Economics Commons^™

Four Essays On Peace Consolidation And Ethnic Reconciliation In Postwar Sri Lanka, Narayani Sritharan

Doctoral Dissertations

In four essays, this dissertation explores the process of peace consolidation and economic recovery from the devastating conflict of 1983-2009 in Sri Lanka. This dissertation addresses a timely and important topic. The findings make an important contribution to the literature on economic development and peacebuilding, specifically on the role of foreign aid in alleviating the risks of conflict and helping countries rebuild their economies after conflict. The dissertation highlights important political economy dimensions that help illustrate social and political dynamics that lead to conflict, such as regional and ethnic inequalities, which also influence post-conflict reconstruction. In addition to a historical …

The State-Constituted Market Economy: A Conceptual Framework For China’S State–Market Relations, Isabella Weber, Hao Qi

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Scholars increasingly conclude that China has created a distinct economic system. Yet despite a growing literature with valuable contributions on the institutional arrangements under ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’, the economic mechanisms underpinning China’s state–market relations remain undertheorised. In this paper we develop a conceptual framework of what we call China’s state-constituted market economy. We argue that the Chinese state ‘constitutes’ the market economy by not only creating new markets through industrial and innovation policies, but by continuously participating and steering markets for essentials in order to stabilise and guide the economy as a whole. Essential is thereby defined as ‘systemically …

Systemic Cycles Of Accumulation And Chaos In The World Capitalist System: A Missing Link, Giorgos Galanis, Christian Koutny, Isabella Weber

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We re-examine the Systemic Cycles of Accumulation (SCA) of Arrighi (2010) and Arrighi and Silver (1999) which provide a framework for the analysis of the cyclical patterns of geographical expansion of trade and production and the related shifts of hegemonic power within the world capitalist system. Within the SCA framework, the last stage of a hegemonic cycle is characterized by what is called ‘systemic chaos’, however the drivers of these chaotic dynamics have not been explicitly analyzed. This article fills this gap by providing a link between the accumulation process, the spatio-temporal fix, and systemic chaos, in three steps. First, …

World Profit Rates, 1960-2019, Deepankar Basu, Julio Huato, Jesus Lara Jauregui, Evan Wasner

Economics Department Working Paper Series

In this paper we present estimates of the world profit rate using country-level data from the Extended Penn World Table 7.0 and industry-level data from the World Input Output Database. The country-aggregated world profit rate series spans the period from 1960 to 2019, and the industry-aggregated world profit rate series runs from 2000 to 2014. The country-aggregated world profit rate series displays a strong negative linear trend for the period 1960-1980 and a weaker negative linear trend from 1980 to 2019. A medium run decomposition analysis reveals that the decline in the world profit rate is driven by a decline …

Three Essays On Labor And Marriage Markets: Farm Crisis And Rural-To-Urban Migration In The United States, 1920-1940, Jennifer Withrow

Doctoral Dissertations

Race and gender create differential responses to, and outcomes of, economic crisis. In this dissertation, I study the intersection of race and gender in the context of steep declines in farm commodity prices during the U.S. farm crisis of the 1920s and 1930s. Against this backdrop, women altered their marriage timing, increased their labor force participation, and migrated off-farm. Previous quantitative studies of this period typically omitted women due to challenges linking women from one historical census to the next after marriage. I create new datasets following women over both decades and draw on archival sources to explore the impact …

Three Essays On Socio-Institutional Ecosystems & Labor Structures, Jonathan Donald Jenner

Doctoral Dissertations

In three essays, this dissertation explores the relationship between the social and the economic, with an eye to how social and institutional formations affect economic outcomes. In the first essay, I construct a theoretical base by developing the metaphor of ‘ecosystem’ as a frame for thinking of the various interrelations between social processes and economic phenomena – the socio-institutional ecosystem analysis. In invoking ecosystem as a central metaphor, this dissertation calls into focus the interaction between the economic and the non-economic, recognizing the multiplicity of causal inter- and intra-relationships between the two. I deploy this analysis in two substantive case …

The (Im-)Possibility Of Rational Socialism: Mises In China’S Market Reform Debate, Isabella M. Weber

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper investigates the long first decade of reform in China (1978-1992) to show that Mises, in particular his initiating contribution to the Socialist Calculation Debate, became relevant to the reconfiguration of China’s political economy when the reformers gave up on the late Maoist primacy of continuous revolution and adhered instead to an imperative of development and catching up. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao had rejected the notions of efficiency and rational economic management. In the late 1970s, the reformers under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership elevated these notions to highest principle. As a result, Mises’ critique that socialism could not achieve …

The Nature Of Money And The Theory Of International Trade: Thornton And Ricardo, Isabella M. Weber

Economics Department Working Paper Series

A rich recent literature reinvestigates the nature of money, but little attention has been paid to the ramifications of the ways in which we theorize money for the theory of international trade. This paper examines the logical relationship between the neutrality of money and self-balancing trade based on Henry Thornton and David Ricardo as two foundational contributions to credit and commodity money theories respectively. I show that both authors theorize trade as self-balancing whenever money is conceptualized as neutral. I distinguish two notions of the neutrality of money: ex ante and ex post neutrality. In Thornton’s Paper Credit money is …

China’S Ancient Principles Of Price Regulation Through Market Participation: The Guanzi From A Comparative Perspective, Isabella Weber

Economics Department Working Paper Series

The History of Economic Thought as a field has long taken it as a premise that so far as ancient economic thought is concerned, only the Greeks and Romans are worth studying. This paper introduces the Guanzi as a core text in ancient Chinese economic thought on price stabilization from a comparative perspective with ancient Greek contributions. The Guanzi presents a framework for the empirical analysis of market fluctuations and price movements and derives principles of economic governance from this analysis. In contrast Plato and Aristotle come to the question of price determination from the angle of moral philosophy. They …

Shooting For An Economic “Miracle”: German Post-War Neoliberal Thought In China’S Market Reform Debate, Isabella M. Weber

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper develops a comparative and connected history of the debates over transition to a market economy in West-Germany after World War II and in China during the first decade of reform and opening up under Deng Xiaoping (1978-1988). At both historical moments the political aim was to reintroduce market mechanisms into a dysfunctional command economy. The question what kind of price reform this required was subject to heated debates among economists. This paper shows how the West-German 1948 currency and price reform was introduced into the Chinese reform debate by German ordoliberals and neoliberals like Friedman. It traces how …

Three Essays On The Past And Future Of Socialism, Mihnea Tudoreanu

Doctoral Dissertations

The idea of economic planning and state ownership of the means of production, which had been central to socialist economic thought for a century and a half, suddenly fell out of favor even among socialists after the fall of the Soviet Union. The three essays of this dissertation are in essence critiques of this 21st century orthodoxy. The first essay addresses the idea of market socialism, as proposed by several academic works in the decades before and after the fall of the USSR. The essay questions whether market socialism would be substantially different from capitalism in practice. It aims to …

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 …

Revisiting The East Asian Miracle: Labor Regimes, Profitability And Accumulation, Zhongjin Li

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation project revisits the widely-acclaimed East Asian miracle from a political economy perspective focusing on class dynamics and profit regimes. After reviewing the historically comparative context of East Asian development, and the economic literature before and after the 1997 crisis, I provide an alternative analytical framework to the dominant market-oriented versus state-interventionist approaches in exploring the long-term trajectories of transformation in the East Asian regimes of capital accumulation. More specifically, my dissertation focuses on two analytical questions in the East Asian development context: the transformation of labor regimes and the evolving class dynamics, and the dynamics of profit rates …

Constraining Labor's “Double Freedom”: Revisiting The Impact Of Wrongful Discharge Laws On Labor Markets, 1979-2014, Eric Hoyt

Doctoral Dissertations

I study the impact of wrongful discharge laws, a form of employment protection in the U.S., on union membership, wages, job tenure, and on-the-job training. There are several important contributions of this work to the previous social science research on the topic: First, I update the legal adoption dataset to 2014. Second, this is the first examination to date of the link between wrongful discharge laws and unions. Third, this is the first analysis that is able to include firm size controls in the investigation of the impact of wrongful discharge laws on wages. Finally, this analysis is the first …

The Economy Of Evangelism In The Colonial American South, Julia Carroll

Masters Theses

Eighteenth-century Methodist evangelism supported, perpetuated, and promoted slavery as requisite for a productive economy in the colonial American South. Religious thought of the First Great Awakening emerged alongside a colonial economy increasingly reliant on chattel slavery for its prosperity. The records of well-traveled celebrity minister and provocateur of the Anglican tradition, George Whitefield, suggest how Calvinist-Methodist evangelicals viewed slavery as necessary to supporting colonial ministerial efforts. Whitefield’s absorption of and immersion into American culture is revealed in his owning a plantation, portraying a willingness to sacrifice the mobility of the disfranchised for widespread consumption of evangelical thought. A side effect …

Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the past forty-years, neoliberal education reform policies in the U.S. have spurred significant resistance, often galvanized by claims that such policies undermine public education as a vital institution of U.S. democracy. Within this narrative, many activists call to “save our schools” and return them to a time when public schools served the common good. With these narratives in mind, I explore the foundational and persistent power structures that characterize the U.S. as a means to reveal the fundamental purpose of its public education system. The questions that guide my research include: (1) With an understanding that capitalism, white supremacy, …

Colonial And Post-Colonial Origins Of Agrarian Development: The Case Of Two Punjabs, Shahram Azhar

Doctoral Dissertations

This study explores the colonial and post-colonial origins of agrarian development by looking at the role of historical institutions, class formations and the state (ICS) in shaping the process. It contributes to the “divergence debates” in economics, which make an attempt to explain the ‘fundamental causes’ of divergence between countries. While one strand of the divergence literature presents the process as being functional to ‘geography’, a second strand focuses on the institutional legacies of colonialism; what is common to both sets of explanations, however, is the view that future outcomes are completely pre-determined by one or another time-invariant factor, leading …

The Labor Share Question In China, Hao Qi

Doctoral Dissertations

In this study I explore why China’s labor share measured by the conventional approach experienced a major decline over the period from the mid-1990s to the outbreak of the global financial and economic crisis in 2008. I adopt a Marxian approach to address this question. Following the Marxian approach, I focus on how the power relation in the sphere of production affects labor’s share. I argue that major changes in the power relation that took place during the transition of China’s economic system have played a crucial role in the changes of distribution. To this end, I build homogenous series …

Three Essays In Macroeconomic History, Joshua W. Mason

Doctoral Dissertations

Following Minsky, an economy can be understood as a set of units linked to each other by flows of money payments and by the commitments to future payments reflected on balance sheets. This dissertation offers three accounts of the historical evolution of the US economy, conceived of a network of balance sheets, over the course of 20th and early 21st century. The first essay looks at changes in the pattern of payment flows between nonfinancial corporations and financial markets associated with the ``shareholder revolution" of the 1980s. It argues that the shift in payouts to shareholders from a quasi-fixed stream …

Advertising And The Creation Of Exchange Value, Zoe Sherman

Doctoral Dissertations

Advertising and the Creation of Exchange Value explores the economics of the industry and the commodification of communications that characterizes consumer goods advertising in the U.S. I consider three phases of communications that take on three distinct commodity forms. First is access to attention, the interception of the audience’s perception; Chapter One, “The Commodification of Audience Attention in the U.S., 1865-1920” traces the conversion of audience attention to commodity form as advertising space/time. Second is content; Chapter Two, “The Value Analytics of Advertising,” examines the nature of advertising content as a commodified form of speech, produced on demand for purchasers …

The Financial Underpinnings Of The Eu Crisis: Financial Deregulation, Privatization, And Asymmetric State Power, Nina Q. Eichacker

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation asks the following questions. How has financial liberalization affected the incidence of financial crisis in Europe? How have power asymmetries within Western Europe facilitated the process of financial liberalization, and distributed the costs and gains from this liberalization? How have these dynamics been demonstrated at the state level? It charts the institutional liberalization and privatization of European finance from the 1960s onward and presents a survey of descriptive statistics that show how different financial stability, financial flow, and macroeconomic variables have changed in Western Europe since the early 1980s, generally increasing financial and economic instability. It also demonstrates …

Bolivia's Coca Headache: The Agroyungas Program, Inflation, Campesinos, Coca And Capitalism In Bolivia, John D. Roberts

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Bolivia in the 1980s was wracked by monetary inflation approaching levels of the German Weimar Republic. Immediately following this time of great financial crisis in Bolivia, the U.N. founded a project through the U.N.D.P. to encourage peasant farmers in Bolivia to switch from growing coca (the plant used manufacture cocaine) to growing other cash crops for market. This crop substitution and development program, called the Agroyungas Project, lasted from 1985 to 1991 and is the focus of this study. While many U.N. pundits and journalists considered the program’s initial small successes promising, it has been considered since its conclusion to …

Gill, Massachusetts: The Mariamante Parcel, Center For Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

In December of 2004, the small Massachusetts town of Gill took a tremendous step to influence its own future. A fifteen acre parcel of land in the south of town, near the intersection of two important town roads, had been put up for sale by its previous owners. The land had been under an agricultural preservation restriction, a program enabled by Massachusetts General Law Chapter 61 A. As part of this restriction, if the land were ever sold, the town would have right of first refusal.

The town's recent Community Development Plan has identified the parcel as a prime site …

Economic Development Plan Town Of Warren, Massachusetts, Center For Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

This section of the Comprehensive Plan identifies economic development strategies within the framework of various development opportunities available to Warren given its current economic and geographical standing within the region. These economic development strategies strive to meet the needs and desires of the residents of Warren, Massachusetts based on their input and an analysis of local and regional economic trends and conditions. These potential economic strategies, intended to promote future economic growth, are in alignment with the Town’s core values and community goals.

Warren currently has two village centers, an active mill complex, significant open space, rivers and wetlands, and …

Miami Furniture Study, Center For Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

This research project, under the guidance of Dr. John Mullin and Professor Zenia Kotval, sought to study and examine Miami's fledgling furniture cluster as well as key elements of the American furniture industry. I believe that this report presents an honest unbiased "snapshot" of the American furniture industry and the City of Miami's furniture design district. All of the information contained within this report has been cited and referenced to the best of my ability.

The Film Industry Cluster Development Recommendations For Western Massachusetts, Center For Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

California is home to the world's largest movie clusters. It grew out of the need to extend beyond New York's confined environment. The opportunities that lay ahead were carefully planned and exploited. For Western Massachusetts to learn from this example it will have to discover a niche that can be marketed as truly worthy of attracting businesses away from established clusters. This will require a top-down approach from government bodies to ensure that a successful cluster fits wit the New England lifestyle. Current opportunities exist within factory towns that have available old mill buildings and infrastructure. Unfortunately the establishment of …

Town Of Billerica, Massachusetts Master Plan Appendix B Community Charrette Results, Center For Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

This is Appendix B of the Town of Billerica, Massachusetts Master Plan. This Appendix contains the results of a Community Charrette in Billerica, Massachusetts that helped identify the desires of residents in the community.

Town Of Billerica, Massachusetts Master Plan Appendix C Community Survey Results, Center For Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

This is Appendix C of the Town of Billerica, Massachusetts Master Plan. This Appendix contains a summarized report of the results of a community survey.

Town Of Billerica, Massachusetts Master Plan, Center For Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

Billerica is a community rich in history and burgeoning with change. We come from colonial, agrarian roots, participated in the industrial revolution and enjoyed our day as a vacation destination. Billerica changed as the post war economy changed and became a haven for those, many from the city, seeking a close-knit community to raise families. We are now at the forefront of a high technology economy that has brought with it jobs, hotels and more change. As a community we struggle with our desire to preserve our historical character as a rural community and our realization that economic development is …

Town Of Billerica, Massachusetts Master Plan Appendix D, Center For Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

This is an appendix for the Town of Billerica, Massachusetts Master Plan. This Appendix contains a community buildout analysis for Billerica.