Journal of Economic Issues articles from June 2007

Journal of Economic Issues archives from June 2007

The 2007 Veblen-Commons award recipient: Richard R. Nelson.
June 1, 2007... RICHARD R. NELSON was born in 1930 in New York City. Author of many books and articles, he is one of a few leading and inspirational scholars who are responsible for a revival in evolutionary approaches to economics in the last thirty years....

Institutions and economic growth: sharpening the research agenda: remarks upon receipt of the Veblen-Commons award.
June 1, 2007... After a long hiatus, "institutions" again is a fashionable term in the vocabulary of professional economists. Indeed, there is widespread agreement that the right institutions are the key to economic productivity and progressiveness, but...

The revival of Veblenian institutional economics.(evaluation, research and growth of institutional economics)
June 1, 2007... The novelties of today are a... later generation of the commonplaces of the day before yesterday. Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership (1923) Institutional economics is more than a century old. After a period of interwar hegemony in...

Clarence Ayres Memorial Lecture (2007): evolutionary institutional economics.
June 1, 2007... The economic system is not ultimately made of resources, but of institutions. And because economic systems differ in their institutions, their comparative performance can be (partially) explained by these differences. Moreover, institutional...

The evolutionary policy maker.(influence of economic conditions and national government on market economy)
June 1, 2007... Government plays an important role in market economies. Traditional mainstream economics claims a role in the case of market failures. Traditionally, Original Institutional Economics (OIE), (1) goes a step further suggesting not only a macro...

Using the social fabric matrix to analyze institutional rules relative to adequacy in education funding.
June 1, 2007... This article explains findings of part of a research project that uses the social fabric matrix (SFM) (Hayden 2006, 73-143) to analyze Nebraska's State education finance system with regard to adequacy and rules. The emphasis is about how to...

Institutionalist perspectives on immigration policy.
June 1, 2007... The recent intense, national debate over various proposals to reform U.S. immigration laws will not be the last such debate nor are the issues new. The immigration debates frequently produce unexpected political alliances and disrupt old,...

Tied to the past--bound to the future: ceremonial encapsulation in a Maine Woods land use policy.
June 1, 2007... The theory of institutional change (Veblen, Commons, Dewey, Ayres) provides a framework with which to analyze public policy. In particular, neoinstitutional value theory (Tool 1977) suggests that institutions need to provide an ongoing viable...

The French competitiveness clusters: toward a new public policy for innovation and research?
June 1, 2007... In December 2002, the French Government gave impetus to a new public policy for regional planning and development. Almost two years later, in November of 2004, the implementation of this policy resulted in a call for projects to create...

Reciprocal transactions, social capital, and the transformation of Bedouin agriculture.
June 1, 2007... This work attempts to analyze the changing organizational structure of Bedouin agriculture from the 1930s through the 1960s. This period was chosen because it represents a critical moment in time when the Bedouin were first introduced in...

Sweden's economic recovery and the theory of comparative institutional advantage.
June 1, 2007... Think of a bumblebee. With its overly heavy body and little wings, supposedly it should not be able to fly--but it does.... This is how so-called analysts view the Swedish economy. We 'defy gravity.' We have high taxes and a large public...

Institutional change in post-socialist regimes: public policy and beyond.
June 1, 2007... Kuznetsov and Kuznetsova (2003) advance the argument that post-socialist institutional settings are transitory. Drawing upon the ideas of new institutionalists, particularly Douglas North (1997), they suggest that these transient institutions...

The hospital industry: the consequences of the reforms in Eastern Germany.
June 1, 2007... The health care system in Eastern Germany was set up after the Second World War (WWII) based on the traditions of social hygiene of the Weimar Republic health system; on the "Beveridge" systems of social security; and, especially on that of...

Impact of ideology on institutional solutions addressing women's role in the labor market in Poland.
June 1, 2007... It is often stressed in economic papers that modern industrial and post-industrial societies are organized according to economic rationality, and the role of allocation is the most important one. If this were true, the participation rate of men...

The global spread of AIDS and HIV.(Report)
June 1, 2007... Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) emerged on the global scene in the early 1980s, and since then has become one of the critical factors affecting human well-being. Globally it kills over 3 million...

The transition from planning to markets in national health policy for acute care hospitals: the Pittsburgh experience.
June 1, 2007... "I can finally lay to rest the Federal health planning authorities. I have sought their repeal since I assumed office. These authorities, while perhaps well-intentioned when enacted in the 1970's, have only served to insert the Federal...

Economic institutions under disaster situations: the case of Hurricane Katrina.
June 1, 2007... Hurricane Katrina represented the "perfect storm." The storm stranded approximately 100,000 people for five days without access to adequate food, water, or shelter; inundated 200,000 homes; displaced 500,000 people; caused $200 billion in...

Can the Fed target inflation? Toward an institutionalist approach.
June 1, 2007... This paper provides a framework for Institutionalist analysis of the determinants of inflation and inflation targeting policies based upon principles in F. Gregory Hayden's book, Policymaking for a Good Society (2006). Theoretical...

Institutional adjustment planning for full employment.(Employer of Last Resort)
June 1, 2007... The idea of government as the Employer of Last Resort (ELR) has been present in the Institutionalist literature since the early twentieth century. In 1919, well before Keynes recognized that capitalist economies lack an inherent mechanism to...

Improving financial stability: uncertainty versus imperfection.
June 1, 2007... For most contemporary economists, financial instability is an exceptional event that results from exogenous shocks, market imperfections, and/or price instability. Thus, in order to have financial stability, we should promote market mechanisms...

Should the Oracle have a moral compass? Social justice and recent Federal Reserve policy.(Alan Greenspan of Federal Reserve Board policies)
June 1, 2007... Given his popular image as the "maestro" of monetary policy, it is unsurprising that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's retirement in January 2006 provided the occasion for scholars to assess the Fed's performance during his term of...

Non-Trade Concerns in agricultural and environmental economics: how J.R. Commons and Karl Polanyi can help us.
June 1, 2007... Some of conflict around agriculture in the World Trade Organization (WTO) is focused on Non Trade Concerns (NTCs). In the first section of this paper, we present how the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) connects...

European contributions to evolutionary institutional economics: the cases of 'cumulative circular causation' (CCC) and 'open systems approach' (OSA). Some methodological and policy implications.
June 1, 2007... This paper reconsiders the pioneering contributions to evolutionary institutional economics (EIE) by the European institutionalists Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Gunnar Myrdal, and Karl William Kapp, namely the conception of circular cumulative...

Toward a political institutionalist economics: Kapp's Social Costs, Lowe's Instrumental Analysis, and the European institutionalist approach to environmental policy.
June 1, 2007... This paper proposes that K. William Kapp's "Theory of Social Costs" and Adolph Lowe's "Instrumental Analysis" are complementary analytical frameworks that contribute to the formation of a unique and practical approach to institutionalist...

Minimizing missed opportunities: a new model of choice?(neoclassical theory)
June 1, 2007... Key axioms of the "hard core" of neoclassical theory suggest that there is a solid link between the model of rational choice and the existence of unique, stable and Pareto-efficient market equilibrium. The task of this article consists of...

Revisiting institutionalist law and economics--the inadequacy of the Chicago school: the case of personal bankruptcy law.
June 1, 2007... "Bankruptcy is perhaps the greatest and most humiliating calamity which can befall an innocent man" --Adam Smith From an evolutionary perspective, bankruptcies may be seen as an important selection mechanism. Bankruptcy, however, has...

Credit card use and abuse: a Veblenian analysis.
June 1, 2007... There is an overwhelming amount of consumer credit card debt in the United States. Revolving credit card debt is close to $900 billion, and has increased at an average annual rate of almost nine percent over the past ten years. The average...

Deficits and institutional theorizing about households and the state.
June 1, 2007... In a pecuniary economy, households' spending is limited by the stock of state money and the flow of income received in the form of state money. Thus, households are subject to liquidity constraint as they incur debts in the established unit of...

Need or want: what explains the run-up in consumer debt?
June 1, 2007... The past few years have been marked by a record run-up in consumer debt. Total household debt grew more than four times faster between March 2001 and the middle of 2006 than it did in the 1990s. This rise in consumer debt occurred against...

Capital, power and knowledge according to Thorstein Veblen: reinterpreting the knowledge-based economy.
June 1, 2007... What is "New" in the New Economy? In recent technological transformations, due to the production and diffusion of information and communication technologies, many economists perceive a radical transformation in the nature of capital and the...

The consequences of peace: Veblen on proper policy to support capitalist economic relations.(Thorstein Veblen)
June 1, 2007... Thorstein Veblen generally shied from directly professing policy recommendations. His concerns lay mainly in the development of theory that would assist in the understanding of the workings of a capitalist economy. But, Veblen clearly...

Constitutional economics and its policy agenda: a Veblen-inspired critique.(Thorstein Veblen)
June 1, 2007... The paper develops a Veblen-inspired critique of the foundations of constitutional economics. The paper also discusses a key aspect of its policy agenda. In recent years, that agenda has focused on tax and expenditure limitations, which are...

Veblen's Theory of Business Enterprise and Keynes's monetary theory of production.(Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes )
June 1, 2007... It has long been recognized that Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes share a common approach to the nature of "business enterprise" or "monetary production" in the modern capitalist economy (Dillard 1948; Dowd 1964). Keynes's most...