The time cost of food at home: general and food stamp participant profiles

Little is known about the cost of time in food preparation at home. Yet, this economic variable is a common thread running through recent concerns about obesity and the Food Stamp (FS) program. This article provides initial estimates of the time cost in food preparation at home for the United States. Two standard methods of estimation are implemented and three demographic profiles are considered: (i) the general population, (ii) the typical FS participant and (iii) the typical FS participant following the United States Department of Agriculture Thrifty Food Plan. For the general population and averaging across methods, the time cost share of total food cost is about 30% if the individual works in the market and at home, but it is about 49% if the individual does not work in the market. For the typical FS participant, especially one following the Thrifty Food plan, the time cost share of total food cost can be as much as 26% higher than the general population. These substantial percentages provide strong incentives to purchase food away from home and help undermine overall diet quality and the efficacy of the FS program, which ignores the time cost in food at home production.     

Competition and the relative productivity of large and small firms

Using a comprehensive dataset on the incidence of price-fixing across British manufacturing industries in the 1950s, I compare collusive and competitive industries and find evidence of a negative relationship between collusion and the labour productivity of larger firms relative to smaller firms. In particular, collusion is associated with a reduction or even a reversal of the productivity gap between larger and smaller firms. This result is robust to controlling for the potential endogeneity of collusion.     

Understanding platform competition through simulation: a research outline

ABSTRACT

Platform competition shapes and is shaped by a constantly changing socioeconomic context. Three trends provide evidence for this: (i) the number of firm level relevant factors for platform success is steadily increasing, (ii) contemporary cases of platform competition take less time to unfold, and (iii) industries converge. These trends suggest that there is a change: in the time required for relevant factors to influence platform competition, and in the trade-offs managers face when they take actions in platform development and competition, to influence the market outcome of such processes. Current frameworks in the literature do not account explicitly for such timing issues. The use of modelling and simulation, along empirical cases, is a way to incorporate timing and strategic action delays in platform competition research. We explore the multi-level research agenda this opens up and develop nine research questions for platform competition research.     

Alan Gillie,Input-Output Economics.

Turnovsky observes that “the rational expectations hypothesis has had a profound impact on macroeconomic theory and policy during the past decade.” Tracing briefly the evolution of the ideas involved, he concludes that “… a consensus view is emerging that in fact under quite plausible conditions the policy neutrality proposition does not hold; therefore, there is still scope for policy rules to play an important role in stabilizing output.”

The mathematics used in the article is expository rather than analytical, requiring of the reader only somewhat more than the usual amount of persistence, faith in the author's interpretation of the literature, and a willingness to accept the integrity of economic models as representative of the real world. This is “required” reading for those teaching macroeconomics.     

A Note on the Teaching of Economics Through American History

McConnell examines problems connected with measuring the readability of introductory economics textbooks and observes that an index of readability based on sentence length and the number of syllables per some given number of words may be deficient, misleading, and possibly counterproductive. In this connection, he observes that “virtually no work has been undertaken to determine whether the choice of textbook is a significant factor in determining student understanding and performance.” Research in this area might make it possible to substitute empirical evidence for what most instructors in their selection of a textbook attempt to intuit.     

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.