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Teaching happiness (economics) in your dismal-science courses
No full textThe authors of this article discuss ideas for incorporating the study of happiness and other measures of self-reported or subjective well-being (SWB) into undergraduate economics courses. They begin by motivating why economics students would benefit from learning about SWB, and then proceed to provide examples of ways to introduce this topic into different parts of the curriculum: macroeconomics, microeconomics, and upper-division electives
Creating and sustaining space for play as leeway for innovation
No full textLarge established organizations face the 'paradox of institutionalizing spontaneity'. While they recognize the need for innovation and create enabling structures to support it, these very structures can inadvertently constrain the spontaneous qualities essential for breakthrough innovation. This longitudinal ethnographic study explores how organizational members navigate this paradox by following six innovation projects over three years at a multinational technology company. Our processual analysis that combined participant observation, interviews, diaries, and project-related documents reveals that innovation projects progress through tactically re-created 'spaces for play'—temporary leeway that innovators create for themselves within existing organizational structures. We show how these spaces develop through recurring patterns of opening, maintaining, and reconstituting and how project teams employ situated tactics to creatively leverage specific organizational structures to open and sustain them. Projects advance by realigning with company strategy to re-open space for play, while those failing to connect either stop or pivot. Our findings suggest that innovation-enabling structures alone are insufficient. Innovators must continuously use tactical combinations to create and sustain temporary space for play as leeway for innovation, generating emerging impacts that influence organizational contexts and shape subsequent project developments. We also contribute both conceptual refinements and empirical grounding to the mainly theoretical body of knowledge on organizational entrepreneurship and space for play
Institutional reform, path development and firm creation: evidence from China
No full textThis paper examines whether and how government-led institutional changes can reshape regional industrial development trajectories. Using quarterly panel data from Chinese cities between 2019 and 2024, we assess the impact of reforms of the business environment on firm creation within both path creation and path dependent industries. Applying a staggered difference-in-differences approach combined with coarsened exact matching, our findings reveal that business environment reforms significantly increase firm creation in path creation industries, especially in high-tech sectors and cities with initially weaker business environments. Key mechanisms identified include enhancements in the market environment and government services, which are central to driving these effects
Regulatory means for interventionist ends: GBER and the transformation of the EU state aid regime
No full textDespite its new‐found penchant for market interventionism, the European Union (EU) is often portrayed as lacking the fiscal and administrative capacity to conduct industrial policy. The EU can regulate markets, the conventional wisdom goes, but not steer them in specific directions. In this article, we challenge the notion that regulation and industrial policy are inherently antithetical, arguing instead that the Commission uses its regulatory authority over state aid to indirectly steer member states' industrial policies. We theorize and empirically investigate this rules‐as‐tools approach to industrial policy through an in‐depth, multi‐method case study on the transformation of the EU's state aid regime, with a focus on the General Block Exemption Regulation (GBER). Combining original interviews, topic modeling, document analysis, and descriptive statistics, we demonstrate that the Commission has long used state aid regulation not only to restrict but also redirect state aid. Increasingly, it employs these rules to encourage selective interventions in the economy—particularly those supporting the twin transitions of digitalization and decarbonization
Toward a free economy: Swatantra and opposition politics in democratic India. Aditya Balasubramanian, (Princeton University Press, 2023. Pp. 352. ISBN: 9780691205243. Hbk £38)
No full textReconfiguration of basis pairs in regular matroids
Get PDFIn recent years, combinatorial reconfiguration problems have attracted great attention due to their connection to various topics such as optimization, counting, enumeration, or sampling. One of the most intriguing open questions concerns the exchange distance of two matroid basis sequences, a problem that appears in several areas of computer science and mathematics. White (1980) proposed a conjecture for the characterization of two basis sequences being reachable from each other by symmetric exchanges, which received a significant interest also in algebra due to its connection to toric ideals and Gröbner bases. In this work, we verify White's conjecture for basis sequences of length two in regular matroids, a problem that was formulated as a separate question by Farber, Richter, and Shank (1985) and Andres, Hochstättler, and Merkel (2014). Most of previous work on White's conjecture has not considered the question from an algorithmic perspective. We study the problem from an optimization point of view: our proof implies a polynomial algorithm for determining a sequence of symmetric exchanges that transforms a basis pair into another, thus providing the first polynomial upper bound on the exchange distance of basis pairs in regular matroids. As a byproduct, we verify a conjecture of Gabow (1976) on the serial symmetric exchange property of matroids for the regular case
Universality in the climate catastrophe: rethinking Chakrabarty’s Anthropocene philosophy of history with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature
Get PDFThis article critically examines Dipesh Chakrabarty's concept of Anthropocene history, a philosophy of history that is designed to respond to the universal challenge of the Anthropocene. It uses the work of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty to mitigate the pitfalls of Chakrabarty's concept and to propose an alternative relation between nature and history. I argue that the problem of Chakrabarty's Anthropocene history resides not in its use of the category of the universal per se but in its insufficient articulation of the particular. Even if he is correct in asserting that it is impossible to conceptualize the ecological crisis within the modern logic of history and that it is necessary to conceptualize the ecological crisis from a non‐Eurocentric perspective, Anthropocene history still leaves the modern structure of history untouched, resulting in a structure that is unable to meaningfully articulate particularity and universality because of its reliance on teleology and phenomenological emptiness. With this in mind, I show how Merleau‐Ponty's conceptual redefinition of nature as a foundational universality, when combined with the chiasmic intertwining of history and nature and a reflection on the concept of the institution as a point of passage between nature and history, enables us to rearticulate universality and particularity in the face of the ecological crisis. This in turn enables a freer conceptual navigation between the existential and political dimensions of the ecological crisis with which environmental philosophy is concerned
Hirak and Hosha: modalities of collective action in Jordan in the wake of the Arab Spring
Get PDFThis essay considers how the rural and tribal have been obscured from prevailing scholarly accounts of unrest and protest in the years since the Arab Uprisings of 2010–2012, and what this might mean for wider scholarly theorizations of protest and revolution. It draws on fieldwork in central Jordan, especially with Hirak Dhiban, where historical circumstances render visible dynamics also significant elsewhere. It takes as a heuristic binary two broad discursive modalities of seemingly dissimilar collective action that in fact reference and relate to each other in various revealing ways: on the one hand the politically populist and self-consciously leftist Hirak protest movements, prominent in the waves of protest since 2011, and on the other hosha—"tribal clashes.” It considers how contestations over the legitimacy, revolutionary potential, and moral valence of protests often hinge on discursive claims that, in a sense, Hirak is hosha, or hosha, Hirak. It engages with anthropological theories to interpret protest as a generative and affective process, rooted in local histories and imaginaries, even while responding to wider events. It calls for a broader reappraisal of where revolutionary potential is located and how it is recognized in anthropological and historical scholarship
The effects of wealth shocks on public and private long-term care insurance
Get PDFThe financing of long-term care services and supports (LTSS) relies heavily on self-insurance in the form of housing or financial wealth. Exploiting both local market variation in housing prices and individual-level variation in stock market wealth from 1996 to 2016, we show that exogenous wealth shocks significantly reduce the probability of LTCI coverage, without altering Medicaid eligibility among people with housing and financial assets. The effect of shocks to liquid wealth strongly dominates the effect of housing wealth changes. A $100 K increase in housing (financial) wealth reduces the likelihood of LTCI coverage by 1.24 (3.22) percentage points
The future of reflexivity in practice: building a collective methodological agenda
Get PDFReflexivity is increasingly recognized as a cornerstone of high-quality research, yet methodological guidance on how to do reflexivity in practice remains limited. Drawing on emerging initiatives to operationalize reflexivity, three priorities for advancing a collective agenda are identified — turning reflexivity into a teachable, actionable set of methods