Journal of Economic Issues articles from June 2001

Journal of Economic Issues archives from June 2001

The Veblen-Commons Award.(presented to Professor Anne Mayhew)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... It is my great pleasure to introduce this year's recipient of the Veblen-Commons award, Professor Anne Mayhew. When Jan Knoedler and I decided we wanted to nominate Anne for this award, we asked Anne if she would send us a vita. Anne said she...

Human Agency, Cumulative Causation, and the State.(economic theory and research)
June 1, 2001... Remarks upon Receiving the Veblen-Commons Award Thank you for this honor, and for the opportunity to share with you some of my thoughts about the theory and practice of institutional economics today. I have been a member of AFEE since its...

John R. Commons's Reasonable Value and the Problem of Just Price.(economic research and theory)
June 1, 2001... I was trying to save Capitalism by making it good. John R. Commons A strong case can be made that John R. Commons's theory of Reasonable Value [1] entities him to be ranked among the great economic theorists. Yet, when economists are...

Unchained Melody: A Price Discrimination--Based Policy Proposal for Addressing the MP3 Revolution.(research and theory)
June 1, 2001... Recent innovations allow Internet users to access and trade digital music files without paying those who have produced the music. MP3 and other data compression algorithms allow digital files to easily fit on hard drives or portable discs, and...

The Internet Revolution, the "McLuhan" Stage of Catch-up, and Institutional Reforms in Asia.(economic research information)
June 1, 2001... The Asian crisis of the late 1990s altered the fortunes of those stricken countries overnight, turning the much-ballyhooed economic miracle into chaos. Japan too became (and still is) trapped in a banking crisis of its own making after the...

Information Technology and Commercialization of Knowledge: Corporate Universities and Class Dynamics in an Era of Technological Restructuring.(industry research)
June 1, 2001... It is one of the unwritten, and commonly unspoken, commonplaces lying at the root of modern academic policy that the various universities are competitors for the traffic in merchantable instruction, in much the same fashion as rival...

Telecommuting: The New Wave of Workplace Technology Will Create a Flood of Change in Social Institutions.(research information)
June 1, 2001... This paper addresses through a "Veblenian lens" the evolutionary impact of telecommuting on social institutions. According to a survey by the International Telework Association and Council, 19.6 million US-based workers telecommuted in 1999...

Protection of Biotechnological Inventions: A Burden Too Heavy for the Patent System.
June 1, 2001... Patent protection for biotechnological inventions has attracted growing public criticism since 1980, when the US Supreme Court in the landmark Diamond v. Chakrabarty case held by a margin of one vote that the first patent on a genetically...

Informational Requirements and the Regulatory Process of Agricultural Biotechnology.
June 1, 2001... This paper investigates the reinforcing and balancing regulatory pressures that are impinging on the performance of agricultural and food biotechnology--based activity in Canada. Regulatory agencies are in the process of adjusting their...

Are Employment Relations Undergoing a Fundamental Change that Threatens the Future of Capitalism? A Critique of Hodgson's View of the Labor Contract.
June 1, 2001... In 1954, Joseph Schumpeter declared that debates over the employment effects of technological change were "dead and buried" (1954, 684). Despite this declaration, many social scientists continued to investigate the manner in which technology...

Gender, Risk, and Retirement.
June 1, 2001... Women are more vulnerable than men to poverty in their older age. They earn less than men over their working lives and accumulate less savings for retirement. These savings typically have to be spread over a longer period of time since women...

Subsistence in the Computer Era.(the new economy)
June 1, 2001... The long economic expansion has been widely celebrated as evidence of a New Economy. According to the promoters of the New Economy idea, the technological advances of the computer era are finally coming to fruition. US Treasury Secretary...

Social Constructions of Measurement: Three Vignettes from Recent Events and Labor Economics.
June 1, 2001... Modern life is permeated by a fascination with numbers, measurement, and quantification. As Theodore Porter (1995) put it, we have come to "trust in numbers." Though we know it is possible to "lie with numbers," we nevertheless rely on them,...

Analysis of the Financial Assurance Plan in the License Application for a Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility.
June 1, 2001... Our purpose is to evaluate the efficiency of the financial assurance plan in the license application [1] submitted by American Ecology Corporation (AEC) to site, design, and build a new technological facility in Boyd County, Nebraska, for the...

The Impact of Technological Change on Market Power and Market Failure in Telecommunications.
June 1, 2001... Technological change is an historical constant--no era has lacked for it. But it cannot be denied that it waxes and wanes. Its pace has quickened recently, with dramatic impacts on telecommunications, broadening its very definition. No longer...

New Dimensions of Market Failure in Electricity and Natural Gas Supply.
June 1, 2001... Has public utility deregulation been a success or a failure? The answer to this question depends on whether one approaches it from the perspective of mainstream neoclassical economics or from the perspective of institutional economics. The...

The Economics of Urban Sprawl: Inefficiency as a Core Feature of Metropolitan Growth.
June 1, 2001... Modem cities are both vibrant and chaotic. New businesses rise; ideas, scientific research, and commercial innovations are created; and the arts and humanities pulse. Unfortunately, problems are created as well, and sprawl--geographic growth...

Can Entrepreneurial Incentives Revitalize the Urban Inner Core? A Spatial Input-Output Approach.
June 1, 2001... Recent efforts to revitalize inner core urban areas have emphasized tax-based incentives for entrepreneurs. What does economic analysis suggest about the likely success of these inner core business-incentive programs? This paper addresses this...

The Stock Watering Debate: More Light, Less Heat.
June 1, 2001... Stock watering, according to its many critics in the early twentieth century, was a way for unscrupulous robber barons to bilk money from the American public. It could also be seen as part of the revolution in accounting practice that made...

Corporate Takeovers, Fairness, and Public Policy.
June 1, 2001... A defining characteristic of the 1980s was the wave of corporate takeovers that introduced many Americans to the colorful world of greenmail and golden parachutes. Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny (1997, 98) estimated that acquisitions during...

International Capital and Mexican Development: A System Dynamics Model.(research information)
June 1, 2001... The proper role of portfolio capital in the development process is currently the subject of vigorous debate among both scholars and policy makers. One of the core elements of the disagreement is whether or not unregulated financial markets...

Monetary Policies, Banking, and Trust in Changing Institutions: Russia's Transition in the 1990s.(research information)
June 1, 2001... Creating a well-functioning market economy is fundamentally an anthropological process as well as one involving politics and economics. We would characterize the ideal government to guide such a process as the "neutral referee" and rule maker....

Cultural Aspects of Credit Institutions: Transplanting the Grameen Bank Credit Group Structure to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.(research information)
June 1, 2001... In recent decades, individuals involved in economic development have propounded the virtues of poverty alleviation through development of micro-enterprises. Increasing the access to credit of micro-entrepreneurs has been prominent in this...

Sustainable Regional Economic Development.(research and analysis information)
June 1, 2001... Designing successful economic development programs is a very difficult task. Most state or regional planning boards rely on "ad-based" campaigns that lack any significant strategic content. Most programs simply produce a series of glossy...

Debt-for-Nature Swaps, Market Imperfections, and Policy Failures as Determinants of Sustainable Development and Environmental Quality.
June 1, 2001... A comprehensive survey of the world's tropical forests recently released by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (1999) stated that 13.7 million hectares (137,000 sq. km, or 53,000 sq. miles) of tropical forests...

The Deliberative Approach in Environmental Valuation.
June 1, 2001... How can and should decision makers collect information on public preferences and integrate public input into the environmental policy process? Since environmental issues often involve conflicts in values among goals that all of us consider...

The Role of Nonmarket Valuation in Hydropower Relicensing: An Application of a Pattern Modeling Approach.
June 1, 2001... Requests for economic analysis in environmental policy decisions are increasing. Many professional economists have responded by crafting benefit-cost guidelines for monetizing people's preferences for environmental services. The nonmarket...

Institutionalist Approaches in the Social Sciences: Typology, Dialogue, and Future Challenges.
June 1, 2001... A multitude of institutionalist approaches are flourishing in the social sciences. Many attempts have been made to survey the field, but most stay within the boundaries of each discipline. Only a few contributions cover trends in the social...

Poverty and the Death Penalty.
June 1, 2001... Disparities of wealth are inevitable within capitalism. Perhaps nowhere are these disparities more disturbing and deadly than in our system of justice and, in particular, in the way in which the death penalty is meted out in the United States....

Did the Rising Tide Eliminate Our "Surplus Population?
June 1, 2001... I do not believe that William Jefferson Clinton is an evil man. I think he really does feel at least some of the pain suffered by our nation's unfortunate. Yet, how does one explain his almost single-minded devotion to the cause of "ending...

Why Did Black Relative Earnings Surge in the Early 1990s?
June 1, 2001... The decade of the 1990s represents one of the longest periods of sustained prosperity in the post-World War II era. Unemployment rates have fallen to unprecedented sustained lows. A "New Economy" of highly technical occupations relies heavily...