Search results

The paper outlines and examines a social‐institutional conception of income inequality or economic distribution. The fundamental proposition of this conception is that income inequality/distribution is far from being the outcome of the operation of strictly market laws or economic forces but rather one of institutional arrangements or social structures. Of the latter particularly important have shown to be the institutional structure of the economy, particularly labour markets, as well as the degree of democracy of political systems. The results suggest transcending single‐factor economic explanations and predictions of income inequality, as implied in the Kuznets curve and its ramifications, in favour of an alternative multilevel sociological approach.

Illustrates and explicates the proposition that the critique of exploitation and injustice found in contemporary Liberation Theology is theologically grounded, in that these phenomena are rebuked as discordant with God′s will, as revealed by textual re‐examination of the Bible, notably the Old Testament, not merely as socially undesirable, by examination of four central themes: (1) the Old Testament characterization of God as hater of exploitation, lover of justice, and Liberator of the oppressed; (2) the Biblical depiction of the character and methods of oppression and exploitation and the identification of oppressors and oppressed; (3) the Old Testament model of stages in the liberative process and vision of a future society characterized by peace, freedom, justice, equality, community, and prosperity; (4) significant elements of continuity between Old and New Testament on these issues.

Introduction The connection between wealth and virtue or between economics and ethics has been severed. Pure or positive economics is believed to be objective and scientific, based on facts alone, while normative or ethical reasoning is believed to be less reliable and non scientific because it is subjective, value‐laden and prone to prejudice and personal preferences.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that free market capitalism is neither efficient nor just. This is in spite of the claims made by its proponents who, utilizing Adam Smith's doctrine of invisible hand or the fundamental theorem of welfare economics, assume that it is efficient, just, smooth functioning, and self‐regulating.

The paper utilizes conceptual/theoretical research and arguments that have emerged in the literatures of public economics and welfare economics.

In addition to proving the above, the paper also finds that Adam Smith is actually a moral egalitarian, thus he could not have agreed with Nozick and Friedman regarding the nature of capitalism. To the extent that Smith supported free market capitalism, it was because he thought, in contrast to mercantilist policies, that free markets would lead to equity and justice.

The paper is an original/valuable contribution since it rescues Adam Smith from the extreme proponents of laissez‐faire capitalism who claim him.

This study examines whether the Hong Kong stock market overreacts. By using monthly return data of all the common stocks listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange from January 1980 to December 1995, it examines the profitability of a contrarian strategy of buying prior losers and selling prior winners. The evidence shows that prior losers outperform prior winners by up to 68.59% in the subsequent five‐year test period. This finding can be interpreted as investors' tendency to react over‐optimistically to positive information and over‐pessimistically to negative information, thus causing stock prices to take temporary swing away from their intrinsic values and then reverse back subsequently. Our result is consistent with that documented by Debondt and Thaler (1985) for the U.S. market. This study also investigates whether seasonality accounts for the abnormal return but finds that the overreaction effect is not caused by the well‐known January effect. Further tests are conducted to investigate whether changes in betas of the winners and losers account for the abnormal return. The evidence shows that such changes are also minor, which cannot explain the price reversal phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on 21 years of IC theory and practice as input into discussing the origins of IC, its multiple perspectives and where it is heading.

This article is based on the author's reflections of the past and vision for the future.

IC is still for many an invisible fuzzy dimension, or mainly a measuring and accounting issue. For others, it is thought of as a more and more strategic ecosystem for sustainable value creation. Is there a kind of learned blindness in financial capital accounting or ignorance of new value opportunity spaces? We need to go beyond IC reporting. We are on the edge of something, but what?

The paper presents the personal views of an internationally renowned IC academic and practitioner about what the future may hold for IC.

The purpose of this paper is to approach the issue of taxation of robotic process automation (RPA) through an interpretive lens provided by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Both scholars have affected the understanding and attitudes of generations of economists, and their ideas have considerable influenced modern economic policy. It will be argued that Smith and Marx have much to offer to help contemporary economists understand the taxation of RPA, and their writings on machines, automation, and their impact on the human labor force will be discussed from their primary texts.

The paper interprets the works of Marx and Smith in relation to contemporary debates on automation, particularly, proposals to tax technological innovations to offset the social costs of automation’s displacement effects.

In the case of Adam Smith, there is not enough evidence to suggest that he would support a specific taxation of RPA; however, he very well might agree with a modest taxation of capital goods. Marx would very likely support a taxation in the short-run, however, would be inclined to caution that the ownership of robots should in the long run be transferred to society.

This paper uses primary texts from the discipline of history of economic thought to spark a discussion about compensating the externalities of technological innovation.