{"title":"Léon Walras and Alfred Marshall: microeconomic rational choice or human and social nature?","authors":"Richard Arena, Katia Caldari","doi":"10.1093/cje/beae005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/beae005","url":null,"abstract":"Alfred Marshall’s and Léon Walras’s works have often been compared in the literature, on the one hand underlining their several differences and on the other hand focussing on their possible resemblances building what was called ‘neoclassical economics. This interpretation failed to pay due attention, however, to a number of important aspects that in fact stand in the way of a proper understanding of these two authors’ contributions. This paper focuses on the analogies to be found between Walras’s and Marshall’s analyses of economic behaviour, which are related not to a supposed affiliation to a common neo-classical tradition but to a common conception of the relation between human economic agents and society.","PeriodicalId":48156,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Economics","volume":"225 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140019807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andrew G Haldane, Alessandro Migliavacca, Vera Palea
{"title":"Is accounting a matter for bookkeepers only? The effects of IFRS adoption on the financialisation of economy","authors":"Andrew G Haldane, Alessandro Migliavacca, Vera Palea","doi":"10.1093/cje/beae006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/beae006","url":null,"abstract":"The process of financialisation has been extensively studied and several stylised facts identified. Short-termism is one of these. This article analyses the role that changes in accounting rules have played in increasing short-termism in company management. Our study considers the adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standards in the European Union (EU), showing that the new accounting standards have altered companies’ sensitivity to investment opportunities, leading to underinvestment in the real economy. In doing so, our article highlights the public-policy profile of accounting standards setting and possible tensions with EU societal objectives. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study empirically analysing the role of accounting rules in the financialisation of economy.","PeriodicalId":48156,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Economics","volume":"75 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139948647","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Who are the capability theorists?’: a tale of the origins and development of the capability approach","authors":"Valentina Erasmo","doi":"10.1093/cje/beae004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/beae004","url":null,"abstract":"This paper offers a history of the capability approach from its origins to its more recent development. Sen himself refused to be defined as the capability theorist and despite this analysis, we will come to understand that Sen played an essential role in this history because he pioneered the approach, but that his role has probably been overestimated by the available literature. Two further ‘main characters’ provided a relevant contribution to the origins and development of the capability approach, namely Walsh and Nussbaum. Finally, this paper considers the two main groups that have developed since the capability approach, the capability approach centred perspective and the capability approach heuristic value perspective, in order to show how they follow these three main characters in their own development of the capability approach.","PeriodicalId":48156,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Economics","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139909898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The advantages of the corporate form—an impossibility theorem on persons and things","authors":"Johann Graf Lambsdorff","doi":"10.1093/cje/beae003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/beae003","url":null,"abstract":"The literature tends to view the firm either as a person or as a thing. Due to this dichotomy, it struggles with the proposition that the corporate form brings about efficiency gains that cannot be accomplished by other types of profit-seeking firms. This study supplies game-theoretic proof for this proposition. It identifies a capital-intensive business that requires external financing and is vulnerable to a holdup by a supplier. It shows that only the corporate form can organise the business while other types of firms fail. This advantage of the corporate form over other types of firms is due to its Janus-faced nature as both person, that is endowed with legal capacity, and thing, such as a transferable bundle of assets. A long-held tradition of strictly separating persons and things fails to account for this advantage.","PeriodicalId":48156,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Economics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139766240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ricardo’s finances and Waterloo: legends by Samuelson and others lack historical evidence","authors":"Wilfried Parys","doi":"10.1093/cje/bead055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bead055","url":null,"abstract":"Paul Samuelson and others suggested that Ricardo (‘the richest economist in history’) made a life-changing coup on the Stock Exchange after the Battle of Waterloo (1815), but archives reveal that Ricardo amassed his fortune more gradually, often by small profit rates upon large investments, as a jobber on the Stock Exchange and a contractor for seven British Loans. The 1815 Loan generated exceptional profits for Ricardo, but not the million sterling mentioned in unreliable legends about Ricardo or Rothschild. Such legends neglected the stock price statistics, the suboptimal timing of Ricardo’s transactions in 1815 and the dominant role of the Baring-Angerstein consortium, which took a much larger part of the Loans than Ricardo’s consortium. Insufficient attention was also paid to the special year 1813, when Britain exceptionally launched not one, but two very profitable Loans. After his large 1813 profits, Ricardo started contemplating his retirement and bought Gatcombe Park in 1814. Samuelson neglected this and overestimated the influence of 1815 events. Moreover, Samuelson claimed that today Ricardo might be prosecuted for using unscrupulous market manipulation and inside information. Archives and statistics show that Samuelson’s allegations lack historical evidence.","PeriodicalId":48156,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Economics","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139679759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Brendan Burchell, Simon Deakin, Jill Rubery, David A Spencer
{"title":"The future of work and working time: introduction to special issue","authors":"Brendan Burchell, Simon Deakin, Jill Rubery, David A Spencer","doi":"10.1093/cje/bead057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bead057","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction to the special issue on the future of work and working time offers an overview of issues of relevance to present-day debates on working time. The aim is to bring together two divergent debates, the first on working time reduction for full-time workers and the second on the diversification and fragmentation of working time. It considers the history of working time including the forces that led to the establishment of the standard employment relationship and to reductions in standard working hours. It addresses contemporary trends and examines why there has been both a stalling of working time reduction and a diversification of working time norms. Some limitations of focussing only on clock time are considered as well as some of the benefits, from more meaningful work to better health and well-being, that stem from both regular and non-excessive working time. The final section turns to the case for reform: it argues that policies are required to address the fragmentation of working time, and that these policies should be combined with a focus on shortening standard working hours that could increase the sustainability of working time in a dual-earner society and even limit the supply of labour for jobs offering only fragmented working time.","PeriodicalId":48156,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Economics","volume":"59 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139581451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gold Rush vs. War: Keynes on reviving animal spirits in times of crisis","authors":"Michele Bee, Raphaël Fèvre","doi":"10.1093/cje/beae001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/beae001","url":null,"abstract":"This paper aims to exploit fully the heuristic virtues of Keynes’ famous ‘old bottles’ story, deploying a multi-layered argument and drawing out its broadest implications. In essence, we show that through this story Keynes was making a very serious point about anti-crisis policies: the need for authorities to stimulate animal spirits by relying on people’s natural impulse to action. Rather than taking the place of entrepreneurs and paying people to dig holes, Keynes seems to be arguing that public authorities should put entrepreneurs in a situation where they are so enthusiastic that they go into debt to dig holes, just like during a gold rush. At the same time, it is a question of restoring the banks’ willingness to lend for these overoptimistic projects in a period of total depression. This article explores the conditions that make public intervention as effective as possible through the enthusiasm and individual initiative that can be generated by an artificial gold rush. Such intervention therefore can be as minimal as possible, without having to resort to the opposite authoritarian solution of war. Since the gold rush builds cities and war destroys them, Keynes spent considerable energy convincing his contemporaries that liberal-democratic countries would have to take the former path if they wanted to avoid the latter.","PeriodicalId":48156,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Economics","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139509121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the survival of a flawed theory of capital: mainstream economics and the Cambridge capital controversies","authors":"Francisco Nunes-Pereira, Mário Graça Moura","doi":"10.1093/cje/bead056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bead056","url":null,"abstract":"The Cambridge controversies on capital theory opposed heterodox economists, mainly from the University of Cambridge, UK, to mainstream economists, mostly based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. The controversies started in the 1950s and occupied the pages of some of the most influential journals. Their primary outcome was the broad acknowledgement of flaws, which we retrieve, in the concept of aggregate capital. Despite that acknowledgement, aggregate, homogeneous capital remains a staple of contemporary macroeconomics, as if the Cambridge controversies had never existed. To account for this apparent paradox is the aim of this article. We examine the arguments seeking to justify the enduring commitment to the aggregate capital approach and argue that they indicate an implicit commitment to instrumentalism. The indifference to the results of the Cambridge controversies is a consequence of methodological conformism and has shaky foundations.","PeriodicalId":48156,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Economics","volume":"94 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139409783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vertical integration, technical progress and structural change","authors":"Theo Santini, Ricardo Azevedo Araujo","doi":"10.1093/cje/bead052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bead052","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In search of an alternative representation of the economic system, Pasinetti ended up with a notion of vertical integration (VI) that takes interdependencies as its starting point but does not explicitly consider their role in the unfolding structural economic dynamics (SED). In this paper, we show that SED may be more inclusive of such interrelations to appropriately consider VI as a tool for analysing economic systems under the conditions of technical change and structural transformation. Our strategy is to focus on Pasinetti’s shift from his original development building on Sraffa’s sub-systems to his formulation of VI in terms of a pure labour technology in which all goods are produced by labour only. To carry out the analysis, we resume his iterative algorithm of VI, showing that we can extend it to the case of an expanding economy as a bridge between the horizontal and vertical production representations. Following this route, we can effectively address the features of structural transformation associated with changing patterns of interdependence. Besides, we can go from an assessment of productivity growth at an industrial level to determining the pace of technical change in a vertically integrated sector (VIS), which allows focussing on a concept of productivity derived from the VI, labelled as the total labour productivity (TLP). The TLP is robust to outsourcing of production, whose effects are adequately dealt with insofar as it considers not only the direct but also the indirect labour required to produce the final output.","PeriodicalId":48156,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Economics","volume":"8 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139380802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rentiers and distributive conflict in Brazil (2000–2019)","authors":"Pedro Romero Marques, Fernando Rugitsky","doi":"10.1093/cje/bead053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bead053","url":null,"abstract":"The paper examines the determinants of rentier income in contemporary financialised capitalist economies by analysing the case of Brazil. It argues that different drivers of rentier income may have comparable potential to channel a substantial share of aggregate income to asset owners. The paper estimates an expanded functional income distribution for Brazil for the period between 2000 and 2019, which distinguishes between rentier income, wages, profits of enterprise and government income. In the last two decades, the share of rentier income in Brazilian GDP has fluctuated around an approximately stable trend even though its composition has changed profoundly. The estimation presented allows for an analysis of the role played by financial expropriation (i.e. interest payments out of wage income) in this expanded functional income distribution, which points to alternative results concerning the recent trajectory of the wage share of income and of the distributive conflict.","PeriodicalId":48156,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Economics","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139057062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}