What is extreme about Mises’s extreme apriorism?

There is something extreme about Ludwig von Mises’s methodological apriorism, namely, his epistemological justification of the a priori element(s) of economic theory. His critics have long recognized and attacked the extremeness of Mises’s epistemology of a priori knowledge. However, several of his defenders have neglected what is (and what has long been recognized by his critics to be) extreme about Mises’s apriorism. Thus, the argument is directed less against Mises than against those contributions to the secondary literature that assert his methodological moderation while overlooking what the most prominent critics have found extreme about Mises’s apriorism. Defending Mises as a merely moderate apriorist because he held only a narrow part of the foundation of economics to be a priori is a straw-man defense against criticisms of his apriorism as epistemologically extreme.     

Are school counselors an effective education input?

We exploit within-school variation in counselors and find that one additional counselor reduces student misbehavior and increases boys’ academic achievement by over one percentile point. These effects compare favorably with those of increased teacher quality and smaller class sizes.     

Impacts of trade liberalization in Canada's supply managed dairy industry

Trade is an integral part of the Canadian economy. The main institutional drivers governing trade are bilateral and multilateral agreements outlining permissible trade distorting measures. Since its inception in 1972, Canada's supply management system has remained protected throughout trade negotiations. The system appears, by any economic measure, to be having an increasingly disproportional influence in recent trade negotiations. However, trade agreements serve not only to maximize social surplus, but also to maximize some measure of political welfare. Canada has recently negotiated three prominent trade agreements: the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) came into effect in the latter part of 2017; the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) came into effect at the end of 2018; and the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) could come into effect in 2020. Collectively, these agreements have guaranteed increased market access for fresh and processed dairy products. We build a spatial partial equilibrium model of the Canadian dairy industry consisting of three regions and 10 commodities to assess the individual and cumulative effect of these trade agreements. We pay particular attention to the institutional drivers within today's dairy sector: milk protein isolates; component pricing, including Class 7; and differential demand growth. We find that the aggregate impacts are: (a) a 1.4% decrease in the marginal retail price; (b) a 4.8% decrease in the blended producer price; and (c) an overall increase in social welfare of 7.8%. Worth noting, the decrease in producer surplus varies from 0.7% in the western region to 1.5% in Ontario. Our results may be relevant to future negotiations as well as the publicly promised compensation package for dairy producers.     

Group concept mapping methodology: toward an epistemology of group conceptualization,complexity, and emergence

Quality & Quantity - Group concept mapping is a participatory mixed-methods approach to social and behavioral research that integrates qualitative group processes with multivariate statistical...     

Your Governance or Mine?

In response to criticism directed at the resource sector's corporate governance, this paper examines the corporate governance and underlying firm characteristics of resource development stage entities (DSEs) relative to a size‐matched sample of non‐resource firms. We find that resource DSEs have different governance characteristics in the measures of board independence, chair/CEO duality and CEO cash bonuses. Furthermore, there are differences in the information environment measures of analyst following, debt levels, stock market return and stock turnover. Considering we document substantial differences in underlying firm characteristics, corporate governance differences are likely appropriate to the mining industry and should not be uniformly labelled as ‘bad’. Our results suggest that media rankings based on corporate governance scores may not accurately portray the resource sector. Overall, our results are of interest to Australian investors and regulators and contribute to a broader understanding of contextually contingent corporate governance.     

Using Experimental and Neurological Data to Gain a Deeper Understanding of Realization Utility Theory

Starting with the premise that realization utility theory helps explain trading behavior, this study combines a carefully crafted experimental design with functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to offer a more inclusive examination of factors that affect REIT trading behavior beyond whether a REIT is simply trading up or down. We add to the nascent field of neurological real estate by finding that local gains/loss domains are more relevant than are global gain/loss considerations, financial skewness is a significant determinant of trading behavior, and that performance inside the REIT market influences how hard subjects think when performing tasks outside the market.     

Has Dodd–Frank affected bank expenses?

Journal of Regulatory Economics - This paper examines the potential effects of the Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 on banks’ noninterest expenses. Using data on U.S. bank holding companies from...