1,720,965 research outputs found
Hayek's Theory of Business Cycles: Theory That Will Remain Obscure
No full textHayek’s theory of business cycles has been criticized for its unfeasible policy prescriptions, weak empirical support, and lack of technical rigor. Although the theory can be defended against these criticisms, it violates the rational expectations hypothesis, a criterion by which economists tend to judge the quality of economic arguments. Since Hayek and his followers failed to remedy or justify the violation, the theory cannot capture the interest of the economics profession today. To change this outcome, Hayek’s theory either needs a satisfactory restatement, or it has to wait until economists change the criteria for judging the quality of arguments.Original manuscript prior to peer review (preprint
Entrepreneurial Errors in a Kaleidic Democracy
No full textEconomic activity is a stream of interconnected experiments, where some are bound to fail. Such failures are costly and policy makers might aspire to mitigate them, particularly during economic crises. The mitigation can happen in two ways: through further entrepreneurial experimentation in the market process or through the political process. When the goal is to minimize uncertainty during economic crises, profit-seeking entrepreneurship should dominate political action. This is because while people easily understand that the goal motivating entrepreneurs is to stay in business and to keep revenues above costs, the goals driving bureaucrats and politicians are less predictable.Published articl
Entrepreneurial Errors in a Kaleidic Democracy
No full textEconomic activity is a stream of interconnected experiments, where some are bound to fail. Such failures are costly and policy makers might aspire to mitigate them, particularly during economic crises. The mitigation can happen in two ways: through further entrepreneurial experimentation in the market process or through the political process. When the goal is to minimize uncertainty during economic crises, profit-seeking entrepreneurship should dominate political action. This is because while people easily understand that the goal motivating entrepreneurs is to stay in business and to keep revenues above costs, the goals driving bureaucrats and politicians are less predictable.Published articl
Intertemporal capital substitution and Hayekian booms
No full textHayek’s business cycle theory portrays monetary expansion and monetary contraction with counterintuitive asymmetry. On the one hand, it suggests that they both change relative prices and cause costly reallocations of production factors. At the same time, the theory predicts that while a monetary contraction causes the economic crisis, the monetary expansion comes with the boom. I argue that what I call intertemporal capital substitution in industries close to final consumption explains why there is a boom in spite of the costly reallocations. More specifically, monetary expansion only gradually increases the demand for nonspecific factors of production by industries that are temporally remote from final consumption. Responding to the expected higher cost of nonspecific factors, consumer-goods industries temporarily increase output and depreciate specific durable production factors faster than they planned.Published articl
Lucas and Hume on Monetary Non-neutrality: A Tension between the Logic and the Technique of Economics
No full textEconomists lost a valid theory of monetary non-neutrality, which relates to how new money enters the economy at different points and in the process changes relative prices. This theory was introduced by David Hume, among others, but it has since disappeared from the leading conversations. The disappearance was not caused by any theoretical or empirical weakness, however. Using Robert Lucas’s Nobel lecture as a case study, I argue that the theory might have disappeared because it did not fit into the popular technical frameworks’ modeling constraints, which view money as inherently neutral and introduce non-neutrality only through external frictions.Published articl
Subjectivism in International Economics: Why Absolute Purchasing Power Parity Does Not Hold
No full textPublished articl
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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