Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Economics

Marquette University

Series

2023

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

(Wp 2023-06) Richard Arena On Sraffa And Wittgenstein, John B. Davis Dec 2023

(Wp 2023-06) Richard Arena On Sraffa And Wittgenstein, John B. Davis

Economics Working Papers

This paper discusses Richard Arena’s insightful and original contributions to interpreting the important interaction between Piero Sraffa and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It discusses this in terms of dilemmas they each encountered in transitions in their thinking in the 1930s, emphasizes the influence of Sraffa’s unpublished “Surplus Product” text, compares Sraffa’s critique of “natural science point of view” and Wittgenstein’s critique of logical form, and compares Sraffa’s later understanding of the relationship between production and distribution and Wittgenstein’s later understanding of forms of life and language-games. The paper argues this thinking opened up a approach to economic philosophy in connection with the …

Go to article

(Wp 2023-05) Measuring The Effects Of Unconventional Monetary Policy Tools Under Adaptive Learning, Stephen J. Cole, Sungjun Huh Oct 2023

(Wp 2023-05) Measuring The Effects Of Unconventional Monetary Policy Tools Under Adaptive Learning, Stephen J. Cole, Sungjun Huh

Economics Working Papers

We compare the economic effects of forward guidance and quantitative easing utilizing the four-equation New Keynesian model of Sims, Wu, and Zhang (2023) with agents forming expectations via an adaptive learning rule. The results indicate forward guidance can have a greater influence on macroeconomic variables compared to quantitative easing, suggesting that forward guidance may have contributed to the high inflation rate after the COVID-19 related recession. Adaptive learning agents estimate a higher effect of forward guidance on the economy leading to a greater impact on expectations, and thus, contemporaneous inflation. However, the performance gap between forward guidance and quantitative easing …

Go to article

(Wp 2023-04) Living Up To Expectations: Central Bank Credibility, The Effectiveness Of Forward Guidance, And Inflation Dynamics Post-Global Financial Crisis, Stephen J. Cole, Enrique Martínez-García, Eric Sims Oct 2023

(Wp 2023-04) Living Up To Expectations: Central Bank Credibility, The Effectiveness Of Forward Guidance, And Inflation Dynamics Post-Global Financial Crisis, Stephen J. Cole, Enrique Martínez-García, Eric Sims

Economics Working Papers

This paper studies the effectiveness of forward guidance when central banks have imperfect credibility. Exploiting unique survey-based measures of expected inflation, output growth, and interest rates, we estimate a small-scale New Keynesian model for the United States and other G7 countries plus Spain allowing for deviations from full information rational expectations. In our model, the key parameter that aggregates heterogeneous expectations captures the central bank's credibility and affects the over-all effectiveness of forward guidance. We find that the central banks of the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and other major advanced economies have similar levels of credibility (albeit far from full …

Go to article

(Wp 2023-03) Economics Imperialism And Economic Imperialism: Two Sides Of The Same Coin, Angela Ambrosino, Mario Cedrini, John B. Davis Sep 2023

(Wp 2023-03) Economics Imperialism And Economic Imperialism: Two Sides Of The Same Coin, Angela Ambrosino, Mario Cedrini, John B. Davis

Economics Working Papers

We argue that in a core-periphery economic world economics imperialism as advanced by the postwar Chicago School and economic imperialism led by the economies of the north are two sides of the same coin. We first review the parallelism between postwar capitalism’s core-periphery expansion of the north into the south and the Chicago’s theory of economics imperialism. We then distinguish four forms of relationships between different disciplines, and using Rodrik’s augmented global capitalism trilemma argue Chicago adopts his Golden Straitjacket pathway, both for north-south capitalist expansion and core mainstream economics’ orientation toward other social science disciplines. The paper then uses …

Go to article

(Wp 2023-02) What Are Reflexive Economic Agents? Position-Adjustment, Slam, And Self-Organization, John B. Davis Jun 2023

(Wp 2023-02) What Are Reflexive Economic Agents? Position-Adjustment, Slam, And Self-Organization, John B. Davis

Economics Working Papers

If mainstream economics and its view of economic agents is designed for a world in which reflexivity and feedback processes in the economy are ‘tamed’ and predictable, how are we to understand economic agents in a world in which reflexivity is ‘untamed’ and economies regularly exhibit unexpected fluctuations and significant nonlinearities? In a nonlinear world, economies evolve and undergo critical phase transitions from one form of organization to another. It seems, then, that we should also expect economic agents to evolve and undergo critical phase transitions from being one type of agent to another just as we observe that economies …

Go to article

(Wp 2023-01) Objectivity In Economics And The Problem Of The Individual, John B. Davis Mar 2023

(Wp 2023-01) Objectivity In Economics And The Problem Of The Individual, John B. Davis

Economics Working Papers

This paper addresses objectivity in economics. It criticizes a closed science, ‘view from nowhere’ conception of economics and defends an open science, ‘view from somewhere’ conception of objective science. It ascribes the first conception to mainstream economics, associates it with its principle practices – reductionist modeling, formalization, limited interdisciplinarity, and value neutrality – and argues their foundation is the Homo economicus individual conception. Two problematic consequences of adopting this stance are: (i) value blindness regarding the range and complexity of human values; (ii) fatalism regarding human behavior associated with employing a tenseless representation of time. The paper contrasts the principle …

Go to article