Archive of papers
Patrizio Lainà
Full-reserve banking, which prohibits private money creation, has not been implemented since the 19th century. Thereafter, bank deposits became the dominant means of payment and have retained their position until today. The specific contribution of this paper is to provide …
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Posted for review 16 Apr 2015
Published
M. Shahid Alam
A review of economic thought in Western Europe since the 15th century reveals two streams of economic thought: interventionist and laissez fairist. The mercantilists saw commodities as complex entities with multiple attributes, some of which are more growth-enhancing than others. …
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Posted for review 27 Mar 2015
Published
Diana Andrada Filip & Cyrille Piatecki
The double-entry bookkeeping promoted by Luca Pacioli in the fifteenth century could be considered a strong argument in behalf of the multiplicative calculus which can be developed from the Grossman and Katz non-newtonian calculus concept provided that one goes from …
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Posted for review 16 Feb 2015
Unpublished
Ajit Sinha
Sraffa’s book (1960), Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, is perhaps the most enigmatic theoretical work ever published in economic theory. Of course, all classics are somewhat puzzling and do give rise to a number of interpretations over a …
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Posted for review 7 Nov 2014
Published
Scott Scheall
The present essay investigates the development of F.A. Hayek’s thought concerning industrial fluctuations from the perspective of his methodology of sciences of complex phenomena and concludes that – to the extent this evolution is representative of Hayek’s more general ‘epistemic …
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Posted for review 24 Oct 2014
Published
Florence Gauthier
Among the important works of Edward Palmer Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” published in 1971 occupies an especially important place. He severely critiqued the historiography of his era, because it no longer saw …
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Posted for review 1 Aug 2014
Published
David Ellerman
Liberal thought (in the sense of classical liberalism) is based on the juxtaposition of consent to coercion. Autocracy and slavery were seen as based on coercion whereas today’s political democracy and economic “employment system” are based on consent to voluntary …
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Posted for review 23 Jul 2014
Peter H. Bent
One of the main economic debates taking place in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America was between supporters of protectionism and advocates of free trade policies. Protectionists won this debate, as the 1897 Dingley Tariff raised tariff rates to …
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Posted for review 23 Jul 2014
Published
Manuel Wörsdörfer
The paper gives an overview of primate research and the economic-ethical lessons we can derive from it. In particular, it examines the complex, multi-faceted, and partially conflicting nature of (non-)human primates. Our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, are …
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Posted for review 7 Jul 2014
Gavin Kennedy
I offer a comment on a paper by Prof David Andrews, ‘Adam Smith’s Natural Prices, the Gravitation Metaphor, and the Purposes of Nature’, 2014, published in Economic Thought, 3.1, pp. 42-55, which takes a philosophical view of Adam Smith’s use …
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Posted for review 20 Jun 2014
Published
Alexander Tobon and Nicolas Barbaroux
Following the recent debates in the New Neoclassical Synthesis, the theory of monetary policy had been renewed. The method that prevails, illustrated by Woodford’s Interest and Prices, is a Dynamic General Stochastic Equilibrium Model (DGSE) in which the old LM …
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Posted for review 21 Jan 2014
Claudio Gnesutta
If “well-being” is to be the key concept in political economy, then economists are placed, from a methodological viewpoint, in an uncomfortable position. A well-being approach requires consideration of several non-economic dimensions strongly interrelated with the economic process, and failure …
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Posted for review 1 Nov 2013
Constantinos Repapis
This paper gives an account of the debate between F.A. Hayek and J.M. Keynes in the 1930s written for the common reader. The purpose for this is twofold. First to provide the general reader with a narrative of what happened, …
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Posted for review 1 Nov 2013
Carmine Gorga
An integrated system of economic theory and policy allowed for the free market price of land to cyclically go down to zero and facilitated the restitution of the land to the original possessor on the year of the Jubilee. A …
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Posted for review 18 Sep 2013
Unpublished
Jorge Morales Meoqui
There are three main claims in this paper: First, there is sufficient evidence for affirming that Ricardo adhered to Smith’s productivity theory; second, Ricardo’s original demonstration of the comparative-advantage proposition is indeed compatible and complementary with respect to the latter; …
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Posted for review 5 Sep 2013
David Andrews
Adam Smith’s “natural price” has long been interpreted as a “normal price” or “center of gravitation price” based on the famous gravitation metaphor of the Wealth of Nations I.vii, natural in the sense that it is the price that would …
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Posted for review 22 Jul 2013
Published
Grazia Ietto-Gillies
The paper briefly summarizes the historical evolution of TNCs and their activities. It then introduced the major theories developed to explain the TNC. There is an attempt to place the theories historically, within the context of the socio-economic conditions and …
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Posted for review 4 Jul 2013
Alex Rosenberg
This paper identifies the major failings of mainstream economics and the rational choice theory it relies upon. These failures were identified by the four figures mentioned in the title: economics treats agents as rational fools; by the time the long …
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Posted for review 3 Jul 2013
Published
Alessandro Roncaglia
The mainstream view about the irrelevance of the history of economic thought (HET) is illustrated, and the reasons for it are indicated in the hidden assumption of a positivist idea about the cumulative growth of knowledge. HET is however very …
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Posted for review 1 Jul 2013
Published
Daniyal Khan
The paper analyzes Robert Heilbroner’s philosophy of economics through the lens of Max Weber’s philosophy of science. Specifically, Heilbroner’s position on vision, ideology and value-freedom is examined by contextualizing it within a framework of Weberian science. Doing so leads to …
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Posted for review 22 Feb 2013
Published