Economics Commons^™

Working Paper No. 37, The American Opium Trade, Karson M. Pence

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to establish that American merchants exacerbated China’s 19th century opium epidemic. Circumventing Britain’s monopoly of Indian opium, three men, Thomas Perkins, John Cushing, and Robert Forbes, played a key role in American consolidation of Turkish opium production. With malice and blatant disregard, numerous Americans pumped tens of thousands of chests of opium into China, creating fabulous riches and incredibly influential familial dynasties while simultaneously destroying the minds and bodies of an untold number of Chinese.

Working Paper No. 50, Alexis De Tocqueville On American 'Exceptionalism', Zachary Mckinster

Working Papers in Economics

From early settlers to the sophisticated nuances and concerns facing Americans in his time, Alexis de Tocqueville authored a definitive piece on democracy as it emerged and was practiced in 19th century America. This inquiry seeks to establish that Tocqueville’s penetrating insights into the United States in its early decades assisted him in arriving at the notion of what is widely touted as American ‘Exceptionalism’. In the first half of the 19th century Tocqueville travelled widely, seeking to understand this republic and its constitutional emphases upon principles of democracy. Completing his tour, in 1835 Tocqueville published Democracy in America. It …

Working Paper No. 40, The Rise And Fall Of Georgist Economic Thinking, Justin Pilarski

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to establish that Henry George’s writings advanced a distinct theory of political economy that benefited from a meteoric rise in popularity followed by a fall to irrelevance with the turn of the 20^th century. During the depression decade of the 1870s, the efficacy of the laissez-faire economic system came into question, during this same timeframe neoclassical economics supplanted classical political economy. This inquiry considers both of George’s key works: Progress and Poverty [1879] and The Science of Political Economy [1898], establishing the distinct components of Georgist economic thought. This rise in ‘Georgism’ is evinced through the …

Working Paper No. 42, Commodity Production As An Explanatory Variable In The Outbreak Of The American Civil War, Andrew Pope

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to establish that the American South’s comparative advantage in primary commodity production can be identified as an explanatory variable in the outbreak of the American Civil War. In addition, this inquiry seeks to illustrate the positive historical correlation between a state’s reliance on primary commodity production and its propensity to generate extreme outcomes—namely, institutional inequality, conflict, and civil war. Furthermore, this inquiry seeks to demonstrate that civil wars can be primarily understood as a function of a rebelling force’s economic motivations and explores the concept of King Cotton, westward expansion, and the South’s ultimate secession from the …

An Inclusive Economic Paradigm Shift, Jonathan Talbot

Capstone Collection

In this paper, the author begins with the question of how we can recognize whether or not we are in an opportune time to re-evaluate our current economic system. Through a literature review the canvas is set for the surveys of 63 people from across the United States about the way they feel about the economic system within which we currently find ourselves. Through the survey, he establishes that people who report having had a harder time during the “economic recovery” of the Great Recession were more likely to act in the hopes of bettering their community than those who …

Working Paper No. 39, Neoliberalism As A Variant Of Capitalism, Justin Pilarski

Working Papers in Economics

Economic systems evolve over time in adapting to the needs and deficiency of the system. This inquiry seeks to establish Neoliberalism as—in the language of Barry Clark—a variant of capitalism that evolved out of retaliation of the regulated variant of capitalism. We utilize Barry Clark’s work on the evolution of economic systems in establishing the pattern of adaptation in American capitalism. Then we establish and analyze the neoliberal variant of capitalism in how this evolution retaliated against the existing system rather than adapting the preceding variant. We then consider how the economics profession reacted when the neoliberal economic policies failed …

Country Roads, Take Me Away: Coal Mining And Migration In West Virginia, 1971-2010, James J. Slaughter

Honors Theses

West Virginia’s population peaked in 1950. Parallel to this, employment in the coal mining industry peaked in 1948. Popular discourse links these two trends together. It is suggested that the decline of the coal mining industry, which was previously a stable source of employment, has led West Virginians to leave the state searching for better job opportunities elsewhere. This thesis uses first-difference regression models to analyze the relationship between lagged year-to-year changes in coal-mining employment and year-to-year changes in net-migration to and from West Virginia. A positive and statistically significant relationship is found between 1-year lagged changes in coal mining …

Ireland And Iceland In Crisis D: Similarities And Differences, Arwin G. Zeissler, Daisuke Ikeda, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

On September 29, 2008—two weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers—the government of Ireland took the bold step of guaranteeing almost all liabilities of the country’s major banks. The total amount guaranteed by the government was more than double Ireland’s gross domestic product, but none of the banks were immediately nationalized. The Icelandic banking system also collapsed in 2008, just one week after the Irish government issued its comprehensive guarantee. In contrast to the Irish response, the Icelandic government did not guarantee all bank debt. Instead, the Icelandic government controversially split each of the three major banks into a new …

Future And Value: The Library As Strategic Partner, Antje Mays

Charleston Library Conference

Broader economic trends spawn budget pressures for education and libraries, prompting a plethora of studies on the value and relevance of libraries. Numerous reports on economic decline in libraries and studies with mixed pronouncements on the value of libraries have led to a negative self-image within the library profession. Yet libraries’ leadership in connecting learners to knowledge is at the heart of producing many of the key skills sorely needed in robust societies and economies. Librarianship has many untapped opportunities for positioning itself as a prominent strategic partner. This paper outlines current research on the economic and societal context for …

The Historical And Legal Creation Of A Fissured Workplace: The Case Of Franchising, Brian Callaci

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the consequences of institutional change in capitalist firms, focusing on vertical dis-integration, the legal boundaries of the firm and what David Weil has called workplace "fissuring," in which corporations place intermediaries (subcontractors, temp agencies, or franchisees) between themselves and workers, often with negative consequences for workers. It focuses specifically on franchising, a type of fissured workplace in which one firm outsources retail operations to smaller, legally independent franchisees. The first chapter uses archival sources to identify the legal and policy changes driving workplace fissuring in the franchising context: specifically the relaxing of antitrust prohibitions on vertical restraints …

El Último Acuerdo Con El Fmi Durante El Gobierno De Mauricio Macri: El Impacto De La Deuda Externa En La Soberanía Según Los Actores Políticos Y Sociales De La Argentina / The Latest Agreement With The Imf Under The Government Of Mauricio Macri: The Impact Of Foreign Debt On The Sovereignty Of Argentina According To Social And Political Actors, Sarah Schubert

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Nobel laureate in economics, Simon Kuznets, allegedly commented “There are four kinds of countries in the world: developed countries, underdeveloped countries, Japan, and Argentina” (Reyes & Sawyer, 2019). Since the mid twentieth century, Argentina has stood out due to the complexity of its ever changing economic and political orientations. Initially recognized as a growing nation with a booming economy, Argentina soon fell victim to macroeconomic instability. Inflation, growing deficits and most notably the assumption of foreign debt have plagued the country’s economy. Known for their tumultuous relationship with the International Monetary Fund, Argentina came to declare the largest sovereign default …

Runaway: A History Of Postwar New York In Four Factories, Andy Battle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At midcentury, New York City was among the preeminent manufacturing centers in the United States. Within a generation, this manufacturing economy suffered an extraordinary collapse. Beginning in the 1950s, workers and their unions began to use the term “runaway” to describe factories that pulled up stakes in New York and set them back down in other climes. This dissertation explores the deindustrialization of New York City through case studies of “runaway” plants, or factories that left New York for the American South or abroad between the years 1945 and 1975.

In general, the manufacturers that remained in New York at …

Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational …

Review Of The Promise And Peril Of Credit: What A Forgotten Legend About Jews And Finance Tells Us About The Making Of European Commercial Society, Jared Rubin

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

A review of The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society, by Francesca Trivellato, published by Princeton University Press.

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale C: Risk Limits, Metrics, And Models, Arwin G. Zeissler, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

Value at Risk (VaR) is one of the most commonly used ways to measure and monitor market risk. At JPMorgan Chase (JPM), very large derivative positions established by Bruno Iksil in the Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) caused the bank’s Chief Investment Office (CIO) to exceed its VaR limit for four days in a row in January 2012. In response, the CIO changed to a new VaR model on January 30, which appeared to immediately reduce VaR by half. However, JPM soon discovered that this new VaR model had not been properly implemented and the bank went back to using the …

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale B: Derivatives Valuation, Arwin G. Zeissler, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

After consistently producing positive results through 2011, the JPMorgan Chase (JPM) traders who oversaw the bank’s Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) grew alarmed by a consistent string of losses beginning in January 2012. (The SCP was maintained by JPM to help hedge default risk and was the source of the 2012 London Whale trading loss.) To minimize the losses reported to their superiors until such time that market prices hopefully turned in their favor, the SCP traders began valuing their largest derivative positions in a manner that was not consistent with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and JPM policy. The fair …

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale A: Risky Business, Arwin G. Zeissler, Daisuke Ikeda, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

In December 2011, the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) instructed the bank’s Chief Investment Office to reduce the size of its Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) during 2012, so that JPM could decrease its RiskWeighted Assets as the bank prepared to adopt the impending Basel III bank capital regulations. However, the SCP traders were also told to minimize the trading costs incurred to reduce Risk-Weighted Assets, while still maintaining the opportunity to profit from unexpected corporate bankruptcies. In an attempt to balance these competing objectives, head SCP derivatives trader Bruno Iksil suggested in January 2012 …

The Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program: A Systemwide Systemic Risk Exception, Lee Davison

Journal of Financial Crises

In the fall of 2008, short-term credit markets were all but frozen, creating liquidity issues for banks and bank holding companies that could not rollover their debt at reasonable rates. Fearing that the situation would worsen if something was not done, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Federal Reserve Board invoked, and the Secretary of the Treasury approved, the use of the “systemic risk exception” (SRE) under the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991, to provide unprecedented broad-based relief to struggling banks. The SRE permitted the FDIC to depart from its “least-cost” requirement when addressing failing …

The Oppressive Pressures Of Globalization And Neoliberalism On Mexican Maquiladora Garment Workers, Jenna Demeter

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

The international economic trends of globalization and neoliberalism have exposed and enabled the exploitation of Mexican workers, especially women in the maquiladora garment industry. During the 1950s, globalization gave rise to the new international division of labor and transnational corporations (TNCs) that have offshored labor-intensive phases of production to developing countries, many of which have pursued export-led industrialization. Export processing in Mexico was encouraged in the 1960s by Item 807 of the U.S. Tariff Code and Mexico’s Border Industrialization Program. Especially following the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, advanced capitalist countries and International Financial Institutions foisted neoliberal structural …

Governance In A Globalised World, Richard Woodward

Books/Book Chapters

Discussions surrounding the sources of power and authority that govern the social world have taken place since ancient times. Finally, in the latter half of the twentieth century, it appeared that this debate had been decisively resolved in favour of the view that governance was the preserve of governments. This was a consequence of the ascendance in the social sciences of methodologies that presupposed human activities to correspond to the territorial boundaries of sovereign states. The privileging of sovereign territoriality did not reflect a poverty of scholarly thinking but was a by-product of their social world. (Taylor, 1996). By the …

Working Paper No. 04, Marx And Religion, Lauren Sweger-Hollingsworth

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to establish that, in his writings, Karl Marx offers his perspectives on religion. The origins of Marx’s conception of religion can be traced to his family history, adolescence, and time at the University of Berlin. Marx’s criticism of contemporary philosophy offers a penetrating account of his views on religion, proving critical of the individualism and idealism implemented by his contemporaries. In Marx’s judgement, religion offers a false sense of solace in a world marked by abuse. Religion rationalizes domination, sows societal divisions, and preserves oppressive institutions. Marx’s materialist approach focuses on the real-life relations and activities within …

Working Paper No. 05, Proudhon, Bakunin And Anarcho-Socialism, Lauren Sweger-Hollingsworth

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to establish that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin advanced ideas supporting what can be identified as anarcho-socialism, and the distinctness in their approaches can also be associated with splits that emerged with the First International Workingmen’s Association. For Proudhon, the institution of property entrenches inequality. In Proudhon’s judgement, society must orient towards advancing independence, proportionality, equality, and individual autonomy without limitations from legal structures. In Bakunin’s anarcho-socialist view, society must reject all forms of authority. In Bakunin’s conception of society, economic and political structures must be constructed from base to summit, founded upon the rights of free …

Working Paper No. 18, Thomas Piketty On Capital And Inequality, Max Randall

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to establish that, in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty advances ideas concerning the origins and implication of economic inequality. Piketty commences his inquiry by considering and detailing wage differences amongst distinct classes of society. This mechanism for the distribution of income is compared across selected nations, and the differing tendencies over time are examined in detail. Distinct from working wages, Piketty considers income effects associated with capital ownership. Adding to this, Piketty shows that effects of inheritance need be considered as capital is passed to successive generations, thereby allowing the accruing of monetary …

Working Paper No. 31, Marx And Proudhon: Two Visions Of Socialism, Lillian Garcia

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to establish that Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon espoused fundamentally different visions of socialism. Marx regarded Proudhon with initial enthusiasm and joined the left at large in celebrating his 1840 essay, What is Property? However, in 1846, when Proudhon attempted to solve the problems of capitalism in his work, System of Economic of Contradictions or The Philosophy of Poverty, Marx took to his pen for an unsparing attack, authoring his The Poverty of Philosophy. At the crux of their split were two analyses of the status of labor and two competing prescriptions for change. While …

Working Paper No. 15, Jevons’ Selective Interpretation Of Bentham, Devin Bales

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to establish that in The Theory of Political Economy, W. Stanley Jevons offers a selective interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s notion of utility. Moreover, Jevons does so in a manner that generates enduring implications for Economics as a science. Special emphasis is placed upon Jevons’ use of Bentham’s understanding of the circumstances that direct pursuits of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Emphasized is that Jevons’ omission of ‘fecundity, purity, and extent’ as quantifiers of utility, creates enduring implications that emerged years after his book’s publication in 1871. What is finally considered are some of the difficulties associated …

Working Paper No. 16, Had We Paid Attention To Keynes?, Saidhbhe Quigley

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to establish that a host of problems could have been averted had we paid attention to Keynes. In the view of Keynes (2013, pp. 23-28), the Versailles Treaty was unnecessarily punitive towards Germany. He explains that the terms negotiated during the Paris Peace Conference were at odds with the agreement that took place during the Armistice when both sides decided to lay down their weapons and end fruitless battling. Consequently, following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Germany registered as one of the most nations most tragically affected by the Great Depression. This is partially because of …

Working Paper No. 21, The Union Of Democracy And Socialism: Towards An Intellectual Biography Of Karl Kautsky, Leo Kendall

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to establish that Karl Kautsky’s vision of social democracy considered and incorporated the best of his day’s socialist theory, leading to the creation of a powerful formula that has also proved enduring, leading towards the achievement of socialist goals. Karl Kautsky was influenced by his work with Karl Marx, Eduard Bernstein and Friedrich Engels. During his time with these noted thinkers he created a unique form of socialism that today is termed ‘social democracy’. Kautsky advanced the view that socialism could better survive when it integrated democracy. Socialism cannot have a period of dictatorship for implementation, but …

Working Paper No. 13, Friedrich List And National Development, Mitch B. Priestley

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to establish that Friedrich List offers an approach to national economic development based upon implementing policies. List conceptualizes and describes a situation wherein the United States, along with Germany and some other Continental European countries, face challenges dissimilar to Britain. List emphasizes an alternate approach towards national development that flies in the face of Adam Smith’s laissez-faire, free-trade prescription, focusing instead upon the powers of production, that he suggests, offer a proper measure of a nation’s wealth. List is a limited protectionist who advocates for national policies suited to a nation based upon its history and level …

Working Paper No. 17, William Petty And Political Economy, Clarissa Allen

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to establish that during the first part of the 1600s, William Petty generated original contributions to political economy. Subsequent to the Irish rebellion and in the wake of the English occupation of Ireland, Petty led a team of surveyors for measuring out areas of Ireland. The survey that he led mapped selected territories and detailed numerous characteristics, thus employing an early, rudimentary, but highly insightful census method. Petty sought to describe his world objectively and quantitatively through the use of numbers, weights, and measures – rather than subjectively. Petty developed a method of calculation still famously known …

Working Paper No. 20, Veblen And The Question Of Sexual Selection, Jenica M. Kramer

Working Papers in Economics

This inquiry seeks to counter a hypothesis recently advanced by Jon D. Wisman; which states that Thorstein Veblen “missed” the opportunity to incorporate sexual selection into his evolutionary economics. To the contrary, I shall argue that Veblen’s vision is not at all lacking and that he intentionally failed to integrate into his evolutionary thinking the animal drive of sexual selection. First-off, I offer an account of Wisman’s thesis and this is followed by a refutation of his argument while making use of Veblen’s key concepts. Tracing the evolution of “conspicuous consumption” to its social inception, I endeavor to reveal the …