Screpanti versus Marx on exploitation: a comment

Abstract

Ernesto Screpanti recently claimed to prove that Marx's value theory is logically inconsistent. Jettisoning the value theory, he then reconstructed Marx's theory of exploitation in a manner that supposedly preserves the gist of the original. This note shows that Screpanti's proof of inconsistency is invalid and that his reconstruction contradicts the original theory of exploitation in significant ways, for instance by implying that workers who perform surplus labor can exploit capitalists.     

Factors Determining Student Retention of Economic Knowledge after Completing the Principles-of-Microeconomics Course

It is probable that all teachers wonder how much of their instruction stays with the students—and for how long. This question has been examined before, but the authors of this article provide new dimensions and suggest analytical techniques that should be of interest to other economic education researchers. For example, they quantify the rate of depreciation of economic knowledge over time, as well as the “counterdecay effects” of several variables.     

The Depreciation of Human Capital Over Time: The Case of Economic Knowledge Revisited

In this note, the authors point out what is learned in principles lasts longer with students of high ability and if the first course is followed by additional courses in economics or mathematics. This lends support to the practice of advising majors not to delay the intermediate theory course after completing principles.     

Science,Technology and the Quest for Sustainable Development

The quest for sustainable development is seen in this article as an intrinsic part of the reconstitution of environmentally-oriented science and technology policy that has been taking place over the past 15 years in most European countries. Rather than dealing with environmental problems after they have occurred, the trend is increasingly to base environmental research and development on so-called preventive principles and to seek to integrate environmental concern into all other areas of science and technology development. There is also a widespread effort to foster new ways to involve the 'public' in the making of science and technology policy. The article is based on results from the project, Public Engagement and Science and Technology Policy Options (PESTO), for which the author served as coordinator.     

Amalgamations of universities:are there economics of scale or scope?

This paper estimates a multiple-output cost function for Australian universities. The estimates are used to evaluate the cost savings arising from the amalgamation of two or more institutions. These cost savings in turn are decomposed into those due to economics of scale and those due to economics of scope, using a new measure of economics of scope associated with the amalgamation of two institutions.     

Le Pont de Londres: Interactions between monetary and prudential policies in cross‐border lending

Using two unique confidential datasets summarizing the cross‐border lending of banks in France and the UK, we examine whether recipient‐country prudential policies can help to reduce the spillover effects of euro‐area (EA) monetary policy. We address this question from a novel angle, focused on the role of international financial centres, by considering differences in bank size and location (lending from French headquarters vs. from French affiliates located in the UK). For small French banks that lack a presence in international financial centres, the response of direct cross‐border lending from France to EA monetary policy is partially offset by recipient‐country prudential policy. For larger banks, however, the offsetting effect applies only to lending that passes through foreign affiliates located in London. This suggests the existence of a “London Bridge”: banks adapt their flows to the UK conditional on EA monetary policy and global prudential policies; and from their UK affiliates to third‐party countries in a manner that depends on local prudential settings.     

Partial‐ and General‐Equilibrium Measures of Trade Restrictiveness

New partial‐equilibrium forms of the Trade Restrictiveness Index and the Mercantilist Trade Restrictiveness Index have recently been used by the World Bank and others. In this paper we examine the bias in the partial‐equilibrium forms due to the neglect of general‐equilibrium effects. We propose “semi‐general‐equilibrium” measures that capture those general‐equilibrium effects due to vertical input–output relations without the need for a computable general‐equilibrium model. These measures also incorporate nontariff measures. Australian data are used to compute the semi‐general‐equilibrium measures. These estimates indicate that the partial‐equilibrium forms generally underestimate the true value of the indices, and by a large margin in some cases.     

A Permanent Change in the Route to Owner Occupation?

This paper attempts to explain why home ownership rates among young adults fell in the early 1990s when various indicators suggested it had become more affordable. As a potential explanation, we focus on the relatively slower growth in their incomes and argue that this could signal a fundamental change in behaviour, a change in route adopted into owner occupation, induced by structural economic change. In examining the implications for housing tenure, we use a conditional fixed effects multinomial logit model to exploit the information on the tenure choice and the timing of transitions in the British Household Panel Survey. Our results reveal that relatively slower income growth contributed significantly to this decline and that ignoring the intertemporal correlation in micro‐panels generates inconsistent results.