Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series最新文献

{"title":"How “Maximizing Shareholder Value” Minimized the Strategic National Stockpile: The $5.3 Trillion Question for Pandemic Preparedness Raised by the Ventilator Fiasco","authors":"William Lazonick, M. Hopkins","doi":"10.36687/inetwp127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp127","url":null,"abstract":"With just 4.2 percent of the world’s population, the United States had, as of July 21, 2020, 26.0 percent of its confirmed Covid-19 cases and 23.1 percent of its deaths. The magnitude of the tragedy raises the critically important counterfactual question of how the United States as a nation would have fared had there been competent and committed political leadership in place when, during January 2020, intelligence indicating the severity of the unfolding pandemic became available. A partial answer to this question lies in identifying the organizational and technological capabilities to develop, produce, and deliver “countermeasures”—personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, diagnostic tests, therapies, and vaccines—that a prepared federal administration would have been able to mobilize to respond to the pandemic. Main repositories of the necessary capabilities are government agencies and business firms, with the development, production, and delivery of countermeasures heavily reliant on government-business collaborations (GBCs). We contend that the success of projects for pandemic preparedness and response depends on the strength of GBCs. In this essay, we focus on the particular case of ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS). We trace the historical evolution within the federal government of the current system of pandemic preparedness for and response through the end of the Obama administration. We then analyze the particular GBCs to develop ventilators for the SNS initiated and implemented by the Biomedical Research and Development Authority (BARDA), under the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). BARDA initiated two successive GBCs, one beginning in 2010 and the second in 2014, with two different business firms, for the purpose of developing portable, easy-to-use, and affordable ventilators for the SNS. We show that the strength of these collaborations lay with the innovative ventilator manufacturers with which BARDA contracted. The weakness of these GBCs appeared when these innovative manufacturers fell under the control of business corporations committed to the ideology of “maximizing shareholder value” (MSV). In each case, the financialized business corporation undermined development and delivery of ventilators to the SNS. We then explain why, in general, we should expect that business firms driven by MSV will be unreliable partners in GBCs—at the expense of the nation’s preparedness for and response to an emergency such as the Covid-19 pandemic. This lack of reliability is rooted in the strategic orientation of corporations which have put stock-market valuation of the company ahead of its innovative performance in producing goods and services. The Covid-19 crisis has already revealed the extent to which, in the U.S. economy, the stock market functions not to support value creation but rather as the prime means of value extraction. The ","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125363355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Payroll Share, Real Wage and Labor Productivity across US States","authors":"Ivan Mendieta‐Muñoz, C. Rada, A. Schiavone, Rudiger von Arnim","doi":"10.36687/inetwp121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp121","url":null,"abstract":"This paper analyzes regional contributions to the US payroll share from 1977 to 2017 and the four major business cycles throughout this period. We implement two empirical exercises. First, we decompose the US payroll share across states. Utilizing a Divisia index decomposition technique yields exact contributions of real wages, employment structure, labor productivity and relative prices across the states to the aggregate change in the payroll share. Key findings are that the decline in the aggregate (i) is driven by decoupling between real wage and labor productivity; and (ii) is initially driven by the rust belt states, but subsequently dominated by relatively large states. Second, we employ mixture models on real wages and labor productivity across US states to discern whether distinct mechanisms appear to generate these distributions. Univariate models (iii) indicate the possibility that two distinct mechanisms generate state labor productivities, raising the question of whether regional dualism has taken hold. Lastly, we use bivariate mixture models to investigate whether such dualism and decoupling manifest in the joint distributions of payroll shares and labor productivity, too. Results (iv) are affirmative, and further suggest a tendency for high performing states to have relatively high payroll shares initially, and low payroll shares more recently.","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"2400 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127477186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Profits, Innovation and Financialization in the Insulin Industry","authors":"Rosie Collington","doi":"10.36687/inetwp120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp120","url":null,"abstract":"The list prices of analogue insulin medicines in the United States have soared during the past decade. In the wake of high-profile cases of prescription medicine “price-gouging”, such as Mylan’s EpiPen and Turing-acquired Daraprim, actors across the insulin supply chain are today facing growing scrutiny from US lawmakers and the wider public. For the most part, however, the role of shareholders in the insulin supply chain has been overlooked. This paper considers the relationship between profits realized from higher insulin list prices, pharmaceutical innovation, and the financial structures of the three dominant insulin manufacturing companies, which set list prices. It shows that despite claims to the contrary, insulin manufacturers extracted vast profits from the sale of insulin products in the period 2009-2018, as insulin list prices rose. Distributions to the company shareholders in the form of cash dividends and share repurchases totaled $122 billion over this period. The paper also considers the role of other actors in the insulin supply chain, such as pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs), in the determination of list prices. The data and analysis presented in the paper indicates that financialization could be considered in tension with not only the development of new drugs that will be available to patients in the future, but also the affordability of products that already exist today.","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129013568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"American Gothic: How Chicago Economics Distorts “Consumer Welfare” in Antitrust","authors":"M. Glick","doi":"10.36687/inetwp99","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp99","url":null,"abstract":"Since the publication of Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox, lawyers, judges, and many economists have defended “Consumer welfare” (CW) as a standard for decisions about antitrust goals and enforcement priorities. This paper argues that the CW is actually an empty concept and is an inappropriate goal for antitrust. Welfare economists concede that there is no credible measurable link between price and output and human well-being. This means that the concept of CW does not legitimate limited antitrust enforcement, nor does it justify the exclusion of other antitrust goals that require more active enforcement practices. This paper contends that antitrust policy is not welfare based at all, and that if it were, antitrust policy and enforcement would differ significantly from the Chicago School vision. Without the fiction that economists can establish that in the short run lower price and higher output measurably increases welfare more than other goals, recent defenses of the CW standard resolve down to arguments based on unsupported assumptions.","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121193868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"American Gothic: How Chicago Economics Distorts 'Consumer Welfare' in Antitrust","authors":"M. Glick","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3482111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3482111","url":null,"abstract":"Since the publication of Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox, lawyers, judges, and many economists have defended “Consumer welfare” (CW) as a standard for decisions about antitrust goals and enforcement priorities. This paper argues that the CW is actually an empty concept and is an inappropriate goal for antitrust. Welfare economists concede that there is no credible measurable link between price and output and human well-being. This means that the concept of CW does not legitimate limited antitrust enforcement, nor does it justify the exclusion of other antitrust goals that require more active enforcement practices. This paper contends that antitrust policy is not welfare based at all, and that if it were, antitrust policy and enforcement would differ significantly from the Chicago School vision. Without the fiction that economists can establish that in the short run lower price and higher output measurably increases welfare more than other goals, recent defenses of the CW standard resolve down to arguments based on unsupported assumptions.","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127878722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Diversity in Economics: A Gender Analysis of Italian Academic Production","authors":"Giulia Zacchia","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3081220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3081220","url":null,"abstract":"Economists’ infamous failure at predicting the recent financial crisis has brought new impetus to studies on diversity in the economics profession. Such studies have underlined how diversity plays a prominent role in enriching economic analyses. The main purpose of this article is to provide new insights into the degree of gender diversity: rather than looking at women’s presence in academia only, we extend our focus to the research production by academic economists in the last few decades. The tendency to identify research quality with standardized bibliometric indicators – i.e. impact factor or h index – had consequences in term of heterogeneity of researchers within institutions (at all levels), and, most of all, in terms of pluralism of research interests. Our new data uncovers a double convergence path: i) a progressive reduction in the variety of research interests of women and men economists; ii) a tendency to “homologate” with international standards of perceived research ‘excellence’. As a consequence of such an impoverishment of pluralism in research, the academic production of both men and women has been drifting away from non-mainstream fields, and, in particular, from heterodox approaches and from the history of economic thought. Since women’s academic careers remain markedly characterized by a strong vertical segregation, we find that for women this effect is even stronger since they are more subject to homologating their research activities with respect to that of their male colleagues.","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"107 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124231117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘Many-Citedness’: Citations Measure More than Just Scientific Impact","authors":"Carlo D’Ippoliti","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2993971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2993971","url":null,"abstract":"Citation indexes are increasingly used to measure the scientific impact of researchers and institutions, though their application is often criticized. We study the network of citations of all publications indexed in Web of Science authored or coauthored by Italian tenured academic economists. We show that citations capture many factors other than mere scientific quality. By estimating the determinants of the probability that any author is cited by any other author, we find those factors to involve not only similarity in methods and topics but also, significantly, various measures of social community as well as of political proximity. Our analysis leads us to conclude that, at least in the case of economics, citations cannot be interpreted as mere proxies of scientific impact, and their use to produce indexes and rankings may require careful rethinking.","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132816850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Eurozone 'Debt' Crisis: Another 'Center' – 'Periphery' Crisis Under Financial Globalization?","authors":"A. O’connell","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2877979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2877979","url":null,"abstract":"This paper analyzes the Euro crisis in light of the experience of center-periphery relations over the last 40 years of renewed financial globalization. The crisis shows the characteristic pattern evident in so many other crises in the developing world: i.e. “boom” and “bust” phases of cross-border financial flows of massive magnitude, dominated by “push” factors from the center. Financial institutions at the center play a crucial role. The “boom” phase leads to serious imbalances in the peripheral economies - losses of competitiveness among them – ending in a “sudden-stop” that poses acute problems for the overexposed creditors, which then turn to their own governments for bailouts.The paper shows that “center” creditor institutions largely fund themselves in international financial markets so that their lending – providing purchasing power to finance spending – has little to do with country to country transfers of savings. When the “sudden-stop” arrives the problem therefore is not that of returning savings to the poor depositors in those institutions but of extricating them from their large exposure to borrowers in difficulties in the “periphery”. A “triangular bail-out” process, a “revolving-door” strategy, has become conventional under which instead of governments in the center openly bailing out their financial houses, official institutions provide some fraction of the debt service to borrowing governments in the form of new debt, for them to add to the extremely demanding burden of fiscal surpluses – arising from deflationary austerity policies – needed to avoid having to register as “non-performing” a menacing volume of credits “outstanding”.","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"20 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130944551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Personal Wealth Interests of Politicians and the Stabilization of Financial Markets","authors":"Ahmed Tahoun, Laurence van Lent","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2877983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2877983","url":null,"abstract":"We examine whether personal wealth interests affect politicians’ decisions about stabilizing financial markets. We use the setting of the government’s support of financial institutions under the 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. We find that the personal wealth interests of politicians are positively associated with voting in favor of the EESA. We implement several analyses to show that personal wealth interests rather than unobservable beliefs in the financial sector explain our result.","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"244 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122922830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Mismeasure of Mammon: Uses and Abuses of Executive Pay Data","authors":"M. Hopkins, William Lazonick","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2877980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2877980","url":null,"abstract":"On April 7, 2016, the Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined “CEO pay shrank most since financial crisis,†while on May 27, 2016, a similar New York Times story declared “Top CEO pay fell – yes, fell – in 2015.†Unfortunately, both the Journal and the Times mismeasured the actual take-home pay of each and every one of these CEOs in 2014 and 2015. The reason for this mismeasure is that both articles relied on “fair value†estimates of the stock-based pay of these CEOs as reported in the Summary Compensation Table of the definitive proxy statement (Form DEF 14A) that each publicly listed company files annually with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Yet the very same proxy statements also report the actual realized gains of these CEOs in the Option Exercises and Stock Vested Table. It is the realized gains on stock-based pay, not fair-value estimates, that enter into the total compensation that a CEO actually takes home and reports as income in his or her income-tax return. Moreover, including actual realized gains instead of estimated fair value of stock– based pay in the measure of total executive compensation can make a big difference. In 2014 average total compensation of the 500 highest-paid executives named on corporate proxy statements based on actual realized gains was $34.3 million, with 81 percent coming from stock-based pay. But average total compensation of the 500 highest paid based on estimated fair value was $19.3 million, with 62 percent attributable to stock- based pay. The excess of total actual realized-gains compensation over total estimated fair-value compensation was greatest in those years when the stock market was booming. Why would the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times report estimates of executive pay when they could be reporting the CEOs’ actual pay? In this paper, we answer this question by explaining the origins of the “fair value†estimates of stock-based pay and how the obsession with these estimates by the SEC, relying on the business-run Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), has relegated to statistical obscurity executives’ readily available, accurate, and actual realized gains from stock-based pay. We use Standard & Poor’s ExecuComp database to document that a) stock-based pay, in the forms of realized gains from stock options and stock awards, dominates both the size of and the changes over time in the total compensation of the highest-paid senior executives; and b) the fair-value estimates of stock-based pay tend to understate, often substantially, the realized gains from stock-based pay that these executives actually receive. An irony is that even critics of excessive executive pay, most notably the AFL-CIO on its Executive Paywatch website, use the fair-value estimates when the actual CEO compensation numbers would reveal a much larger ratio of CEO pay to the earnings of the average worker. Indeed, as we discuss in the conclusion to this paper, as m","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124081898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}