Economic Theory Commons^™

Reclaiming Prosperity: Repositioning Southern Nevada For The Next Economy, Bruce Katz

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

The outlines of the next American economy are coming into focus, yet the future remains uncertain in Southern Nevada as America's newest metropolis labors through a major recession. It is time therefore to get back on track and begin laying the foundation for a new and more durable kind of growth in metropolitan Las Vegas and across the Intermountain West. To help with that, urban visionary Bruce Katz advanced a powerful depiction of the next American economy in a major UNLV lecture and articulated a bold agenda for helping Las Vegas reclaim prosperity in the new era.

Economic Thinking And Risk Attitudes: An Empirical Study, Peter Slepcevic-Zach, Ph.D., Thomas Koeppel

International Journal for Business Education

In the light of the current economic crisis, which had its roots in high risk dealings in the international financial markets, the question how economically minded students are and what propensity towards risk they have, are essential to improving their financial literacy. In a broad survey including economic and non-economic schools 649 students aged 14 and 18 were questioned. In this paper results are presented and implications for classroom teaching and curricular development are derived.

Determinants Of Housing Prices In Pittsylvania County, Jason Hall

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this research is to determine the implicit factors influencing housing prices in Pittsylvania County, a rural county in Southside Virginia. Currently in Pittsylvania County there is a debate over whether or not to mine what is believed to be the largest deposit of uranium in the United States, containing approximately 119 million pounds of uranium ore at an estimated value of $7 billion to $10 billion. The Virginia Coal and Energy Commission issued its final approval for the National Academy of Sciences to study the debate from a socio-economic standpoint. The $1.2 million study is currently taking …

The Social Strategy Game: Resource Competition Within Female Social Networks Among Small-Scale Forager-Horticulturalists, Stacey L. Rukas, Michael Gurven, Hillard Kaplan, Jeffrey Winking

ESI Publications

This paper examines social determinants of resource competition among Tsimane Amerindian women of Bolivia. We introduce a semi-anonymous experiment (the Social Strategy Game) designed to simulate resource competition among women. Information concerning dyadic social relationships and demographic data were collected to identify variables influencing resource competition intensity, as measured by the number of beads one woman took from another. Relationship variables are used to test how the affiliative or competitive aspects of dyads affect the extent of prosociality in the game. Using a mixed-modeling procedure, we find that women compete with those with whom they are quarreling over accusations of …

Countervailing Power In Wholesale Pharmaceuticals, Sara F. Ellison, Christopher M. Snyder

Dartmouth Scholarship

Using data on wholesale prices for antibiotics sold to U.S. drugstores, we test the growing theoretical literature on ‘countervailing power’ (a term for the ability of large buyers to extract discounts from suppliers). Large drugstores receive a modest discount for antibiotics produced by competing suppliers but no discount for antibiotics produced by monopolists. These findings support theories suggesting that supplier competition is a prerequisite for countervailing power. As further evidence for the importance of supplier competition, we find that hospitals receive substantial discounts relative to drugstores, attributed to hospitals' greater ability to induce supplier competition through restrictive formularies.

Monopoly, Regulation, And Innovation, Matt Bogard

Economics Faculty Publications

Recently the Justice department has started investigations into alleged anti-trust violations by Monsanto. This has helped fuel a lot of already hyped discontent with one of the world’s leaders in innovative solutions for sustainable agriculture. This article discusses how the regulatory environment could possibly have contributed to more concentration and power in the biotech industry. Increasing regulation would likely have the opposite effect of creating a level playing field in the agriculture industry. From AgWeb, March 27,2010 http://www.agweb.com/blog/Economic_Sense_190/Monopoly_Regulation__and_Innovation_10771/

The Gettysburg Economic Review, Volume 4, Spring 2010

Gettysburg Economic Review

No abstract provided.

An Examination Of Non-Linear Relationships Between Intellectual Property Rights Protection And Growth, Brian R. Lemak

Gettysburg Economic Review

This paper examines the possibility of a non-linear relationship existing between intellectual property rights protection (IPR) and gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates. A theoretical justification is developed for the potential existence of a non-linear relationship in terms of a quadratic relationship. This is then examined using panel data from 191 countries and taken in 5 year intervals, although the data had many missing observations. Results indicate there is statistically significant evidence that a quadratic relationship exists between IPR and GDP growth, however there are reservations about this evidence due to a dearth of observations in countries with very weak …

Did I Do That? Group Positioning And Asymmetry In Attributional Bias, Brian Gunia, Brice Corgnet

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

A laboratory experiment examined whether one structural feature of groups—members’ physical positioning—may produce asymmetry in their perceived contribution to a task. In particular, we investigated asymmetry in group members’ (often excessive) claims of credit for collective tasks ("the self-serving attributional bias"). Consistent with the availability account of this bias, group members located in the middle of a group, with easy visual access to their partners’ contributions, demonstrated less bias than outside members (who demonstrated bias consistent with prior research)—but no less satisfaction. Further analyses suggested that these results reflected bias reduction among middle members and did stem from visual availability. …

Team Formation And Self‐Serving Biases, Brice Corgnet

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

There is extensive evidence which indicates that people learn positively about themselves. We build on this finding to develop a model of team formation. We show that under complete information learning positively about oneself prevents efficient team formation. Agents becoming overconfident tend to ask for an excessive share of the group outcome. Positive learning generates divergence in workers' beliefs and hampers efficient team formation. Interestingly, in a context of incomplete information regarding the partner's ability, extensive learning biases may reduce the divergence in agents' beliefs and facilitate efficient team formation as a result. We apply our model to coauthorship and …

Product Innovation And Stability Of Collusion, Sougata Poddar, Bibhas Saha

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We study the nature of market competition in relation to stability of collusion in the infinitely repeated play of a twostage game of product innovation and market competition, and show that cooperation in giving R&D efforts is more easily sustained when firms compete in quantity than in price.

Enumerating Old Themes? Berle’S Concept Of Ownership And The Historical Development Of English Company Law In Context, Lorraine E. Talbot

Seattle University Law Review

This paper offers some tentative suggestions as to why Berle’s work has been read and interpreted so selectively in the United Kingdom. I suggest that this must be partly attributable to the historical developments in English company law that entrenched the notion of shareholder ownership claims. Specifically, unincorporated associations’ normative values—that members are owners and there is no distinction between small organizations with no share dispersal and large organizations with wide share dispersal—have a continuing influence on this entrenched notion of shareholder ownership claims. First, I provide an overview of the origins of English company law. Next, I address how …

Power Without Property, Still: Unger, Berle, And The Derivatives Revolution, Cristie Ford, Carol Liao

Seattle University Law Review

We are in a time when the notion of property is in flux. The derivatives revolution has shattered the “atom of property” well beyond what was originally imagined in 1932 by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means. This disaggregation has had fascinating, and often adverse, effects on corporate law and securities regulation. Moreover, the phenomenon has had the unexpected effect of permitting some parties that already possess considerable social, economic, and political power to accumulate even more.

See No Evil? Revisiting Early Visions Of The Social Responsibility Of Business: Adolf A. Berle’S Contribution To Contemporary Conversations, Erika George

Seattle University Law Review

Much corporate legal scholarship considers such fact patterns as beyond the scope of the discipline’s core concerns. Yet, increasingly, questions are asked concerning the scale and scope of modern corporate power. This Article will challenge the conventional understanding of what the core discipline of corporate law should encompass and argues that the failure to focus on precisely these sorts of factual scenarios involving allegations of corporate complicity in human rights violations and environmental degradation is misguided and short-sighted.

Then And Now: Professor Berle And The Unpredictable Shareholder, Jennifer G. Hill

Seattle University Law Review

Shareholders, and the relationship between shareholders and management, lay at the heart of Professor Berle’s scholarship. The goal of this Article is to compare the image of shareholders emerging from The Modern Corporation and Private Property and the Berle/Dodd debate with a range of contemporary visions of the shareholder that underpin some international regulatory responses to recent financial debacles, from Enron to the current global financial crisis. As the Article dis- cusses, these recent developments in the era of financial crises have prompted a reevaluation of the traditional image of the shareholder—and the role of the shareholder in the modern …

Berle And The Entrepreneur, Charles R.T. O'Kelley

Seattle University Law Review

In the first and last four chapters (“the Five Chapters”) of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf Berle, Jr. describes in sweeping terms a fundamental transformation of the American economy. . . . Writing more than ten years before Berle, another seminal scholar, Frank Knight . . . developed a theory of the entrepreneur as part of his larger effort to more carefully explain the theoretical underpinnings of a free-market economy. . . . Given Knight’s prominence and the fact that Knight apparently reached dramatically different conclusions than did Berle concerning the consequences flowing from separation of ownership …

Neo-Brandeisianism And The New Deal: Adolf A. Berle, Jr., William O. Douglas, And The Problem Of Corporate Finance In The 1930s, Jessica Wang

Seattle University Law Review

This essay revisits Adolf A. Berle, Jr. and The Modern Corporation and Private Property by focusing on the triangle of Berle, Louis D. Brandeis, and William O. Douglas in order to examine some of the underlying assumptions about law, economics, and the nature of modern society behind securities regulation and corporate finance in the 1930s. I explore Douglas and Berle’s academic and political relationship, the conceptual underpinnings of Brandeis, Berle, and Douglas’s critiques of modern finance, and the ways in which the two younger men—Berle and Douglas—ultimately departed from their role model, Brandeis.

Acting In Good Faith: An Economic Approach To Religious Organizations As Advocacy Groups, Anthony J. Gill, Steven J. Pfaff

Sociology Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Advocacy groups are all the rage! Over the past two decades, a new cottage industry has erupted in academia examining the seemingly explosive growth in new social movements, advocacy groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that has occurred in Western industrialized nations and several developing nations as well. Many of these movements and NGOs have crossed international boundaries, feeding the notion that globalization is eroding boundaries between people all around the world. This literature certainly has added to our knowledge of how advocacy groups originate and operate. But curiously missing from these recent studies has been any discussion of what amounts …

Sraffa, Marx, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Shaikh, A. (2008, August 27). Letter to Francisco on the algebraic decomposition of long-term exchange rate behavior, international terms of trade, and real unit labor costs [Unpublished letter manuscript].

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Smith and a standard system: Equations [Unpublished handwritten manuscript].

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Ricardo, Sraffa, Marx: Paper topics (Eco 211S) [Unpublished handwritten manuscript].

• Shaikh, A. (2000, September). Vertically integrated labor costs and market prices in advanced countries [Unpublished document with charts].

• Shaikh, A. (1995, June 26). Standard price–value ratios (Marxian prices of production) [Unpublished document with charts].

• Shaikh, A. (1987, …

Eco104 Ricardo, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection contains:

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (2005, Fall). Historical foundations of political economy [Midterm exam sample questions].

• Ricardo 93 percent price theory [Handout]. (n.d.).

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Ricardo’s general problem [Handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A. (2010, September 8). Basic structure of the classical theory of price [Manuscript].

• Calculation of standard Marxian prices of production [File printout]. (2004, October 6).

• Wage-profit frontiers using commodity 61 as numeraire [Graphs]. (n.d.).

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (1973, February 27). Value seminar [Handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Ch IV: On natural and market price [Handwritten notes].

• …