Revolutionary Maoism and the Production of State and Insurgent Space in Eastern and Central India

This article situates India’s Maoist insurgency within longer term processes of state expansion in the east and centre of the country. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s work on space, its core claim is that since the onset of colonialism the region has been produced as a peripheral area whose primary function has been as a zone of settlement and a source of natural resources. Consequently the state has been simultaneously thin and repressive, leading to the creation of an oppositional insurgent space in which the Maoist guerrillas are only the most recent and visible actors. Currently new patterns of hyper-state and hybrid state/insurgent spaces are emerging: the former structured around the forced relocation of entire populations into tightly controlled and regulated camps and the latter around an emergent system of dual authority in which the demarcation between official and insurgent governance is blurred.     

Capital Controls,Global Liquidity Traps,and the International Policy Trilemma*

The zero bound on interest rates introduces a new dimension to the trilemma in international policy. The openness of the international financial market might render monetary policy ineffective, even within a system of fully flexible exchange rates, because shocks that lead to a liquidity trap in one country are propagated through financial markets to other countries. However, the effectiveness of monetary policy can be restored by the imposition of capital controls. We derive the optimal response of monetary policy to a global liquidity trap in the presence of capital controls. We show that, even though capital controls might facilitate effective monetary policy, capital controls are not generally desirable in terms of welfare.     

Polanyi’s ‘substantive approach’ to the economy in action? Conceptualising social enterprise as a public health ‘intervention’

For several decades now, critical public health researchers have highlighted the deleterious effects that pursuing neoliberal policies can have on the ‘causes of the causes’ of poor health and upon growing health inequalities. This paper argues that the conceptual tools of Karl Polanyi can help lend particular insight into this issue. The specific example that this paper focuses upon is the ‘social enterprise’: a form of organisation that combines both social and business objectives. The paper explores, conceptually, whether social enterprises may have the potential to act as one component of a neo-Polanyian countermovement: helping to re-embed the economy back into society, and offering greater recognition for a more comprehensive and socially imbued concept of health. Importantly, this potential is critically examined in the context of neoliberal hegemony, where challenges to the status quo have regularly been met with assimilation, co-option and/or repression.     

Trade and Industrial Policies with Heterogeneous Firms: The Role of Country Asymmetries

This paper explores the role of country asymmetries for trade and industrial policies with heterogeneous firms. The analysis delivers a number of novel results. First, trade policies, infrastructure policies and industrial policies which improve the business conditions in one country have negative productivity and welfare effects on the trading partner. Second, symmetric trade liberalization is immiserizing for a trading partner whose business conditions are inferior. Third, there are gains from trade even for a country whose monopolistically competitive sector with heterogeneous firms is wiped out by switching from autarky to trade.     

The maximum number of parameters for the Hausman test when the estimators are from different sets of equations

Hausman (1978) developed a widely-used model specification test that has passed the test of time. In this paper, we show that the asymptotic variance of the difference of the two estimators can be a singular matrix. Three illustrative examples are used, namely an exogeneity test for the linear regression model, a test for the Box–Cox transformation, and a test for sample selection bias.     

Consumer adoption of Internet banking in Jordan: Examining the role of hedonic motivation,habit, self-efficacy and trust

Despite the rapid growth of Internet banking (IB), customers in developing countries still hesitate to adopt this technology and its use in the Middle East remains low. This study aims to identify and examine the factors that predict behavioural intention and adoption of IB in Jordan. Four factors – hedonic motivation, habit, self-efficacy and trust – are proposed in a conceptual model. Data was collected by means of a survey with bank customers in Jordan. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to analyse the data. The results strongly supported the conceptual model. Further, hedonic motivation, habit, self-efficacy and trust were all confirmed to have a significant influence on behavioural intention. Trust was found to be strongly predicted by both hedonic motivation and self-efficacy. This study provides both academics and practitioners with an insight into the factors that can be used to encourage customer adoption of IB specifically in a Middle East context.     

Fame and the fortune of academic economists: How the market rewards influential research in economics

We analyze the pay and position of 1009 faculty members who teach in doctoral‐granting economics departments at 53 large public universities in the United States. Using the Web of Science, we have identified the journal articles published by these scholars and the number of times each of these articles has been subsequently cited in published research articles. We find that research influence, as measured by various measures of total citations, is a remarkably strong predictor of the salary and the prestige of the department in which professors are employed. We also examine the effect of coauthorship. Surprisingly, we find no salary penalty for sharing authorship; however, in terms of prestige of employing department, coauthorship is fully discounted.