Money as Social Exergy

Synopsis It has been proposed that open thermodynamic systems will act to dissipate available energy gradients by self-organizing into coherent structures that, with time, evolve and develop into nested hierarchies – panarchies – that adapt to internal and external changes according to a characteristic adaptive cycle. This paper seeks to apply these ideas in the purely societal realm by investigating the role of money in economic systems. Money represents the value embodied in goods; a value that is separate from the exact nature of those goods. We suggest that money thereby liberates the ‘free value’ of economic desire and that this free value has properties analogous to energy. The result is the self-organization of structures and systems (‘econosystems’) that dissipate this ‘free value’. Econosystems act at different scales, and nested levels of econosystems form a panarchy, having effects that can be observed. In particular, it appears that money facilitates the creation of relationships between econosystem actors, increasing the connectedness of the econosystems that envelop those actors. We have identified a phenomenon whereby freed social value (i.e. money) can aggregate, or pool, at a larger econosystem scale in structures such as banks. These pools act as gradients that actors at the neighborhood scale can exploit for self-organization in the econosystem. Thus, econosystem actors appear to be freed from thermodynamic constraints by using money as a means of self-organization. However, because of these pools of aggregated social exergy, connectedness is increased at the larger scale of the econosystem. The potential consequence of this dynamic is that money may act to push larger scale econosystems toward a state of heightened vulnerability to collapse, while freeing smaller scale actors from apparent constraints. In this way, we propose that money acts to skew information feedback loops between econosystem actors and larger scale structures such as economies and ecosystems.      

Researching Preferences,Valuation and Hypothetical Bias

A number of recent papers in environmental economics have focused on the process of researching preferences – agents are uncertain about preferences but with effort may narrow their uncertainty. This issue has arisen in formulating bids in contingent valuation (CV) as well as the debate over the divergence between WTP and WTA. In the context of CV, it has been suggested that the hypothetical nature of the preference elicitation process biases responses. This paper provides both a theoretical model and experimental evidence to contribute to this debate. The model is a model of competitive bidding for a private good with two components that are particularly relevant to the debate. The first component is that bidders are unsure of their own value for the private good but may purchase information about their own value (researching preferences). The second component is that there is a probability that the auction is hypothetical – that the winning bidder will not get the private good and will not pay the winning bid. The experiment tests this theoretical model of bidding equilibrium and analyzes the effects of variations in the parameters (hypotheticalness, information costs and number of agents) on the endogenous variables (such as the proportion of bidders who become informed and the winning bid). Experimental results suggest that an increase in the hypotheticalness of an auction tends to decrease the likelihood that bidders pay for information on their valuation with an ambiguous effect on the winning bid.      

Feminist Ecological Economics and Sustainability

Synopsis New developments in feminist ecological economics and ecofeminist economics are contributing to the search for theories and policy approaches to move economies toward sustainability. This paper summarizes work by ecofeminists and feminist ecological economists which is relevant to the sustainability challenge and its implications for the discipline of economics. Both democracy and lower material throughputs are generally seen as basic principles of economic sustainability. Feminist theorists and feminist ecological economists offer many important insights into the conundrum of how to make a democratic and equity-enhancing transition to an economy based on less material throughput. These flow from feminist research on unpaid work and caring labor, provisioning, development, valuation, social reproduction, non-monetized exchange relationships, local economies, redistribution, citizenship, equity-enhancing political institutions, and labor time, as well as creative modeling approaches and activism-based theorizing.      

Does the Company Lawyer Have Your Back? A Brief Look at the Need for Personal Private Liability Insurance

There are four traditional uses of private personal liability insurance dating from the 1970s to the present (Hayes 1979; Sommers 2005) which pertain either to individuals or corporations. There is insurance to cover damage to rental cars, umbrella insurance to cover any injury to a guest at one’s home, insurance bought by corporations to cover potential corporate responsibility for actions of company representatives and insurance including misadventures with financial information and morally hazardous behavior as well as corporate required actions which are later deemed to be wrong or inappropriate. Employees need to find out if the employee manual provides for coverage for legal liabilities resulting out of performing job responsibilities. Due to a need to reduce company costs, many companies are reducing or eliminating coverage for employees for many types of actions. Private personal liability insurance gives you the peace of mind to know what you are covered for and for how long. Employee rights versus corporate budgets are at the core of this discussion.     

Optimal mechanisms for siting noxious facilities

We study Bayesian mechanism design in the context of the siting of noxious facilities. Under incomplete information, we characterize optimal mechanisms facilitating the siting and cost sharing of the facility. These mechanisms are allocatively and Pareto efficient. However, it appears that transfers occur when the good is not provided. This result is due to the weakening of the incentive notion to Bayesian–Nash equilibrium and to the balanced budget condition. This phenomenon disappears if the setting is perfectly symmetric.      

How useful are signals? A micro-structure analysis

We analyze how the market processes a signaling event by studying a sample of self-tender offers, events often viewed as signals of firm value. By examining changes in the degree of informed trading, we find asymmetric information costs fall at announcement, remain low throughout the event, and increase at offer expiration. By one month following expiration, informed trading returns to a level not significantly different from that prior to the offer. Higher risk firms have significantly larger declines in information asymmetry during the offer. Increases in information asymmetry persist one month following expiration for firms with lower pre-offer informed trading. (JEL G14, G32)     

Relative importance of scheduled macroeconomic news for stock market investors

This paper investigates the relative importance of scheduled U.S. macroeconomic news releases for stock valuation. The study focuses on 11 macroeconomic announcements selected on the basis of the previous literature and the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifications of major economic indicators. The paper shows that five out of the 11 announcements have significant influence on stock valuation. These are the Employment Report, NAPM (manufacturing), Producer Price Index, Import and Export Price Indices, and Employment Cost Index. Of these six announcements, the Employment Report and NAPM (manufacturing) exert the greatest influence. The time of the announcement, measured by days from the beginning of the month to the release day, has a moderating impact on the relationship between macroeconomic announcements and its importance.     

Growth,Convergence, and Social Cohesion in the European Union

The aim of this paper is to analyze the economic and social cohesion in the European Union. There are different factors to explain the convergence process and besides, empirical findings are not conclusive. To the European Union, GDP per head interregional differences have decreased for certain periods but it has remained unchanged or even increased for others periods. The second report on the economic and social cohesion indicates that some decades are necessary to eliminate regional differences. These differences in regional GDP are mainly explained by differences in their productive structures, degree of innovate activity, communications structures, which depend on the relative level of transport infrastructures, and manpower qualifications. This analysis allows us to obtain some conclusions to the economic policies and the social cohesion. A preliminary version of this paper was presented in the 57th International Atlantic Conference, held in Lisbon, Portugal, March 10–14, 2004.