End the minimum wage debate: Revise the concept itself

The debate over raising the minimum wage focuses on the wrong point. We should be trying to change the concept of minimum wage to one that reflects what it really is—an entry wage. The real issue in the minimum wage debate needs to be one of clarifying the underlying human/social purpose of the minimum wage concept.     

Peering at the Past Century's Corporate Strategy Through the Looking Glass of Time‐Series Analysis: Extrapolating from Chandler's Classic Mid‐Century American Firms?

ABSTRACT This study has a dual thrust. Substantively , it revisits Chandler's pragmatic fit-performance directive (Chandler's 'efficiency thesis') or his assertion that firms whose structure matches their strategy become more effective than mismatched firms. It is important to revisit the empirical origin of this result in view of its gradual international extrapolation beyond the time and place in which it originated. By gathering the financial data relevant to the firms cited as examples by Chandler, we identify whether the change to the multidivisional structure did indeed lead to improved financial performance in the mid-twentieth century American firms he described. Methodologically , it explores a novel approach to the empirical validation of basic theories. Using historical replication, it undertakes a longitudinal, time-series analysis of a classic theory based on twentieth-century data, and thus investigates the testing of classic data with a modern tool. We undertake multiple replications. Three separate longitudinal studies are performed, consisting of two forecasting methods applied to 11 individual time series, and a comparison technique applied to the same. These are used with the three most common measures of performance at the time of Chandler's writing. All three methods reveal that the differences predicted by his theory are not borne out by the longitudinal analysis of a core group of Chandler's own exemplary firms. The three sets of longitudinal analyses we present raise some substantive questions regarding this cornerstone of classical theory, and carry positive methodological portents regarding the use of historical replication as a stepping-stone for twenty-first-century research.     

Economic Crime as Hiding Behavior

The article introduces "hiding behavior" as a concept for understanding why people conceal economic problems and solve them by committing crimes. This concept's theoretical purport, empirical applicability, and relevance for the research area are considered through an analysis of an empirical case. An explanatory model is then developed, focusing on the concrete social relations in which hiding behavior originates and in which it remains embedded. From case studies we see how hiding behavior is situated in social relations characterized by a specific form of uncertainty arising from engulfment and isolation. In these relations money plays a central role, providing a medium for action-coordination essential in the incidence of economic crime. Finally, the explanatory power of the proposed conceptual model is discussed, with several possible refinements suggested for it.