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This article looks at 33 economics books that were published before 1750 and appeared in ten editions or more before 1850. This is a period – before Physiocracy and before the works of Adam Smith – which has been largely neglected in the history of economic thought. The article sheds new light on the early bestselling contributions of German and Italian economists, and on an internationally famous Spanish economist at the time. Also of interest is that three of the bestselling English economists of the period are so forgotten that they do not even have an entry in Wikipedia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the topic modeling technique known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a form of text-mining aiming at discovering the hidden (latent) thematic structure in large archives of documents. By applying LDA to the full text of the economics articles stored in the JSTOR database, we show how to construct a map of the discipline over time, and illustrate the potentialities of the technique for the study of the shifting structure of economics in a time of (possible) fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the subadditivity of costs and multiproduct production in large commercial banks in the United States. It is the aim of the article to contribute to economic literature centering around bank production efficiency. One of the ways the article contributes to the literature is that it analyzes a sample composed of banks of appreciably larger asset size than in analyzed in most previous bank cost studies. The result of this study reveals the production and product mix economies of larger banks. Several other contributions are also discussed in the article.

The article focuses on the role of purchasing power parity in theoretical and empirical research. The article also presents assertions on the martingale model of real exchange rate innovations. It is explained that the concept of purchasing power parity (PPP) has long played an important role in theoretical and empirical research. The article reports that the examination of the current empirical literature also suggests that the movements in foreign exchange risk premiums are unlikely to exactly balance the variations in ex ante real rate differentials.

This main point of this paper is that the functions of modern theories of financial market imperfections provide effective theoretical support for much of the less theoretical literature on the role and importance of financial institutions, and serve to rehabilitate many of the early growth models and the conclusions concerning economic development that arose out of the earlier literature. The first section of the paper defines the economic problems with which the financial institutions are concerned. The second shows the variety of ways with which modern economies address these problems. The third section explores the relationship between the financial constraints which arise out of the informational imperfections and the evolution of the firm.

This paper proposes a new definition of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis with respect to information, which is more formal and precise than those of Rubinstein [13], Fama [4], Jensen [6], and Beaver [1], and which fits well as a framework for interpreting the many tests of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis in the literature. Security markets are here considered "efficient with respect to information set " if and only if revealing to all agents would change neither equilibrium prices nor portfolios. In addition to other desirable features, this definition has the "subset property": efficiency with respect to implies efficiency with respect to any subset of . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a general equilibrium model with endogenous stochastic production and establishes that the equilibrium interest rate can he constant in a closed production economy when the preferences are represented by constant absolute risk aversion utility functions. The results in this paper and their limitations are compared and contrasted with related contributions in the financial economics literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical analysis of mergers has a great deal of significance independent of the fact that, when markets are perfect and in equilibrium, incentives for further merger activities are, by definition, exhausted temporarily. Two originally separated gases in a closed container will get mixed up and reach an equilibrirum state after one removes the partition. But that is hardly any reason for neglecting the investigation of how and why they get mixed up. It is in light of this observation that an attempt is made in the present article to reexamine a purely financial rationale for merger, which has already attracted a lot of attention in the finance literature. By drastically simplifying our considerations, we are able to arrive at three general conclusions on the basis of structured models. First, co-insurance, one of the many things that take place in a merger, has a cost and benefit structure to an equity class that can in principle be delineated. The pure cost of co-insurance to an equity class, if perceived, consists of that part of the expected residue used to subsidize the loan class of the other firm at the pre-coinsurance rate when default occurs in the latter. The pure benefit of co-insurance to an equity class is made possible by the concessions, if any, in contractual loan rates of both firms following the co-insurance. It is argued that the source of this benefit is a far cry from that resulting from preferential tax treatment of the allegedly enlarged "debt capacity" (however defined) of the participating firms. Second, residue redistribution effect in a merger must not be ignored. The simple but essential point is that it, again largely a matter of perception, may be regarded as working for or against the interest of a particular equity class. To that extent, therefore, any conclusion based on co-insurance effect alone is weakened. Third, to dispose of the misplaced emphasis on statistical correlation of revenues, it is reasoned that the really... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The description and theory of regulation have received a great deal of attention in the Economic Literature in recent years. Most of the literature dealing with regulation has been concerned with the impact of regulation on some particular aspect of firm behavior, usually in a single period setting. Little attention has been paid to the construction of a total model of the optimum financing, investment, and valuation of the firm under regulation. The purpose of this paper is to construct such a model which, in addition, captures the intertemporal interdependencies of optimum firm behavior. The model will be used to derive both the optimum behavior of a regulated firm over time and to show the impact of changes in the allowable rate of return (regulatory rate) on this behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces a general-purpose citation-indexing system for finance journals, with the primary objective of illustrating the cross-disciplinary impact of journals of finance. A brief historical overview of the growth of professional literature is presented, and it is suggested that writers of financial literature often use only a few sources in their research. The citation-indexing system introduced by the authors can assist researchers in bibliographic searches, identification of widely used finance journals, and the selection of appropriate journals for their needs.

The author discusses his views on the value of economic and finance literature as an aid to decision-making. He believes the literature tends to promote policies that are either impractical or informed by inadequate analysis, and that rigorous application of economic techniques to apparently solvable problems is limited. He also discerns too great a willingness on the part of writers to publish work of merely academic interest, without expending the effort to determine whether it is applicable to real-world problems, or how it can be made so. Three examples are detailed to illustrate his contentions.

A language of care and relationship-building has recently appeared with prominence in the business literature, driven by the realities of the marketplace. Thus, it seems a propitious time to reflect on a decade of writing in feminist morality that has focussed on the concept of an ethic of care, and examine its relevance for today's business context. Is the idea of creating organizations that "care" just another management fad that subverts the essential integrity of concepts of ethical caring? Conversely, are these concepts capable of beginning an important dialogue that may help us to see new possibilities for simultaneously enhancing both the effectiveness and the moral quality of organizations in the future? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article lists several books which have been received by the Academy of Management. They include "Advanced Project Management: A Structured Approach," "The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society," and "American Arbitration Law."

The article discusses publications from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). According to the author, FTC publications are an important resource for consumers, but they can be easily overlooked because the FTC does not actively market their availability. He also feels that the available publications from the FTC present a fair and balanced view. Some of the categories that publications fall into include consumer publications, business publications, business manuals, policy planning publications, and business guides, among others. The author includes charts showing the different categories and how they can be broken down, as well as how the publications can be put to use.

This article reviews John Butterworth's significant contributions to the accounting and information economics literature. Some of the reviewed work is unpublished and is first exposed in this paper. I describe the general nature of John's diversified contributions and focus on some theoretical components of his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent writings on competitiveness fall into three almost disjointed clusters. One is oriented toward firms. A second is concerned with macroeconomic conditions. A third is about national industrial policies. Writings in each of the three perspectives purport to give a virtually complete explanation as to why American companies have been faring so badly recently in international competition. Each of the explanations is plausible, and yet they are completely different. This article aims to describe each of them and to sketch out how they might be joined with each other to arrive at a more integrated perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A primary goal of most R&D organizations is innovation. The principles of innovation are the essential building blocks for the organization's design and management, and differ from the often quoted principles of management in key ways. Applying the principles of innovation can help R&D and corporate managers to better organize and staff their R&D units by identifying the roles to be performed and the skills each role requires for effective performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares applied economic models and an institutional model in an empirical study of financial reporting practice at the Fortune 200 between 1962 and 1984. The findings indicate that the institutional model adds significant explanatory power over and above the models that currently dominate the applied economics literature. Thus, the primacy of organizational level rationality implicit in existing models is shown to be overly narrow and inadequate, in discussing the conclusions of the study and their implication for future research, particular emphasis is placed on the question of how institutional environments change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the financial report of the executive secretary and treasurer of the American Finance Association (AFA) for the year ending September 30, 1991. The article reports that the AFA celebrated it's Golden Anniversary Annual Meeting in the year 1992, and that editor Rene Stulz has commissioned a number of review articles for the "Journal of Finance." The article states that the AFA is sponsoring research on ways to help start academic finance associations in eastern Europe and Russia. The article states that the AFA will publish an updated finance literature index, and will be exploring additional outlets for publishing some of the manuscripts received that had to be turned away because of lack of space.

This study provides comprehensive publications performance data over a 25-year period for finance doctorates. These data indicate that publishing one article per year in any finance journal (or finance, accounting, economics, or business journal) over any prolonged period of time is a truly remarkable feat, met by only 5% of the graduates. Tenure screens combining various quantity and quality requirements are examined to assess their ability to predict future publication productivity. Faculty and administrators seeking defensible benchmarks for evaluating faculty research productivity in finance will find that these data and results are particularly useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the term structure of interest rates in a multiperiod production and exchange economy with incomplete information. Unable to observe their stochastic investment opportunities, investors engage in dynamic Bayesian inference. This results in the endogenous identification of a more complex production function which generates a richer term structure, resembling the one that actual market prices imply. In addition, this paper introduces a characteristic function of the term structure and demonstrates that, in contrast with a fully observable economy, the widely investigated expectations hypothesis holds true only if interest rates are nonstochastic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to examine some of the literature in Economics that concerns itself with the economics of advertising and to present some of the public policy implications of the results of these studies. It is found that it is unlikely that advertising expenditures are subject to increasing returns to scale, thus probably do not lead to an increased concentration of industry for this reason. A study is presented that deals with competition by advertising expenditures and product differentiation in the U.S. cigarette industry. It is found that advertising expenditures, during the 1956-68 period, were not effective in obtaining sales from competitors, although they may have had the affect of inducing new customers to buy the product. The effect of anti-smoking commercials is examined, and it is found that, although they may have had some effect on cigarette smoking, it is doubtful that they provide the impetus for the decreases in advertising expenditures in this particular industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an inventory of research on the U.S. capital market from 1954 to 1963 that was compiled by a committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Many ongoing research projects related to various aspects of the U.S. economy are, the article notes, being undertaken by agencies such as the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Commission on Money and Credit, and Harvard University. A bibliography is also included in the article that illustrates articles and books on the capital market and financial institutions, including the book "Individual's Saving: Volume and Composition," by I. Friend and V. Natrella, the article "Saving in the National Economy: From the National Income Perspective," by E. F. Denison, and "Variation in Bank Asset Portfolios," by R. McEvoy.

The list of books received includes: "Prices, Income, and Public Policy," by C. L. Allen, J. M. Buchanan, and M. R. Colberg; "Changes in the Structure of Texas Commercial Banking, 1946-1956," by William Hubert Baughn; and "The Job of the Federal Executive," by Marver H. Bernstein.

The article addresses a controversy among marketing students, some who believe that economic theory encompasses marketing theory, and others who think that there is little application of economic theory to marketing problems. The author of this article refers to neoclassic economic literature, particularly that of Alfred Marshall, to prove that economists are aware of the impact that selling efforts and costs have on economic activity, as well as the relationship between increasing returns and selling costs. The article discusses Marshall's work and his treatment of marketing issues and conditions, concluding that the claim that economists have not considered marketing conditions is false.

The article reports on the rise in popularity of consumption economics education and consumer research literature. Additionally, the author reports books have been published which treat advertising as propaganda and seek to make consumers wary of free advice. The similarities between consumption economics and marketing are noted; the criteria for classifying a writer's work as scholarly and scientific are presented. They involve accurate, logical and fair analysis. The work of Leland J. Gordon and Charles S. Wyland in "Economics for Consumers" and "The Economics of Consumption" are evaluated for their criticism of advertising.

The article reports on the study of consumption in the field of marketing. The author reviews several books which she feels have contributed to the study of consumption. Books including "Economics of Consumption," by W. C. Waite, "Economic Principles of Consumption," by P. H. Nystrom, and "Consumers and the Market," by Margaret G. Reid. The books "Consumption and Standards of Living," by C. C. Zimmerman, "Consumer-Buyers in the Market," by Jessie V. Coles, and "Consumption of Wealth," by Elizabeth Hoyt are also discussed.

Summary: This article provides an adequate statistic for testing the rationality of point predictions of categorical outcomes under a subjective median or mode assumption. The test improves upon previous approaches by accounting for all the required moment inequalities and their respective covariance matrix in a single statistic. Monte Carlo simulations show that the test has an improved Type I error, especially in cases with multiple modes. Applying these tests to a dataset with parents' and students' predictions of school scores, I find that respondents are biased towards expecting higher grades and that students' expectations are correlated with the time of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global conservation efforts are increasingly focused on expanding the amount of permanently protected private land, with the aim of preserving biodiversity. These efforts are often constrained by financial resources, particularly where land acquisition is expensive, or where landowners are reluctant to enter into conservation agreements. Purchase–protect–resale (PPR) programs are used by conservation organizations in a number of countries to facilitate the purchase, resale, and protection of private land. We conducted the first systematic review of the literature on PPR and collated information on its use around the world. In total, we found that funds exceeding US$384 million were available for PPR, and over 684,000 ha have been protected to date. We identify the unique attributes of this approach and the challenges of its implementation, and discuss its potential for protecting land unsuitable for other conservation approaches. Our analysis highlights the importance of selecting appropriate properties, and we suggest that insights from the economics literature could help to improve the effectiveness of PPR programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editor's Note Our policy is to annotate all English-language books on economics and related subjects that are sent to us. A very small number of foreign-language books are called to our attention and annotated by our consulting editors or others. Our staff does not monitor and order books published; therefore, if an annotation of a book does not appear six months after the publication date, please write to us or the publisher concerning the book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little in the scholarly economics literature is directed specifically to the performance of stable value funds, although they occupy a leading place among retirement investment vehicles. They are currently offered in more than one-third of all defined contribution plans in the USA, with more than $800 billion of assets under management. This paper rigorously examines their performance throughout the entire period since their inception in 1973. We produce a composite index of stable value returns. We next conduct mean-variance analysis, Sharpe and Sortino ratio analysis, stochastic dominance analysis, and optimal multi-period portfolio composition analysis. Our evidence suggests that stable value funds dominate (on average) two major asset classes based on a historical analysis, and that they often occupy a significant position in optimized portfolios across a broad range of risk aversion levels. We discuss factors that contributed to stable value funds' past performance and whether they can continue to perform well into the future. We also discuss considerations regarding whether or not to include stable value as an element in target date funds within defined contribution pension plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Over the last decades, a significant amount of literature has been published on informal risk‐coping in developing countries. In this paper, we review how informal risk‐coping has been addressed in the land tenure literature from two main perspectives: a first stream of research looks at how customary tenure and communal property perform key informal risk‐coping functions. A second subset of this literature analyses how informal risk‐coping creates land market imperfections through sharecropping or distress sales. The segmentation of the literature results from the Demsetzian property rights framework. Further research on risk‐coping and land tenure would benefit from examining recent work on property regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study reviews the empirical literature on banking efficiency by conducting a meta‐regression analysis. The meta‐dataset consists of 1661 observations retrieved from 120 papers published over the period 2000–2014. While the role of study design and method‐specific characteristics of primary studies is evaluated, the focus concerns regulation in banking. The results are fourfold. First, parametric methods always yield lower levels of banking efficiency than non‐parametric studies. Second, banking efficiency is higher in studies using the value‐added approach rather than the intermediation method. Third, efficiency scores also depend on the journal's ranking and on the number of observations and variables used in the primary papers. Finally, regulation matters: primary papers focusing on countries with a liberalized banking industry provide higher values for efficiency scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, the literature on the interaction between monetary and fiscal policies in a monetary union is surveyed. By adopting the concept of symbiosis as a starting point, the paper highlights the importance of uncertainty, policy makers' preferences and targets. Then, the role of commitment to policy rules and coordination is addressed. The analysis also focuses on the importance of the data considered for the generation of the policy mix. As a final step, the paper discusses the main results in the literature on public debt management in a monetary union. All the reported theoretical results are then adopted to retrieve policy and institutional implications for the European Monetary Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The use and prevalence of JEL code categorization is wide in the field of economics, but what do JEL code classifications actually tell us? And are they used with consistency by academics in the field? Utilizing a data set of articles published in the American Economic Review from 1990 to 2008, we investigate whether there is heterogeneity in JEL codes assignments between authors and editors. We find that there is. A secondary goal of this paper is to survey overall thematic trends in JEL code usage over the past four and a half decades. One result is that JEL category M: Business Economics, in particular, appears to be thematically and spatially distinct from much of the rest of the published literature in the top general interest journals in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly assumed in the optimal auction design literature that valuations of buyers are independently drawn from a unique distribution. In this paper we study auctions under ambiguity, that is, in an environment where valuation distribution is uncertain itself, and present a linear programming approach to robust auction design problem with a discrete type space. We develop an algorithm that gives the optimal solution to the problem under certain assumptions when the seller is ambiguity averse with a finite prior set $${\mathcal {P}}$$ and the buyers are ambiguity neutral with a prior $$f\in {\mathcal {P}}$$ . We also consider the case where all parties, the buyers and the seller, are ambiguity averse, and formulate this problem as a mixed integer programming problem. Then, we propose a hybrid algorithm that enables to compute an optimal solution for the problem in reduced time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The categories listed below are used to classify books, book reviews, journal articles, and dissertations indexed in JEL, JEL on CD, and EconLit. New changes to the classification system appear as soon as possible on . The JEL classification system may be used freely for scholarly purposes. We suggest the following format: 'JEL: A10, B10, etc.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We exploit cross-sectional and temporal differences in search intensity in order to examine the relationship between search costs and price dispersion using a hand-collected panel data set from Jerusalem's Shuk Mahane Yehuda outdoor market. We present empirical evidence that price dispersion increases with the cost of search using several different measures of price dispersion; however, our interpretation of this finding is sensitive to the search proxy in question. We also address several acute difficulties facing empiricists seeking to test theoretical price-dispersion models in which consumers are heterogeneous in their search behavior. ( JEL L11, L13) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the increasing concern about research reproducibility, cross-fertilisation across economics and other disciplines is likely to have far-reaching benefits. Our brief summary focuses on two areas in which a mutual investment in investigating possible cross-disciplinary synergies could benefit the scientific endeavour as a whole. First, the discipline of economic design has much to contribute to the discussion of possible reforms in science. Second, the empirical methodology of meta-research can inform practices to assess the validity of the economics literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sciences are in an era of an alleged 'credibility crisis'. In this study, we discuss the reproducibility of empirical results, focusing on economics research. By combining theory and empirical evidence, we discuss the import of replication studies and whether they improve our confidence in novel findings. The theory sheds light on the importance of replications, even when replications are subject to bias. We then present a pilot meta-study of replication in experimental economics, a subfield serving as a positive benchmark for investigating the credibility of economics. Our meta-study highlights certain difficulties when applying meta-research to systematise the economics literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate two critical dimensions of the credibility of empirical economics research: statistical power and bias. We survey 159 empirical economics literatures that draw upon 64,076 estimates of economic parameters reported in more than 6,700 empirical studies. Half of the research areas have nearly 90% of their results under-powered. The median statistical power is 18%, or less. A simple weighted average of those reported results that are adequately powered (power ≥ 80%) reveals that nearly 80% of the reported effects in these empirical economics literatures are exaggerated; typically, by a factor of two and with one-third inflated by a factor of four or more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article lists publications received for review by the journal, including "The Agile Virtual Enterprise: Cases, Metrics, Tools," by H.T. Goranson, "The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification," by Michael Power, and "Behavior Dimensions of Retirement Economics," edited by Henry J. Aaron.

Socio-emotional and motivational skills are routinely measured using self-reports in large-scale educational assessments. Measures exploiting test-takers' behaviour during the completion of questionnaires or cognitive tests are increasingly used as alternatives to self-reports in the economics of education literature. We compute behavioural measures of socio-emotional and motivational skills using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We find that these measures capture important aspects of students' academic profiles: some are importantly associated with contemporaneous performance and educational attainment and most measures have a high degree of stability over time. However, these measures are only limitedly correlated among themselves and have low correlations with self-report measures of the same constructs. This is likely a reflection of the fact that behavioural measures are representations of the test taker current 'state', rather than descriptions of the participant view of their own 'trait' like the self-report measures. Moreover, the low correlation across measures suggests that they capture different behavioural responses to the test-taking situation. These differences are still limitedly understood because the measures are constructed ex-post using collateral information collected during the administration of assessments rather than developed ex ante in line with theoretical models of human cognition and affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]