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on Heterodox Microeconomics |
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Issue of 2014‒09‒29
twelve papers chosen by Carlo D’Ippoliti Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” |
| By: | Alina Beattrice Vladu; Oriol Amat; Dan Dacian Cuzdriorean |
| Abstract: | Preparers of accounting information are in a position to manipulate the view of economic reality presented in this information to interested parties. These manipulations can be regarded as morally reprehensible because they are not fair to users, they involve an unjust exercise of power, and they tend to weaken the authority of accounting regulators. This paper develops a model for detecting earning manipulators using financial statements ratios in a sample of Spanish listed companies. Our results provide evidence that accounting data can be extremely useful in detecting manipulators. This approach can be used by a large category of users of accounting information among them we can cite the stock exchange supervisors or investing professionals. |
| Keywords: | accounting ethics, accounting manipulation, accounting users, earnings management, financial reporting |
| JEL: | M1 |
| Date: | 2014–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:upf:upfgen:1434&r=hme |
| By: | Ronald M. Harstad (Department of Economics, University of Missouri-Columbia); Reinhard Selten |
| Abstract: | Economists' policy advice is based on models of responses by a variety of economic entities to policy adoptions. There is compelling evidence that these entities do not optimize in at all the fashion that mainstream economics assumes. Rather, they limit decision-making to solving problems of much smaller dimensionality. We consider how political economy goes awry when ignoring diminished dimensionality, and some research avenues opened up by this realization. |
| Keywords: | political economy, policy advice, problem complexity, dimensionality |
| JEL: | D6 B41 H42 H11 |
| Date: | 2014–08–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:umc:wpaper:1414&r=hme |
| By: | Schaller, Lena; Ehmeier, V; Kapfer, M; Kantelhardt, J |
| Abstract: | The use and valorisation of landscape services provided in agricultural landscapes are assumed to create socio-economic benefits, which in turn can enhance the competitiveness of rural regions. However, the causal relationships between the valorisation of landscape and the socio-economic benefits are complex and up to now not comprehensively understood. Results of a stakeholder workshop held in a rural area in the northern Austrian Alps indicate, that functioning networks of regional actors are of utter importance for successful landscape valorisation. Also literature reveals that the successful involvement of stakeholders is a major factor for an effective management of complex social processes. Against this background our paper analyses the contribution of social networks to landscape valorisation in the Austrian study region “Mittleres Ennstal”. We apply a Social Network Analysis (SNA) on a closed stakeholder network of altogether 22 institutions representing agriculture, tourism, local administration, local economy, nature conservation and rural development. We combine SNA with an expert evaluation of different strategies of landscape valorisation and assess how regional socio-economic benefits from landscape valorisation potentially impact on regional competitiveness. The study gives insights about the density of stakeholder networks in rural areas and about the different strategies of landscape valorisation pursued by different stakeholder groups. The method applied is suitable to show the potentials of stakeholder networks in fostering landscape valorisation. It furthermore is able to detect strategic gaps and thus can reveal potential starting points for the improvement and bundling of landscape valorisation strategies aiming at the enhancement of regional competitiveness. |
| Keywords: | Social Network Analysis, Stakeholder networks, Landscape valorisation strategies, Agricultural landscape, Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Q15, Q180, Q51, |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aiea14:174944&r=hme |
| By: | Carrillo-Tudela, Carlos (University of Essex); Hobijn, Bart (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco); She, Powen (University of Essex); Visschers, Ludo (University of Edinburgh) |
| Abstract: | U.K. data from 1993-2012 suggest that in economic downturns a smaller fraction of unemployed workers change their career when starting a new job. The proportion of total hires involving a career change also drops. This implies that career changes decline during recessions. The results indicate that recessions are times of subdued reallocation rather than of accelerated and involuntary structural transformation. |
| Keywords: | Labour market turnover; occupational and industry mobility; wage growth |
| JEL: | G10 J63 J64 |
| Date: | 2014–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedfwp:2014-21&r=hme |
| By: | P. G. Ardeni |
| Abstract: | After more than half a century, the reflections of Albert O. Hirschman on development assistance, the role of consultant "experts" in providing policy advice and the "visiting economist's syndrome" are still very current. In as much as Hirschman argued against all-encompassing policy frameworks, overall development plans and universal models, "one-size-fits-all" models abstracting from the local, historical, geographic and institutional conditions have remained the prevailing modus operandi of international development agencies and governments in development assistance. In spite of Paul Krugman's criticism of Hirschman's lack of a mathematically-consistent approach in favor of an ad hoc pragmatism, Hirschman's avoidance of assuming a toy model to deal with practical issues and the specificities of development problems in different countries – while still using rigorous and detailed analysis– appears to be a promising attitude of enormous relevance even today. If the rejection of large-scale models of the hey days of development theory was due to the neoliberal policy wave that led to the "Washington consensus" – more market and less State –, development assistance has remained firmly entrenched in the principles of balanced growth, all-encompassing liberalizing policy reforms and diffused marketization with an increasingly limited role for the State. Development assistance approaches have maintained a standard list of prescriptions, policy-reform recipes for all sectors, social, institutional and even political objectives, under the justification that "everything depends on everything". In this paper, I briefly review the evidence regarding the active pursuit of a paradigm that, sidelining Hirschman's unorthodox approach, has confirmed that we have "forgotten nothing and learned nothing", as Hirschman once said. While Hirschmanian concepts like "linkages" and "leading sectors" and some of his famous parables – like the "tunnel effect" on inequality – have left an enduring mark on economists' perspectives, his "unbalanced-growth" has been dismissed on ineffectual grounds, while his "empirical lantern" has been derided and abandoned. The lessons of Hirschman's consultant experience in the tropics have left a legacy that goes beyond his prescriptions: it is a philosophy, a conception of the world, a guiding sets of principles that survives time. From that wilderness where Hirschman led his followers, it is only by re-igniting that lantern that we can wisely contribute to the "development" of others as savvy and informed "experts". |
| JEL: | B2 B3 O2 |
| Date: | 2014–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp964&r=hme |
| By: | Takao Kato (Department of Economics Colgate University); Pian Shu (Harvard Business School, Technology and Operations Management Unit) |
| Abstract: | We study the impact of social identity on worker competition by exploiting the exogenous variations in workers' origins and the well-documented social divide between urban resident workers and rural migrant workers in large urban Chinese firms. We analyze data on weekly output, individual characteristics, and coworker composition for all weavers in an urban Chinese textile firm between April 2003 and March 2004. The firm's relative performance incentive scheme rewards a worker for outperforming her coworkers. We find that a worker does not act on the monetary incentives to outperform coworkers who share the same social identity, but does aggressively compete against coworkers with a different social identity. Our results highlight the important role of social identity in overcoming self-interest and enhancing intergroup competitions. |
| Date: | 2013–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hbs:wpaper:14-011&r=hme |
| By: | Yongming Huang (Institute for Development of Central China and Center for Industrial Development and Regional Competitiveness, Wuhan University); Anthony T. Flegg (Department of Accounting, Economics, and Finance, University of the West of England); Timo Tohmo (School of Business and Economics, University of Jyväskylä) |
| Abstract: | Data for the Chinese province of Hubei are used to assess the performance of Kronenberg’s CHARM, a method that takes explicit account of cross-hauling when constructing regional input-output tables. A key determinant of cross-hauling is held to be the heterogeneity of the products of individual sectors, which is estimated using national data. However, contrary to the authors’ earlier findings for Finland, CHARM does not generate reliable estimates of Hubei’s sectoral exports, imports and volume of trade. It is crucial, therefore, especially in relatively small regions, to make adequate allowance for any known divergence between regional and national technology and heterogeneity. |
| Keywords: | regional input-output, non-survey methhods, CHARM, cross-hauling, China |
| JEL: | C67 C83 R15 |
| Date: | 2014–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rri:wpaper:2014wp03&r=hme |
| By: | Margaretha Wewerinke (Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge; European University Institute, Florence, Italy) |
| Abstract: | This paper considers the extent to which international human rights law offers protection to "climate migrants" irrespective of whether these persons would qualify for refugee status. In contrast with most existing literature, it does not focus on States’ obligations arising from the right to life or the prohibition of inhumane treatment. Instead, the paper focuses on the right of persons belonging to minorities to enjoy their culture as protected under Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The paper peruses the Human Rights Committee's interpretation of Article 27, with particular attention to its link with the rights of peoples to self-determination and to freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources as protected under Article 1 of the Covenant. Based on this analysis the paper challenges the presupposition that a normative gap exists, pointing instead at a need for further research into the interpretation of norms and obstacles to enforcement. |
| Keywords: | Cultural rights, Human rights, Climate change, International Law |
| JEL: | K32 K33 |
| Date: | 2013–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ccc:wpaper:007&r=hme |
| By: | Yew-Kwang NG (Division of Economics, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological Univer- sity. Address: 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore, 637332.) |
| Abstract: | Piketty’s influential book Capital in the Twenty-First Century and its prominent review by Milanovic in the Journal of Economic Literature both assert the inevitability of an increasing share of capital in total income, given a higher rate of return to capital than the rate of growth in income. This paper shows by a specific example, a logical argument and its intuition that the alleged inevitability is not valid. Even just for capital to grow faster than income, we need an additional requirement that saving of non-capital income is larger than consumption of capital income. Even if this is satisfied, the capital share may not increase as the rate of return may fall and non-capital incomes may increase with capital accumulation. |
| Keywords: | capital; capitalism; distribution; income; wealth |
| JEL: | D3 P1 |
| Date: | 2014–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nan:wpaper:1410&r=hme |
| By: | NU. CEPAL. Subsede de México |
| Date: | 2013–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ecr:col094:26109&r=hme |
| By: | Salvatori, Andrea |
| Abstract: | In 2002, the United Kingdom implemented the EU directive mandating equal treatment of fixed-term and permanent workers. This paper uses eleven years of data from the Labour Force Survey to assess whether the new legislation has led to a decrease in the average wage gap between fixed-term and permanent workers. For women, there is no evidence of that. For men, the wage gap appears to have closed after 2002. However, this gap was falling even before 2002 and some evidence of changes in the selection of workers after the implementation of the Directive cast doubts on the extent to which the closing of the gap can be ascribed to the new legislation. |
| Date: | 2014–05–23 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ese:iserwp:2014-21&r=hme |
| By: | Koichiro Kamada (Bank of Japan) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the characteristics of households' inflation expectations using the micro-data of the Opinion Survey on the General Public's Views and Behavior conducted by the Bank of Japan. The results of the Kahn test indicate the existence of strong downward rigidity in households' price expectations. One consequence of this downward rigidity is that survey answers strongly react to shocks to inflation expectations in a high inflation environment, but only weakly in a low inflation environment. Furthermore, this downward rigidity may hide potential links between inflation expectations and other economic indicators and may produce spurious correlations between them. To overcome these problems, this paper adjusts the distribution of survey answers on inflation expectations for downward rigidity. Using this adjusted distribution, the paper examines the relationships between households' inflation expectations and their views on various economic issues. The main results are as follows. From the end of 2005 onward, a negative correlation between households' inflation expectations and their outlook for economic conditions can be observed. Regarding the activities of the Bank of Japan, the following relationships can be observed from 2006. First, the more strongly households are interested in the Bank's activities, the more stable are their inflation expectations. And second, the more confidence households have in the Bank, the more tightly are their inflation expectations anchored. |
| Date: | 2013–11–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:boj:bojwps:13-e-15&r=hme |