and social discounting. In particular, several rationales for the use of time-varying social discount rates have emerged. These rationales range from the ad hoc to the formal, with some founded solely in economic theory while others reflect principles of intergenerational equity. While these advances are to be applauded, the practitioner is left with a confusing array of rationales and the sense that almost any discount rate can be justified. This paper draws together these different strands and provides a critical review of past and present contributions to this literature. In addition to this we highlight some of the problems with employing DDRs in the decision-making process, the most pressing of which may be time inconsistency. We clarify their practical implications, and potential pitfalls, of the more credible rationales and argue that some approaches popular in environmental economics literature are ill-conceived. Finally, we illustrate the impact of different approaches by examining global warming and nuclear power investment. This includes an application and extension of Newell and Pizer [‘Discounting the benefits of climate change mitigation : how much do uncertain rates increase valuations?’ Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 46 (2003) 52] to UK interest rate data.     

公共真实中的社会和谐

公共真实是社会和谐必不可少的条件。只有在享有公共真实的社会中,人们才能有效地一起辨认当前生活中的不和谐因素,并一起克服这些因素。这样一个允许自由讨论和共同行动的社会空间就是公民社会。公民社会是就它做什么,而不是就它是什么而言的。公民社会不单单是一个拥有形式公民身份者构成的社会,而是一个让普通人能通过说真话和积极参与起到公民作用的社会。公民社会的和谐是由每一个公民的宪法权利来保障的。在公民社会中,生活在和谐之中,也就是生活在公共真实之中。公共真实是社会和谐的基础,社会和谐则是公共真实的结果。     

Equally-distributed equivalent utility,ex post egalitarianism and utilitarianism

We provide an axiomatization of expected equally-distributed equivalent-utility social welfare functions in the context of Harsanyi?s impartial observer theorem. For this family of social welfare functions, we show what additional axiom is necessary and sufficient for the observer to exhibit aversion to ex post inequality. We also relate this axiomatization to our axiomatization in a companion paper of generalized utilitarian social welfare functions. Given certain richness assumptions, the only social welfare functions that belong to both families are the utilitarian.     

Multi-unit auctions with budget limits

We study multi-unit auctions for bidders that have a budget constraint, a situation very common in practice that has received relatively little attention in the auction theory literature. Our main result is an impossibility: there is no deterministic auction that (1) is individually rational and dominant-strategy incentive-compatible, (2) makes no positive transfers, and (3) always produces a Pareto optimal outcome. In contrast, we show that Ausubel?s “clinching auction” satisfies all these properties when the budgets are public knowledge. Moreover, we prove that the “clinching auction” is the unique auction that satisfies all these properties when there are two players. This uniqueness result is the cornerstone of the impossibility result. Few additional related results are given, including some results on the revenue of the clinching auction and on the case where the items are divisible.     

The Biodiversity Bargaining Problem

We employ cooperative bargaining theory and Nash’s ‘rational threats’ idea to cast light on the biodiversity bargaining problem. The problem of global environmental negotiations is argued to be of the nature of a bargaining problem, in which bargainers must agree on the distribution of cooperative surplus in order to move to the bargaining frontier. We discuss the importance of both efficiency (bargaining frontier) and fairness (recognition of characteristics of bargainers) in the choice of the appropriate contract. We show that the incremental cost contract, used to resolve the biodiversity bargaining problem, is of the form of an extreme point contract that fails to recognise the contributions of the South to the production of cooperative surplus. A rational response to such a contract is the use of threats of biodiversity destruction. Contracts must evince both efficiency and fairness in order to represent lasting solutions.     

Reflections on the Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity

Environmental and Resource Economics - The Dasgupta Review provides a rich overview of the economics of biodiversity, paints a bleak picture of the current state of biodiversity, and is a call to...     

THE DYNAMIC PROPERTIES OF ALTERNATIVE ASSUMPTIONS ON PRICE ADJUSTMENT IN NEW KEYNESIAN MODELS

This paper presents a classification of the different new Phillips curves existing in the literature as a set of choices based on three assumptions: the choice of the structure of price adjustments (Calvo or Taylor), the presence of backward indexation and the type of price contracts (fixed prices or predetermined prices). The paper suggests study of the dynamic properties of each specification, following different monetary shocks on the growth rate of the money stock. We develop the analytical form of the price dynamics, and we display graphics for the responses of prices, output and inflation. We show that the choice made for each of the three assumptions has a strong influence on the dynamic properties. Notably, the choice of the price structure, while often considered as unimportant, is indeed the most influential choice concerning the dynamic responses of output and inflation.