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Heterodox economics emerged because of dissatisfaction with the high level of abstraction of neoclassical economics and its excessive reliance on mathematical modelling. Instead of ontological and epistemological references to the natural sciences, heterodox economists turn their attention to the social sciences and biology. The article aims to contribute to the discussion of methodology of heterodox economics and original institutionalism in particular. It explores the potential of content analysis for empirically oriented research in heterodox economics. Content analysis is widely used in the social sciences (sociology, linguistics, political sciences, legal studies) to analyze qualitative data (texts, images, videos) but is relatively unknown to heterodox economists. Content analysis takes several forms: qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. It is argued that content analysis is not only compatible with the methodology of heterodox economics through critical realism but has a potential to contribute to its further development. With the help of content analysis, heterodox economists would be better equipped to collect and process qualitative data that prevail in social realms. A content analysis of a sample of articles published in Journal of Economic Issues (N = 763) in 1967–1969 and 2010–2019 informs the discussion of applications of content analysis to heterodox economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of 'opportunity cost' has been neglected in economics. The reason is that any such measure of cost is invisible, unobservable, and untestable. Yet the so-called 'competitive ideal' in neoclassical theory is based on claims of decreasing returns and substitutional tradeoffs in production, consumption, and social relations, and therewith an exclusive focus on scarcity in economics. Within this view, collusion is suspect: it raises prices, reduces sales, and so harms social welfare. This is the baseline emphasis of neoclassical microeconomic theory. The opportunity costs of this framework involve a significant loss of perspective on actual economic phenomena, the potential value of which may far exceed that of orthodoxy. The unbounded character of economic effects suggests an analytical bound derived from our rational limits, since we cannot see the full range of outcomes stemming from our decisions: planning horizons so enter this scene. The paper describes the horizonal theory that would have emerged from the 1930s debates on cost had Hicks not walked away from increasing returns and had Hirshleifer not promoted a false 'rescue' endorsed by Alchian in 1968, declaring decreasing returns 'a general and universally valid law.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we have analyzed the sensitivity of the aggregate volume of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) in Brazil to fluctuations (shocks) in the Economic Uncertainty level from 2010 to 2021 under behavioral and neoclassical theoretical foundations on the M&A causes. We estimated a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model with the volume of M&A announcements, the Brazil Economic Uncertainty Index (IIE-Br), and macroeconomic and market variables. There is evidence that the M&A announcements in Brazil can respond positively to an economic uncertainty shock. Thus, we contribute with empirical evidence to understand the role of macroeconomic factors, including economic uncertainty, in the future conduct of the M&A market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sought to reinterpret the Keynesians and Neoclassical growth models in the Zimbabwe context. The study adopted an Error Correction Model for estimating annual time series data for the period 1990 to 2020. Out of the five growth models examined, the results of the study confirmed a positive relationship between real GDP and the Harrod-Domar, Solow, Schumpeter and Nurkse growth models, with Lewis growth model exhibiting an inverse relationship, contrary to the positive relationship that underpins the model. The study, recommend the need for the government of Zimbabwe to come up with policies that enhances the attraction of Foreign Direct Investment which could enhance the growth of fixed capital formation. There is also need for revitalization of the industrial sector given that it is operating below capacity as suggested by the study results. The government of Zimbabwe should continue supporting the agricultural sector through its Command agricultural and Pfumvudza initiatives as this would spur agricultural exports, which are key for growth. The government of Zimbabwe should also come up with initiates that enhances innovation, through making budgets for research and development, and enacting laws that govern patents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catholic social teaching (CST) is a rich and relevant source for studying contemporary problems in society. In this paper, I investigate the question of equal pay from a CST perspective. There has been increasing interest in equal pay and related concepts such as universal basic income over the last decade. Equal pay means that everyone in society receives the same remuneration regardless of the type of work, level of effort, or employment status. From an economic point of view, there are substantial negative-incentivizing effects with such an arrangement, as the principle of "equal pay for all" breaks the relationship between workers' efforts and the payment associated with those efforts. Furthermore, neo-classical economics postulates that there is no incentive to work if there is no financial payoff. From a CST perspective, there is no support for an "equal pay for all" arrangement; however, CST sheds essential light on the meaning of work and the right to a living wage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author honors professor Peter Gerhart's legacy to the legal academy by his books on unified theory of several different areas of law including "Tort Law and Social Morality," "Property Law and Social Morality," and "Contract Law and Social Morality." Topics discussed include tension between scholarship in the tradition of neoclassical economics and its progressive counterpart, dyad that characterizes most contemporary property scholarship and contemporary property theory.

It is often argued that Richard Nelson and Sydney Winter's evolutionary theory is an alternative to neoclassical economics and is compatible with or complementary to Veblenian evolutionary economics. This article subjects such arguments to critical examination. I argue that while Nelson and Winter's theory provides a more realistic account of the firm behavior than Marshallian-neoclassical theory does, it is a neoclassical evolutionary theory in much the same sense as Marshall's economics is quasi-evolutionary, "neo-classical" economics according to Veblen. Therefore, Nelson and Winter's evolutionary theory is in fact a protective modification of neoclassical economics and is antithetical to Veblen's evolutionary economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the work of Professor Svetozar (Steve) Pejovich, focusing on his research on property rights, capitalism, socialism, and freedom. Pejovich argued that property rights are essential for organizing production and distribution, and he compared the differences between capitalist and socialist systems. The text emphasizes the importance of private property and the ability to exchange ownership rights. It also examines the impact of property rights on labor-managed firms in Communist Yugoslavia, highlighting the hindrance of economic calculation and pricing due to the inability to exchange ownership claims. The article concludes by discussing the emergence of "liberal socialism" and arguing that socialism, in any form, is incompatible with liberalism and democracy. [Extracted from the article]

In this article, we examine the notion of well-being in light of the relationship between positive and normative economics. Having identified four interrelationships between possible theoretical developments within the two fields, we propose a framework for the analysis of normative economic theories. The starting point for these considerations were competing stances on well-being proposed by neoclassical welfare economics, Robert Sugden, Amartya Sen, and Daniel Hausman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

He was highly critical of the ideological structure behind capitalism with liberalism putting property over people (Losurdo [35]; Henry [27]) and neoclassical economics being one, among other, frauds used to justify the capitalist socio-economic order (Henry [12]). I Erik Olsen i Recollections of John F. Henry I first encountered John in an Economics of Racism class at California State University-Sacramento in the summer of 1976. If one bases their analysis on social foundations, John argues, an ensuing theory cannot be natural, normal, and universal (which are the characteristics of neoclassical economics that John considered the "illusion" of our epoch). A festschrift in Dr. Henry's honor, I Marx, Veblen, and the Foundations of Heterodox Economics: Essays in Honor of John F. Henry i , was published in 2015 (Jo and Lee [31]). In particular, I'm thinking of John's essay on Keynes as a Neoliberal (Henry [30]) and a piece on Frank Knight, "Ethics and Economic Theory" (Henry, unpublished manuscript). [Extracted from the article]

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a rethink of many areas of our society. Financial education should be no exception. Based on the assumptions of 20th century neoclassical economics, and not catering for cultural, social and ecological considerations in our purchasing decisions, the New Zealand offering of resources to teach financial wellbeing are lacking in several key areas. I expose the gaps in the current approach by discussing the financial reality for many people in New Zealand. I propose three reorientations towards financial education based on 1) changes to people's current financial situations and financial prospects; 2) changes to our understanding of the importance of ecological and social factors in purchasing decisions, and the role of cultural factors in access to financial products; and finally, 3) developments in our knowledge of how we make decisions. I conclude that a new set of assumptions should be adopted, and that educators commit to preparing our young people for a future of both financial instability and change, and financial wellbeing and success, encouraging them to define their own success measures individually and in their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the causal effect of education on time preference. To define our measure of time preference, we use responses to hypothetical questions involving intertemporal trade-offs from the Indonesian Family Life Survey. We instrument years of education with exposure to the Indonesian INPRES primary school construction program of the 1970s that caused exogenous variations in the cost of going to school. The local average treatment effect of the program was a 9 percentage point decrease in the probability of a female respondent choosing the most impatient response for every additional year of schooling. The results are robust to alternative definitions of the time preference measures but sensitive to changes in samples and specifications. The findings add to the evidence on the endogeneity of individual preference parameters that are often taken to be constant in neoclassical economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The institution of private property forms the basis for ecological disaster. The profit-seeking of the vested interests, in conjunction with their modes of valuing nature through the apparatuses of neoclassical economics and neoliberalism proceed to degrade and destroy life on Earth. I assert that the radical, or original institutional economics (OIE) of Thorstein Veblen, further advanced by William Dugger, have crucial insights to offer the interdisciplinary fields of political ecology and ecological economics which seek to address the underlying causes and emergent complications of the unfolding, interconnected, social, and ecological crises that define our age. This inquiry will attempt to address what appears to be either overlooked or under-explored in these research communities. Namely, that the usurpation of society's surplus production, or, the accumulation of capital, is a parasite that sustains itself not only through the exploitation of human labor, but by exploiting society and nature more broadly, resulting in the deterioration of life itself. I shall argue that the transformation of the obvious predator that pursues power through pecuniary gain into a parasite, undetected by its host, is realized in its most rapacious form in the global hegemonic system of neoliberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs that Mainstream economic thought has supported the idea of capital accumulating economies having imperfections that can be corrected by finding the right price, which include value the environment to claim price in the market place.

Two leading schools of thought among U.S. conservative legal elites-Law and Economics (L&E) and Originalism and Textualism (O&T)--both purport to use their formalist structures to guide analysis in ways that are objective, substantially determinate, and apolitical. Because they rest on very different theoretical underpinnings, L&E and O&T should only randomly reach similar policy or legal conclusions. After all, L&E implements neoclassical economics, a theory of utility maximization, whereas O&T is a theory of semantics. Yet as practiced, L&E and O&T rarely result in conflict. What explains the missing intra-conservative clash? Despite their respective pretenses to objectivity, determinacy, and political neutrality, neither theory delivers on its promises. Economic efficiency, the linchpin of L&E, is incoherent because it relies on typically hidden but ultimately normative assumptions about preferences that would exist in an impossible world without law. O&T as it has been refined in response to devastating criticisms of earlier versions is indistinguishable from ostensibly less determinate rivals like Living Constitutionalism and purposivism. Accordingly, conservatives use L&E and O&T to obscure the role of normative priors, perhaps even from themselves. Liberals could use the same techniques for different results but heretofore generally have not, instead mostly settling for counterpunching against charges of resultorientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compare the high degree of inequality in the Nordic countries to three countries with much lower Gini coefficients, which means a more equal distribution of wealth: Japan (0.631), Australia (0.658), and Italy (0.689). Land Value as Location Value Even though land is a free gift of nature, there is plenty of land where the location value is negative. That needs to be emphasized because it is so rarely understood: location has value relationally, which means that land in a city has value I only i because of the value contributed by surrounding activity. While it is possible that high marginal income tax rates and more public services might move society in the direction of greater wealth equality, the high Gini numbers for Nordic countries indicate that that policy direction is inadequate. [Extracted from the article]

Since the economic reforms of the 1970s, local Chinese urban authorities have requisitioned rural land near cities. To protect their land from these practices, many urban village collectives have established a cooperative shareholding system, but their motives remain unclear. Neoclassical economics suggests that such enterprises seek to maximize profits. Guided by the original institutional‐economics approach, I investigate this question empirically by interviewing residents of Mengke village in Chaoyang city, Liaoning Province, northeast China. These data reveal four startling findings about the motives behind the shareholding system. First, collective economic organizations do not simply seek the maximization of profit. Second, the shareholding cooperative system adopted by village collectives helps villagers resist external threats such as land loss. Third, the collective economic organization is not merely a firm or a single market; it may work as a firm and a market simultaneously. Finally, managing of common property contributes to maintaining the identity of the collective. These findings suggest that the theories of neoclassical urban economics and new institutional economics fundamentally mischaracterize urban cooperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most crucial discussions within water resource management is the debate between those who defend the concept of economic efficiency and those who privilege notions of social equity. This tension is located at the core of binary categories that currently constitute the public debate within comparative water law and policy. These categories are commodity/human right, private property/common property, free-market/state regulation, and market value/community value. This paper explores this tension by studying how neoclassical economics understands efficiency and tracing its rise as a key hegemonic principle for water resource management. I also present equity as a conceptual opposition to efficiency and describe its institutionalization through the human-right-to-water frame. A problematization of both the equity approach and the human-right-to-water frame follows. Finally, I propose a political ecology approach to better understand the tension between efficiency and equity and offer recommendations for informing the water research agenda on efficiency/equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These growth rates in turn are estimated by measuring their respective Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Published by the Princeton University Press in 2014, this book ' GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History' written by Diane Coyle is a seminal work that helps understand how GDP has played a pivotal role throughout the last century in reorganizing the global economic and political relations. The book gains its authenticity not only by providing a consciousness on the discursive power of GDP, but also through historicising the GDP with its subjective and context dependent nature against universalising GDP as the ultimate measure of social welfare. [Extracted from the article]

This article outlines principles of a modernised macroeconomic framework, drawing on John Maynard Keynes. It explores the historical context in which Keynes' economic theory arose, and the history of its application and subsequent replacement by neoclassical economics. The article argues that any updated Keynesian programme must address three new problems: globalization, wealth inequality and climate change. It sketches out the ways in which these might be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Iberian Journal of the History of Economic Thought is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Table of Contents 1 How Financial Markets Actually Work 2 How Humans Actually Behave 3 A New Theory of Firm 4 Recurring Themes 5 The Many Issues with Shareholder Primacy 6 Model Specifications 7 Externalization Machine 8 Compounding Effects of Financialization 9 A Final Challenge to Shareholder Primacy Advocates 10 In Memoriam References The Corporate Issue: A Tribute to Lynn Stout1. But, knowing the firm can be sold out from under them, other participants in the firm, such as employees, will resist investing in firm-specific knowledge and skills since they would lose their firm-specific investments in case of the firm sale. Lynn and I also appreciated right away that this was a new "theory of the firm", which emphasizes the lateral interactions and firm-specific investments among employees as sources of value, rather than top-down control, and de-emphasizes the "agency cost" problem between directors and shareholders that so dominates corporate law scholarship. If the firm doesn't pay for using up some of "nature's CO SB 2 sb absorption capacity" the implicit cost is imposed on the community of interests that make up the firm, or completely externalized onto parties who have no other connection to the firm at all. [Extracted from the article]

Richard Langlois supports the contribution of New Institutional Economics (NIE) to Economics, contrasting the following assertions: (i) Original Institutional Economics (OIE) wanted institutions but without theory; (ii) Neoclassical Economics (NE) wants an economic theory without institutions; and (iii) NIE wants both institutions and theory. This article uses the approach of Critical Realism with the aim of counteracting the suggestions of Langlois, who considers the advances of institutionalist schools by contrasting the theoretical (scientific) and anti-theoretical (naive empiricism) institutionalism. Instead of sustaining a criterion of scientificity founded on the assumption of a world composed of isolated and atomized events, Critical Realism treats the real unity of human activity and social structure as a condition of knowledge in the social domain. This implies the adoption of a structured ontology that deals with the opening of social systems, the existence of emerging phenomena, and the rejection of the notion of cause as a constant conjunction of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Diversity is a gradual property for cataloging homogeneous / heterogeneous cases. • Diversity is a productive, structural component to consider for policy making. • Carbon pricing policy needs to take diversity into account ex-ante in its design. • Mathematical optimization theorems cannot prove uniform pricing is superior. • Bottom-up, specific financial incentives substitute for top-down, uniform carbon pricing. Real economies and societies are diverse. Applied economics responds to diversity by a variety in technologies, institutions, products, policies, for meeting the demands of differentiated actors. Nevertheless, neoclassical economics states that climate change can be regulated most efficiently by installing a global uniform carbon price. This position is based on many assumptions, such as full substitutability, negligible transaction costs, and boundless scale economies. However, diversity is relevant for designing well functioning carbon pricing policies. Diversity is a gradual property for cataloging homogeneous and heterogeneous cases. When categories are incompatible, substitutability is problematic, and transaction costs are high, respecting diversity is beneficial, not costly. Negating heterogeneity (strong diversity) by applying uniform approaches triggers subsequent remedial ad-hoc policies to anyhow address relevant differences. Ex-ante consideration of diversity prevents the flaws of remedial policies. By opting for diverse, case specific financial incentives, economics would well partner with other social sciences in search for realistic, effective, efficient and just climate policies. The global uniform carbon price is a theoretical concept, unlikely to ever be realized, hence escaping decisive assessment of its actual performance. We suggest a substitute indicator for UNFCCC monitoring of countries' efforts to financially incentivize climate actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art's status as a self-legislating artefact, Brown argues, is diametrically opposed to the commodity, which gains its meaning and value not through its internal qualities, but rather through its satisfaction of external ends: namely the desires of the consumer. If Brown's argument was simply that all art needs to have some aspect of conscious engagement of form, or if the book simply set out to establish which elite, anglo-American artforms and which popular cultural artefacts are art and which mere entertainment, that would be one thing. But that is not the book's claim; instead, Autonomy is resolute in its claim that politically committed art is not only not art, but a mere commodity (no different than a Park Slope Co-op bag he puts it slyly). Part of the excitement of Brown's book comes from its claim that mass cultural forms such as genre fiction, tv shows, and popular films can also achieve autonomy through a process Brown describes as the "aestheticization of genre" (25). [Extracted from the article]

The mainstream or neoclassical economics view that labor is rewarded according to its productivity has been extended to managers and management teams as justification for the levels of compensation that they receive. Additionally, the management concept of "span of management" or "span of control" has been used to explain the total number of and per employee number of managers in any organization along with the assumption that the appropriate span of management is where the marginal productivity of the last manager employed should equal his/her marginal cost, or wage. Or, at least, this is supposed to be the case in competitive industries in the short run, or in all industries in the long run. On the other hand, heterodox economists hold different views of the roles and purposes of managers within organizations and attempt to explain these through either the view of managers exploiting workers on behalf of owners or the view of managers exploiting both workers and owners in order to advance their own agendas. This article examines managerial compensation and intensity from both traditional/mainstream and alternative views (mostly using David Gordon's theory of a "bureaucratic burden" existing in most U.S. industries). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As I have argued elsewhere, there is no room for the concept of need in the prevailing neoclassical school of economics—without reducing the need to a purely subjective construct. Not so, however, both in classical political economy and in the contemporary heterodox schools of economics. The main aim of this paper is, firstly, to show the existence of the concept of need as such in Carl Menger—widely acknowledged as one of the fathers of modern economics; and secondly, to trace the concept's erasure in the orthodox school along with its rediscovery in the heterodox schools. With this exposition on the history of the idea, I hope to demonstrate how taking the concept seriously would urge us to engage ontological research and would mandate a significant change in economic analysis, regardless of whether this change is considered to reside within the orthodox tradition or be deemed a departure to heterodoxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of economic thought are paying greater attention to issues of social ontology (i.e. to the assumptions that economists make about the nature of social reality). We contribute to this burgeoning literature by exploring the hitherto neglected way in which James Buchanan invoked ontological considerations, concerning in particular the nature of human choice, both in criticising neoclassical economics and also in setting out his own contributions to constitutional political economy. We focus on Buchanan's account of man as an artifactual being who has the capacity to choose the kind of person he wishes to become, in particular by selecting the kind of preferences he wishes to have and the kinds of rules under which he wishes to live. We discuss how Buchanan's thinking on this issue was shaped by Frank Knight and G. L. S. Shackle and explain why Buchanan explicitly described his argument as ontological in nature. Finally, we contend that Buchanan's approach would have benefited from further ontological elaboration, in two ways: first, because his arguments would have been stronger had he said more about the attributes of the human agent that help to secure their engagement in thinking creatively about themselves and the rules of society ('the constitutional moment'), and second because his account would benefit from a deeper discussion of the interplay between human agency and social structure, especially with regard to the question of which structures might constrain or facilitate creative choices of the kind by which he set such great store. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on classical economics. Topics include that the neoclassical mathematical theory of value culminated in Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu's model characterizes the static general equilibrium state of an economy; and that the principle of individual utility maximization has no interesting implication for aggregate market demand.

Copyright of Economic & Business Review is the property of Economic & Business Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Homelessness and housing insecurity in the United States are not so much a housing problem or a poverty problem as a visible sign that growing wealth inequality has left millions of people unable to earn enough to afford adequate housing. The classical economists David Ricardo and Henry George linked wealth inequality by arbitrage to unequal income and wages. The greater the inequality of wealth, the greater the inequality of income and the lower the wages at the bottom. Neoclassical economics has largely obscured this relationship. Consequently, proposals from both conservatives and liberals to address homelessness focus narrowly on housing. Ultimately, reducing wealth inequality requires national tax reform and a return to vigorous antitrust enforcement. However, cities can reduce local inequality by making property tax assessments uniform, or, better yet, by shifting to taxing land only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Confucian doctrine of the Mean teaches that too much is as bad as too little. The Aristotelian doctrine of the Mean coincidently articulates that there can be too much or too little of nearly every human passion and action. In neoclassical economics, it is assumed that people tend to take any action at the optimal (not too much and not too little) level to maximise the net happiness from the action. This article argues that the Confucian doctrine of the Mean concurs with the optimality principle, and therefore that the optimality principle is a representation of human nature and can be understood as universal human wisdom. It follows that people can adopt both the Confucian doctrine of the Mean and the optimality principle as worldly common wisdom beyond the blunt dichotomy of spiritual orientalism and materialistic individualism. Too much emphasis on the technical differentials between the two has undermined the common wisdom embedded in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on neoclassical economic theory and the realities of individual decision-making described by behavioral economics to begin to grapple with the complex problem and people enroll in health insurance policies. It mentions repeal will have a negative impact on the insurance markets and negative implications of decreased health insurance enrollment, beyond just the instability that healthy people leaving insurance markets will cause.