Politicizing Undocumented Immigrants One Corner at a Time: How Day Laborers Became a Politically Contentious Group

This article examines how undocumented immigrants become politicized and evolved into a relatively powerful group in the United States. It does so by examining the evolution of day laborers from their humble beginnings in a Los Angeles suburb in the early 1990s into an important component of the national immigrant rights movement today. It addresses the issue by examining the strategic importance of the ‘urban' in enabling stigmatized individuals like undocumented day laborers to overcome major barriers and establish themselves as a vocal and potent group in the public sphere. It suggests that once this group gained a foothold and a sense of itself through urban relational spaces, it experienced enhanced capacities to make rights claims in local and national political arenas. The article uses a case study of immigrant activism in Pasadena and Los Angeles, California, and draws special attention to the evolution of the National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON).     

Risk Aversion,the Disposition Effect,and Group Decision Making: An Experimental Analysis

This article reports a laboratory experiment comparing the behavior of individuals and groups in terms of their susceptibility to the disposition effect. A total of 174 students took part in six experimental sessions in which they made decisions individually, in pairs, or in three‐person groups. It was observed that the disposition effect was attenuated when the decisions were made in groups of two or three members. It was also noted that the attenuating effect of group decision making was the result of a reduction in the proportion of gains realized, indicating that the groups were less risk averse than individuals. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Classical Mechanics With An Ethical Dimension: Professor Tinhergen’s Economics

This article is an attempt to present and assess Professor Jan Tinbergen’s influential work in economics. It is inspired by the controversy between John M. Keynes and Jan Tinbergen conducted in the Economic Journal over half a century ago. [Keynes 1939, 1940; Tinbergen 1940]. The key issue in the discussion was how far economic phenomena were quantifiable and representable in invariant empirical relationships. For the writing of the article at hand, this author had an additional spur: he was himself a victim of Tinbergen’s verdict that economics must quantify in order to be scientific¹. The disagreement between Keynes and Tinbergen was fundamental, but in view of the intellectual monoculture prevailing since World War II, economists considered a discussion of this sort to be increasingly unnecessary and irrelevant. However, in recent years there has been a change in the wind. On the one hand, there is increasing dissatisfaction with the paradigmatic foundations of contemporary economics, and on the other, there have been scientific advances in physics, which constitutes a major paradigmatic basis of conventional economics. This article assesses the foundations of Tinbergen’s work in view of some of the changes in the natural sciences.     

A Nobel Prize for Asymmetric Information: The economic contributions of George Akerlof,Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz

This paper reviews the research related to the asymmetric information of George Akerlof, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, for which they jointly received the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. After recounting their overall careers, the history of the asymmetric information idea is presented and their key papers are discussed. This is followed by an examination of various applications of the concept, including in industrial organization and microeconomic dynamics, efficiency wage theories of unem ployment, credit market rationing theory, and issues of economic development and global stability. The degree to which these latter theories can be considered to be truly Keynesian is also considered.     

The Evolution of the Veblenian Dichotomy: Veblen,Hamilton, Ayres,and Foster

One of the most troubling developments in recent years has been widening income inequality in the United States and elsewhere. We argue Post Keynesian Institutionalism (PKI) provides insight into the causes of increasing income inequality and our contribution is threefold. First, we compare PKI to the “financialization” literature, noting key similarities and differences. Second, we examine changes in financial structure and income inequality for a sample of developed nations, showing that financialization has increased in nearly all the countries sampled and that this increase has generally been accompanied by a rise in income inequality. Third, we demonstrate that the development of modern financial structures does not preclude an expansive welfare state and egalitarian public policies. Our finding is congruent with Hyman Minsky's conception of PKI, which stressed both that “economic systems are not natural systems” and that capitalism comes in as many varieties as Heinz has of pickles.