Economic Organization,Distribution and the Equality Issue: The Marx-Engels Perspective

This paper has four related themes. It demonstrates that Marx's Communism in its first or Socialist phase would recognize the essential inequality of labour on grounds of efficiency and growth. It offers an explanation for the apparent paradox that Marx and Engels championed a fully-fledged control system notwithstanding appreciation of the allocation functions of a competitive market system. It highlights common ground relating to market process between Marx and Engels and the modern classical liberals Mises and Hayek. And it traces the evolutionary nature of the Marx-Engels perspective on transitions between and within economic systems.     

On cannibalism, torture and conspiracy: a rejoinder to Dr Peach

This note discusses aspects of Robert Torrens's debt to DavidRicardo regarding the theory of profits. It is written in responseto criticism of two of my papers appearing in the CambridgeJournal of Economics.     

Strategic resources and performance: a meta‐analysis

Resource‐based theory (RBT) has emerged as a key perspective guiding inquiry into the determinants of organizational performance. Since the early 1990s, numerous studies have examined RBT's assertion that the extent to which organizations possess strategic resources is positively related to performance. Although many studies appear to support this assertion, there is no consensus regarding how strongly strategic resources relate to performance. To help resolve this issue, we meta‐analyze 125 studies of RBT that collectively encompass over 29,000 organizations. Our conservative estimate is that the effect size of the strategic resources–performance relationship is r?_c = 0.22. Moderator tests suggest that the resources‐performance link is stronger (1) when resources meet the criteria laid out in RBT and (2) for those performance measures that are not affected by potential value appropriation. When resources meet RBT's criteria and when performance measures are not affected by potential appropriation, the strength of the relationship grows to r?_c = 0.29. This suggests that the identification, development, and distribution of value from strategic resources should be a primary consideration for scholars, managers, and shareholders. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Beyond the existence proof: ontological conditions, epistemological implications, and in-depth interview research

In-depth interviewing is a promising method. Alas, traditional in-depth interview sample designs prohibit generalizing. Yet, after acknowledging this limitation, in-depth interview studies generalize anyway. Generalization appears unavoidable; thus, sample design must be grounded in plausible ontological and epistemological assumptions that enable generalization. Many in-depth interviewers reject such designs. The paper demonstrates that traditional sampling for in-depth interview studies is indefensible given plausible ontological conditions, and engages the epistemological claims that purportedly justify traditional sampling. The paper finds that the promise of in-depth interviewing will go unrealized unless interviewers adopt ontologically plausible sample designs. Otherwise, in-depth interviewing can only provide existence proofs, at best.     

Water Management,Spanish Irrigation Communities and Colonial Engineers

In the nineteenth century, Spanish irrigation was studied by a number of British and French engineers, who sought to acquire knowledge that could be applied to India and Algeria. In their reports, they said that Spanish irrigation communities were run by the irrigators themselves in a totally democratic way, which was not true. Although such ideas had hardly any practical consequences in colonial India and Algeria, they did have important repercussions in Spain, where the irrigation institutions came to resemble the image they had been given by the reporters, with the best results. Through the work of Elinor Ostrom, the myth created by the nineteenth‐century reporters has also eventually become an argument in favour of irrigation projects in today's developing countries being managed by water users’ associations.     

An Analysis of Pet Food Label Usage

We use the 2008 Health and Diet Survey to investigate the extent to which pet owners consult pet food labels. We find that pet food label usage has not penetrated shopping behavior to the degree that using the Nutrition Facts label has for human food purchases. While we find no gender difference in using pet food labels among dog owners, women may be less likely than men to consult labels among cat owners. The data also suggest that usage increases when at least three pets are owned; cat owners consult pet food labels less frequently than dog owners; and usage is not dependent on the type of product purchased.     

Is the agricultural industry spared from the influence of the Australian carbon tax?

The Australian agricultural sector provides food security for the nation and affects the livelihood of farmers and the development of rural communities. This sector has been uneasy about the Australian carbon tax scheme introduced in July 2012 although the government has exempted the agricultural sector from the scheme. By employing a computable general equilibrium model and an environmentally extended Social Accounting Matrix, this article simulates the effects of different carbon tax policy scenarios. The modeling results show that all agricultural sectors will be affected negatively but to differing degrees. The household compensation policy will improve the performance of the poultry and fishing sectors, while having opposite effects in the other agricultural sectors. The inclusion of the agricultural industry into the carbon tax scheme will lead to a considerable further decrease in output, employment and profitability in the agricultural sector, and a significant further reduction in real GDP, but a much larger emission reduction.     

Using semantic fingerprinting in finance

Researchers in finance and adjacent fields have increasingly been working with textual data, a common challenge being analysing the content of a text. Traditionally, this task has been approached through labour- and computation-intensive work with lists of words. In this article we compare word list analysis with an easy-to-implement and computationally efficient alternative called semantic fingerprinting. Using the prediction of stock return correlations as an illustration, we show semantic fingerprinting to produce superior results. We argue that semantic fingerprinting significantly reduces the barrier to entry for research involving textual content analysis, and we provide guidance on implementing this technique.