Journal of Economic Issues articles from March 1995

Journal of Economic Issues archives from March 1995

A realist perspective on contemporary "economic theory."
March 1, 1995... that the transcendental realist perspective throws up. The essential point here is that while the traditional constant conjunction view of science entails the goal of control along with the amelioration of events and states of affairs, the...

Innovating-by-doing: skill innovation as a source of technological advance.
March 1, 1995... Technological advance often involves a mix of discrete innovations in products, machines, tools, organization, and skills. An extensive literature has investigated innovation in products, machines, tools, and organization [e.g., Schmookler 1966;...

Urban labor markets and young black men: a literature review.
March 1, 1995... Astonishingly high rates of black male joblessness characterize large northeastern cities in the United States today. Although widespread idleness among working-age men has long been a feature of ghetto life [Orfield 1992], the problem has...

Institutional changes in hospital nursing.
March 1, 1995... Throughout the 1980s, the efficiency of the health care delivery system in the United States appeared to be threatened by recurrent shortages of registered nurses (RNs). Concerns over these recurrent shortages led many economists and health care...

Longer waves in financial relations: financial factors in the more severe depressions II.
March 1, 1995... Moses Abramowitz, testifying in 1939 before the path-breaking hearings chaired by Senator Paul Douglas on "Employment, Growth and Price Levels," said "it is not yet known whether they (the long swings) are the result of some stable mechanism...

The limits of neoliberalism: toward a reformulation of development theory.
March 1, 1995... Neoliberalism, based on a public choice perspective, has established itself as the dominant paradigm in development theory during the past two decades. This paper challenges the neoliberal claim to provide a comprehensive understanding of...

C.A. Wiley and the integrated economy.
March 1, 1995... Two leading centers of institutional economics were the University of Wisconsin from the 1890s to mid-century and the University of Texas during the period 1930-1970. In the subfields of agricultural and land economics, Clarence Alton Wiley...

The Association for Evolutionary Economics and the Union for Radical Political Economics: general issues of continuity and integration.
March 1, 1995... This paper examines the link between themes and trends within the traditions of the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) and the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE). In more recent years, organizational developments have...

The independence of central banks: a nonconventional perspective.
March 1, 1995... Many nonconventional economists oppose the idea of the movement to a single currency with monetary policy administered by a European central bank, seeing as essential the retention of the exchange rate as an instrument for achieving a balance of...

The economist as mythmaker - Stigler's kinky transformation. (George Stigler)
March 1, 1995... period in the development of economic theory. A fine introduction to some of the debates of this period (1920s and 1930s) can be found in his book of the same name [1967]. For Stigler, this period might be more aptly labelled Years of Wrong...

The hidden barriers of occupational segregation.
March 1, 1995... The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that blacks comprise about 10 percent of the work force. Given that proportion, it is interesting to note that 30 percent of nursing aides are black; 29 percent of domestic servants are black; 25 percent of...

Private investment and democracy in the developing world.
March 1, 1995... The relationship between domestic politics and economic performance in developing countries has been the subject of a new wave of research by both economists and political scientists [Alesina and Rodrik 1991; Alesina et al. 1991; Frieden 1991;...

A handbook of economic neologisms.
March 1, 1995... The time required for the adoption of innovations in the organization of economics is directly proportional to their simplicity and utility. This is so trivial a statement as to be easily converted into a folk theorem (unlike the real folk...

Technological paradigms and strategic groups: putting competition into the definitions. (Notes and Communications)
March 1, 1995... The concept of the technological paradigm has become increasingly popular among Schumpeterian and evolutionary authors. In this note, I want to propose a new definition of this concept and to show how it can be applied to the study of strategic...

Economic Theory and Natural Philosophy: The Search for the Natural Laws of the Economy.
March 1, 1995... This slim volume evolved out of the author's dissertation [1989], written under the tutelage of Robert Heilbroner, who provides the book's Foreword. The author informs us that three of the eight chapters are from the dissertation (although he...

Economics Without Time: A Science Blind to the Forces of Historical Change.
March 1, 1995... This book argues that modern economics is lacking in empirical grounding, that too much attention is given to mathematical and purely deductive reasoning, and that economics is too narrowly focused in time. As a result, it lacks operational...

Learning and Technological Change.
March 1, 1995... In recent years, work that should be both interesting and useful to institutional economists has emerged from the related disciplines of business history and the economics of technological change. Despite bowdlerization of many of his ideas by...

History and Historians of Political Economy.
March 1, 1995... Werner Stark fled Czechoslovakia in 1939 for Cambridge, England. He spent the next five years in Cambridge studying the history of economic thought and laying the foundation for his contributions to the sociology of knowledge. During that time,...

U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776: Of, By, and For Which People.
March 1, 1995... U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776 presents a coherent view of U.S. economic development that uses both Marxist and Veblenian theory to analyze the historical data and present an explanation for rapid economic development. Dowd's central...

Inside the Volcano: The History and Political Economy of Central America.
March 1, 1995... Weaver's book is a slim but ambitious work that, in 250 pages of text, moves from the Spanish conquest to the present. Inside the Volcano appears in the aftermath of several important and comprehensive volumes of Central American [CA] scholarship...

The New American Workplace: Transforming Work Systems in the United States.
March 1, 1995... Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt have a simple message: the future success of both U.S. firms and our economy as a whole depends on America's ability to transform work (or production) systems that have become obsolete in recent decades. But...

Sustainable Development for a Democratic South Africa.
March 1, 1995... Mikhail Gorbachev liberated more than we often imagine. Not only did his reforms emancipate the citizenry of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, but his reach extended south of the Limpopo River. With the disappearance of the communist...

Arguing for Basic Income: Ethical Foundations for a Radical Reform.
March 1, 1995... The title of this volume accurately captures the essential theme. This is an edited collection of 13 chapters by 12 coauthors, all of whom present well-crafted essays arguing both for and against the policy prescription for a "basic income." In...

Dynamics of the Firm.
March 1, 1995... How can we develop a theory of the modern business firm? We can follow Alfred Marshall's lead and outline the cost and revenue changes that occur when output rises and falls. If we assume that at least one input factor is fixed in the short run,...

Silent Depression.
March 1, 1995... When faced with anomalous or incompatible information, economists frequently dismiss it as representing purely nominal phenomena, admonishing observers for failing to recognize the "real" phenomena that are hidden behind the veil of monetary...

New Perspectives in Monetary Macroeconomics: Explorations in the Tradition of Hyman P. Minsky.
March 1, 1995... This interesting and timely book builds from and further develops aspects of Hyman Minsky's numerous contributions to monetary macroeconomics. It is not a Festschrift. This has been done elsewhere by Fazzari and Papadimitriou [1992]. The...

The Elgar Companion to Radical Political Economy.
March 1, 1995... "Companions," as Edward Elgar publishes them, are selective encyclopedias of particular subjects, composed of signed entries on items of central relevance to the subject being treated. Such volumes are literally companions for a student of the...