Search results

In this work, I deal – based on my memories and reflections on Lachmann’s teaching and the ideas that I discussed with him as my dissertation supervisor and member of his weekly departmental seminar – with the following two topics: first, what Lachmann understood by his subjectivist approach to economics and some of its consequences, including the use of the concept of equilibrium in economics; and second, my understanding of Lachmann’s intellectual relationship with Schumpeter. The work also raises questions about the absence in Lachmann’s work of an examination of the role of innovation in the economic process that he analyzed.

This paper surveys the contribution of economics and industrial relations (E/IR) to the development of the field of personnel/human resource management (P/HRM). A brief review of existing accounts of the evolution of the field reveals that they give little mention to the role of E/IR. A re‐examination of the early years of P/HRM suggests, however, that this is a serious omission. It is demonstrated, for example, that E/IR was in fact the principal disciplinary base for research and teaching in P/HRM in US universities into the 1940s and that for the first two decades of the field’s existence the most influential and authoritative academic‐based writers came from the ranks of economists and economics‐trained IR scholars. After describing the reasons for this close relationship, The centrifugal forces that caused a gradual split between E/IR and P/HRM are described. This split had roots in the 1920s, became increasingly visible in the 1950s and beyond, and by the late 1980s had reached a point where the two subject areas had little intellectual or organizational interaction. The paper ends with a brief review of recent developments that herald a modest rapprochement between E/IR and P/HRM.

This research explores the relevance of the Austrian tradition within the field of public policy studies. Policy studies is a research field about what governments can do. Austrian economics, conversely, mostly highlights the shortfalls of government intervention: as such overlapping seems limited. However, broadly speaking Austrian principles have indirectly influenced two aspects of policy studies: the conceptualization of the policy cycle as an imperfect process driven by actual individuals with limited knowledge and bounded rationality, and the creation of a regulatory framework that forces policy makers to reflect upon unintended consequences, by using evidence and data. This regulatory framework, assessed in this chapter by reading several regulatory guidelines through Austrian lenses, provides a new window of opportunities for Austrian economics to be relevant in the policy process. Austrian economist can be taking part in the regulatory process and also help select regulatory tools and institutional infrastructures that minimize the unintended consequences of government intervention, while contributing to the definition of social problems that enter the policy agenda from an individualistic perspective.

Standard macro theories have the same analytical structure as their micro counterparts. Where micro theories work with equilibrium between supply and demand for particular products, macro theories work with equilibrium applied to aggregates of products. This common approach treats the micro–macro relationship as scalable, with macro variables being aggregations over micro variables. In contrast, we pursue a systems-theoretic approach to the micro–macro relationship. This relationship is not scalable and rather entails a disjunction between micro- and macro-levels of theory. While micro phenomena are still susceptible to choice-theoretic analysis, macro phenomena are products of ecological interaction and so entail emergent phenomena. Our alternative approach treats macro theory as a form of systems theory where the behavior of the system has properties that are not reducible to properties of the individual elements within that system. Besides sketching this alternative approach, we examine some of the different insights this approach offers into such topics as unemployment and stabilization.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the institutional context of the entrepreneurial discovery of blockchain applications.

This paper draws on institutional and entrepreneurial theory to introduce the economic problem entrepreneurship in the early stages of new technologies, examines the diversity of self-governed hybrid solutions to coordinating entrepreneurial information and draws policy implications.

To perceive a valuable and actionable market opportunity, entrepreneurs must coordinate distributed non-price information under uncertainty with others. One potential class of transaction cost economising solution to this problem is private self-governance of information coordination within hybrids. This paper explores a diverse range of entrepreneurial hybrids coalescing around blockchain technology, with implications for innovation policy.

This paper points to the problem of how the defining of the innovation problem as either choice-theoretic or contract-theoretic changes the remit of innovation policy. Innovation policy and blockchain policy should extend beyond correcting sub-optimal investments or removing barriers to action, to incorporate how polices impact entrepreneurial choices over governance structures to coordinate information.

Psychoactive substances take on many symbolic meanings, and thus the politics of psychoactive substances has featured symbolic elements, or value-based rationality, alongside and often dominating instrumental rationality. Drawing particularly on the work of Joseph Gusfield and Nordic scholars, the chapter considers the symbolic dimension in the politics of substance use, even in Nordic countries celebrated for their societal commitment to knowledge-based policymaking, and its effects on the interplay of science and policy.

Air carriers and aircraft manufacturers are investing in technologies and strategies to reduce fuel consumption and associated emissions. This chapter reviews related issues to assess airline fuel efficiency and offers various empirical evidences from our recent work that focuses on the U.S. domestic passenger air transportation system. We begin with a general presentation of four methods (ratio-based, deterministic frontier, stochastic frontier, and data envelopment analysis) and three perspectives for assessing airline fuel efficiencies, the latter covering consideration of only mainline carrier operations, mainline–subsidiary relations, and airline routing circuity. Airline fuel efficiency results in the short run, in particular the correlations of the results from using different methods and considering different perspectives, are discussed. For the long-term efficiency, we present the development of a stochastic frontier model to investigate individual airline fuel efficiency and system overall evolution between 1990 and 2012. Insight about the association of fuel efficiency with market entry, exit, and airline mergers is also obtained.

This paper examines associations of mass media and information and communications technologies (ICTs) with inequality and poverty. It has been found that newspaper circulation has a robust negative association with inequality. Radios and TVs also have a negative association with poverty. ICT expenditures (as a percentage of GDP) have a negative association with poverty. An ICT index is constructed which also has a negative association with poverty. An instrumental variable analysis confirms the robust negative association between newspaper circulation and inequality.

This study measures the impact of ICT on Malaysia’s aggregate output in the period 1965‐2005. It closes a gap in existing literature by using the 3SLS technique on a country specific study. Telecommunication penetration rate is used as a proxy for ICT and analysed in both macro‐economic and micro‐economic perspectives. The findings of this study suggest that there is a causal relation between ICT and aggregate output in Malaysia and that the MSC and the privatisation policy of the telecommunication sector, are found to be indifferent to achieving expected economic growth in Malaysia.