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In 1912 Guillermo Subercaseaux (1872–1959), a professor of economics at the University of Chile, published El Papel Moneda, translated into French in 1920 as Le Papier-Monnaie. The paper provides a full treatment of Subercaseaux’s interpretation of the working of paper-money economies, including his approach to the determination of the exchange rate of depreciated currencies and his views about the problem posed by the existence of a positive value of inconvertible paper money. We investigate how his framework was related to classic contributions by Adolph Wagner (1868), Carlo Ferraris (1879), and Wesley C. Mitchell (1903, 1908). We also deal with the background formed by the South American debates between ‘papeleros’ and ‘oreros’ (paper-money and gold-standard supporters) at the time. The paper offers an investigation of an aspect of the international transmission of economic ideas, this time from the periphery to the center. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Noting limited attention by international development agencies to inequalities compared to global poverty, we ask how these two challenges have been framed in agencies’ policy publications during the past several decades. Following a recent application of algorithmic analysis to health policy narratives in the UK, we use text-mining software to compare the frequency of two alternative conceptualisations of poverty and inequality in three different document categories: the World Bank's World Development Reports, the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Reports and a set of white papers by bilateral donor agencies. In a second step, we visualise each document's degree of contextual similarity in using the two conceptualisations of poverty and inequality with all documents in the same source category. We find that while references to poverty have, on average, been twice as prominent as references to inequality, conceptualisations of poverty and inequality as well as the textual contexts in which they appear differ both temporally and substantively between agencies included in our sample. We show how such agency-specific framing patterns can be leveraged politically to forge more effective social policy coalitions. We also outline follow-up research capable of capturing the politics of language underpinning our observations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As long as all interest rates move in tandem – including the rate of return on paper currency – economic theory suggests no important difference between interest rate changes in the positive region and interest rate changes in the negative region. Indeed, in standard models, only the real interest rate and spreads between real interest rates matter. Thus, in most respects, negative interest rate policy is conventional. It is only (a) what needs to be done with paper currency, (b) difficulties in understanding negative rates or (c) institutional features interacting with negative rates that make negative interest rate policy unconventional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the 1962 paper "On Walras's Theory of Capital," by Pierangelo Garegnani.

The article presents abstracts of papers discussed at the annual meeting of the History of Economics Society (HES) held at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville from May 23 to 26, 1983 including a convex and upward sloping aggregate supply function envisioned by economist J. M. Keynes, transformation in the views of Banking School co-founder Thomas Tooke, and the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH).

Climate change is considered to be one of the most significant and complex challenges facing the world in the twenty-first century. As such, it is essential to increase the knowledge base regarding climate change and how best to address its impacts through efficient policies. This special issue, which is divided into two parts – published in the previous and current issues of Environment and Development Economics – is a selection of papers related to 'The Economics of Climate Change and Sustainability', the topic of an international workshop organized by the Economics Department of the University of Bologna in April 2018. The papers in this special issue cover a wide range of climate-change-related topics, including endogenous growth and overlapping generation models; climate-related financing and green bonds; demography; location decisions and technology diffusion; quantitative relationships and experimental approaches. They aim at providing new insights into the economics of climate change and help to identify new directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper treats the economy of controlling an African pest rodent, the multimammate rat, causing major damage in maize production. An ecological population model is presented and used as a basis for the economic analyses carried out at the village level using data from Tanzania. This model incorporates both density-dependent and density-independent (stochastic) factors. Rodents are controlled by applying poison, and the costs are made up of the cost of poison plus the damage to maize production. We analyse how the present-value costs of maize production are affected by various rodent control strategies, by varying the duration and timing of rodenticide application. Our numerical results suggest that it is economically beneficial to control the rodent population. In general, the most cost-effective duration of controlling the rodent population is 3–4 months every year, and especially at the end of the dry season/beginning of rainy season. The paper demonstrates that changing from today's practice of symptomatic treatment when heavy rodent damage is noticed to a practice where the calendar is emphasized, may substantially improve the economic conditions for the maize producing farmers. This main conclusion is highly robust and not much affected by changing prices of maize production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of papers presented at the annual meeting of the History of Economics Society held at the Columbia University in New York City on June 2-4, 1986, including "Nominal Wage Contracts and the Economics of Keynes," by S. Q. Lemche, "Why Bother With Methodology? A Critique of the Rhetoric of Economics,"by A. W. Coats and "Carl Menger's Conception of Economics As An Exact Science," by Uskali Maki.

Comments on several articles related to the influence of legal institutions on economic practice. Information on a mathematical model developed by authors William Landes and Lewis Solomon; Lack of historical research of the articles written by John McManus and Donald McCloskey.

This paper investigates the effects of pollution taxation for a dual developing economy with a separate abatement sector. Due to the real rigidity of the urban wage, pollution taxes raise the cost of the urban good and hence its relative price. This suggests that because of flexible rural wages, the developing economy tends to have a comparative advantage in the rural good which may be less polluting. Moreover, the higher price of the urban good worsens the urban unemployment ratio. The optimal tax on pollution is thus lower than the marginal environmental damage to the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic instruments offer the potential to reach pre-determined environmental goals at a lower aggregate cost than less incentive-based measures, but administrative underpinnings crucial to the effective functioning of economic instruments may be lacking in developing countries. For this reason, pragmatic analysts and policymakers often advocate the use of so-called ‘mixed’ instruments that combine incentive mechanisms with improved administrative arrangements. This paper explores such possibilities with reference to intensive shrimp aquaculture, which dominates shrimp farming and is an important economic sector in Thailand. This activity has been cited as a major contributor to environmental degradation in Thailand and several other countries through destruction of mangrove forests, salinization of land, sludge disposal, and, in particular, water pollution. An analytical model is presented that highlights some of the key opportunities and limitations of mixed instruments applied to shrimp aquaculture. Mixed instruments are then proposed and evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses provincial macro-data from the mid 1980s onwards to investigate the determinants of land-use choice in rural China, by paying particular attention to the decision to plant trees as competing with agriculture. The evidence supports the importance of economic motivations in the afforestation decision. A profit-seeking behavior is found to be at stake in the decision to plant trees, which is made according to both the relative profitability of forestry against agriculture, and their relative risks. Afforestation is also found to strongly depend on the pressure upon land as well as on household wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of research in economic history, including "Original Sin, Good Housekeeping and Empire: The Relation Between Currency Risk and Default Risk," "Clio and the Economics of International Currencies" and "How Much Did the U.S. Government Value its Troops' Lives in World War II?: Evidence From Dollar-Fatality Tradeoffs in Land Battles."

The article offers several abstracts on economics topics presented at the annual meeting of the History of Economics Society in April 1980, including liberalism and economics in the Habsburg monarchy, the origin of French economic liberalism, and the history of economic liberalism in Italy in 1800-1850.

Comments on the articles published in the March 1971 issue of the `Journal of Economic History,' which deal with economic development. Differences of Olmstead's papers from Davis and Payne; Role of New York City's mutual banks as investors.

Comments on several articles about the mechanisms for discrimination in a market economy and the economic basis for sharecropping. Relationship between market incentives and racism; Economic and racial structure of public policies.

Comments on several articles related to trade and imperialism. Criticisms on the quantitative losses computed by author Scott Eddie for Hungary.

The article reports on the special issue on "Business Ethics Quarterly Special Issue on: Exploring Important Thinkers to Generate New Theory in Business Ethics" in which the editor discusses business ethics as a hybrid discipline built on the conceptual resources of several fields including moral and political philosophy, economics and social psychology. It states that the editorial team seeks papers that demonstrate how a well-known thinker in a field can contribute to business ethics.

Climate change is one of the most significant and complex challenges facing the world's economies. The necessity to enlarge the knowledge base regarding climate change and its impacts and to design efficient policies is widely accepted by the scientific community, the decision makers and the general public. This special issue, which will be published in two parts in the current and subsequent issue of Environment and Development Economics , is a selection of papers related to the topic of the international workshop on 'The Economics of Climate Change and Sustainability' organized by the Economics Department of the University of Bologna in April 2018. The papers in this special issue cover a wide range of climate-change-related topics, which include endogenous growth and overlapping generation models; climate-related financing and green bonds; demographics; location decisions; technology diffusion; quantitative relationships and experimental approaches. We hope that this special issue will provide some new insights into the economics of climate change and help to identify new directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the activities of Japan Society for the History of Economic Thought (HET) Society and 17 papers read at six meetings of four HET branches. The papers read include "John Millar on the formation of civil society," by Kaname Ohta, "British neo-liberalism and social reform," by Norio Ampo and "Ricardo's theory of wage," by Toshihisa Ikeda. Papers read and presented at the 1982 HET Japan annual meeting include "Michel Chevalier's views on the New World," by Takashi Ueno and "A.I. Gertsen on socialism," by Eiichi Hisen.

Conventional economic theory assumes that people care only about ultimate outcomes and are indifferent to the decision and allocation processes by which outcomes are brought about. Building on Sen (1997), I relax this assumption, and investigate the formal and philosophical issues that arise. I extend the formal apparatus of preference theory to analyse how processes may enter preferences, and investigate whether traditional invariance requirements like the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference are still satisfied in this new setting. I show that it is, provided certain conditions of separability hold, and I discuss the plausibility of these conditions. Further, I argue that processes are often valued in a mode that diverges from the conventional modes of instrumental and intrinsic/independent valuation. I introduce the notion of dependent non-instrumental valuation, and show how processes could depend on their instrumental function for their value – making their value dependent – and yet derive their value from something else – making it non-instrumental. Dependent non-instrumental value, I argue, can be explained by symbolic and evidential relations between processes and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on several articles about determining and measuring the viability of slave systems. Issues concerning slave systems; Relationship between the ratio of the price of slaves and reproduction costs.

This paper provides further evidence of the holiday effect in stock returns and additional insight into the effect. This paper reports abnormally high returns on the trading day before holidays in all three of the major stock markets in the U.S.: the NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ. The holiday effect is also present in the U.K. and Japanese stock markets, even though each country has different holidays and institutional arrangements. This study finds that the holiday effects in the U.K. and Japanese stock markets are independent of the holiday effect in the U.S. stock market. Unlike the other seasonal patterns in stock returns, such as January and weekend effects, this investigation of size decile portfolios shows that the size effect is not present in mean returns on preholidays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on articles about diffusion of technology. Information on the economic transformation of Manchuria, China; Economic and non-economic factors in technology diffusion.

This paper explores the history of the first economics film, made by Michael Polanyi. It traces the evolution of the film from the first idea to the latest version. It portrays Polanyi's motives for making the film, the contexts in which the film was embedded, and its perception by various individuals and communities. The paper demonstrates the novelty of both the content and the presentation of Polanyi's economic ideas through the eyes of his contemporaries. It discusses why it was important for Polanyi to make a film about the circulation of money and the principle of neutrality, and comments on what historiographers of economic thought might learn if they put a stronger emphasis on visual representations in their pursuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an abstract of a research paper entitled `Stasis Amid Change: Regional Income Inequality in Canada, 1870-1890,' by Kris Inwood, presented at the annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

The fact that equitable social policy expanded drastically in Latin America during the left turn and during a time of prosperity does not necessarily mean that the ideological color of governing parties and economic growth are the engines behind changes in social policy, as is usually claimed by part of the literature. Using panel data from Latin American countries for 1990–2013, this paper offers an alternative explanation, derived from previous qualitative research, that the level of political competition, the strength of civil society, and wealth are the key factors behind the expansion of equitable social policy. Once these explanations are included in our models, the ideological leaning of governments and economic growth lose statistical significance. Thus, this paper challenges dominant approaches that consider social policy change in Latin America a consequence of the ideological leaning of the government and economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clarence Ayres was a strong dissenting voice in US economics during the twentieth century. In the 1930s, a debate between Ayres and Frank Knight was published by the International Journal of Ethics. Although the debate focused on ethics, the evolution of economics was also discussed. This paper proposes an understanding of Ayres's ideas based on the context in which he made them. This context is defined by the 1930s Ayres-Knight debate and the archival correspondence between Ayres and Knight during the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argument: In this paper we comparatively explore three claims concerning the disciplinary character of economics by means of citation analysis. The three claims under study are: (1) economics exhibits strong forms of institutional stratification and, as a byproduct, a rather pronounced internal hierarchy; (2) economists strongly conform to institutional incentives; and (3) modern mainstream economics is a largely self-referential intellectual project mostly inaccessible to disciplinary or paradigmatic outsiders. The validity of these claims is assessed by means of an interdisciplinary comparison of citation patterns aiming to identify peculiar characteristics of economic discourse. In doing so, we emphasize that citation data can always be interpreted in different ways, thereby focusing on the contrast between a "cognitive" and an "evaluative" approach towards citation data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists' engagements with other disciplines--e.g., mathematics, statistics, operations research, physics, engineering, cybernetics--during and immediately after World War II. More controversially, some historians have also argued that the transformation was accelerated by economists' desires to be safe, to seek the protective coloration of mathematics and statistics, during the McCarthy period. This paper argues that that particular claim 1) is generally accepted, but 2) is unsupported by good evidence, and 3) what evidence there is suggests that the claim is false. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mean-field games (MFGs) and the best-reply strategy (BRS) are two methods of describing competitive optimisation of systems of interacting agents. The latter can be interpreted as an approximation of the respective MFG system. In this paper, we present an analysis and comparison of the two approaches in the stationary case. We provide novel existence and uniqueness results for the stationary boundary value problems related to the MFG and BRS formulations, and we present an analytical and numerical comparison of the two paradigms in some specific modelling situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent theoretical models derive return continuation in a setting where investors have heterogeneous beliefs or receive heterogeneous information. This paper tests the link between heterogeneity of beliefs and return continuation in the cross-section of U.S. stock returns. Heterogeneity of beliefs about a firm's fundamentals is measured by the dispersion in analyst forecasts of earnings. The results show that momentum profits are significantly larger for portfolios characterized by higher heterogeneity of beliefs. Predictive cross-sectional regressions show that heterogeneity of beliefs has a positive effect on return continuation after controlling for a stock's visibility, the speed of information diffusion, uncertainty about fundamentals, information precision, and volatility. The results in this paper are robust to the potential presence of short-sale constraints and are not explained by arbitrage risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on an essay written by Donald McCloskey about the achievements of economic history. Role of economic history in the development of quantitative facts in history; Difference of cliometrics with other schools of economic history.

This paper argues for two propositions. (I) Large asymmetries of power, status and influence exist between economists. These asymmetries constitute a hierarchy that is steeper than it could be and steeper than hierarchies in other disciplines. (II) This situation has potentially significant epistemic consequences. I collect data on the social organization of economics to show (I). I then argue that the hierarchy in economics heightens conservative selection biases, restricts criticism between economists and disincentivizes the development of novel research. These factors together constrain economics' capacity to develop new beliefs and reduce the likelihood that its outputs will be true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the bias associated with parametric measurement of timing skill based on monthly timer returns when timers can make daily timing decisions. Simulations suggest that the classic Henriksson-Merton parametric measure of timing skill is weak and biased downward when applied to the monthly returns of a daily timer. The paper proposes an adjustment that mitigates this problem without the need to collect daily timer returns. Four tests of timing skill, carried out on a sample of 558 mutual funds, show that very few funds exhibit statistically significant timing skill. More encompassing, the adjusted-FF3 test (based on the specification that incorporates both the proposed adjustment and the Fama-French three-factor model) is the least biased measure of timing skill among the four--it provides for a sharper inference regarding timing skill and helps mitigate biases associated with the choice of investment style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home equity represents a substantial share of retirement wealth for many older persons, particularly in Asia where national housing policies have encouraged home-ownership. This paper explored the potential for reverse mortgages to help 'asset-rich and cash-poor' older Singaporeans unlock their home equity while ageing in place. The empirical analysis was based on a nationally representative survey of home-owners age 50+ in the 2018 Singapore Life Panel (N = 6,258). Our analyses showed that the average older home-owner holds some 60 per cent of total net wealth in housing equity, suggestive of high demand potential for reverse mortgage products. Nevertheless, actual interest in such products was much below potential demand. Only one in four older home-owners indicated interest in commercial reverse mortgages if these were to become available; a larger majority had never heard of the financial product. Interest in reverse mortgages was positively associated with product awareness and self-rated product understanding. This implies that a critical step towards building consumer interest would be to enhance awareness of such products and simplify related contract terms. Having a mortgage, fewer children, financial literacy and preparedness for retirement were also positively associated with interest level. These results have implications for targeted interventions to enhance consumer awareness and spur interest in reverse mortgages, especially in ageing societies where older people have built up substantial equity through the housing market over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the introduction to the Macroeconomic Dynamics Special Issue on Measurement with Theory. The Guest Editors of the special issue are William A. Barnett, W. Erwin Diewert, Shigeru Iwata, and Arnold Zellner. The papers included are part of a larger initiative to promote measurement with theory in economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the December 2014 issue of Environment and Development Economics, we published the article, ‘The economic power of the Golden Rice opposition’ by Wesseler and Zilberman. The paper generated substantial interest, not only in academia but also among civil society groups. In this note, we address some of the concerns that have been raised about our results. Our main conclusion remains that misguided regulations in the case of Golden Rice have cost millions of healthy life years and billions of dollars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to contribute to the growing literature on resilience by focusing on coping with hardship during the Great Recession, drawing upon primary data gathered through household and key informant interviews in nine European countries. As the resilience approach highlights agency, the paper examines the nature of household responses to hardship during this period on the basis of the 'structure-agency problem'. An important contribution of this paper is to identify different forms of agency and discuss their implications. More specifically, we conceptualise three different types of agency in coping with hardship: absorptive, adaptive and transformative. Analysis of the findings indicates that structural constraints remain prominent. Most coping mechanisms fall under the category of absorptive and adaptive agency characterised here as burden-bearing actions that 'conform' to changing circumstances rather than shaping those circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]