Search results for "Storia del pensiero economico"
showing 10 items of 188 documents
Warner Winslow Gardner’s The Institutional Theory of John R. Commons (1933)
2011
A Scholar in Action in Interwar America: John H. Williams on Trade Theory and Bretton Woods
2009
In this paper we analyse the scientific contributions of Harvard economist John H. Williams as international trade theorist and monetary reformer together with his activities as a Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In the first 2 Sections we first present a succinct overview of Williams’ main contributions to international trade theory and to the interwar debate on the reform of the international monetary system. Particular attention will be devoted to his early academic writings which contained different critical arguments against the two main tenets of classical international economics: the Ricardian theory of comparative advantages and the gold standard. These critic…
Un’analisi giuridica dell’economia: John R Commons e i Legal Foundations of Capitalism
2015
Legal Foundations of Capitalism by John Roger Commons (1924) challenges both orthodox theories of economics and mainstream legal doctrines, at a time when the social sciences were oriented towards new epistemological approaches. This essay shows how Common’s work overruled the assumptions of that movement which in the 20th century became known as Law and Economics. It is not an attempt to extend economic analysis to the study of law. Instead, it is aimed at the application of legal concepts, terms and definitions to economics, and at making economic phenomena coincide with juridicial ones. The end result is the challenge of both neoclassical economics and of traditional legal theories.
How to pay for the war in times of imperfect commitment. Adam Smith and David Ricardo on the Sinking Fund
2014
AbstractThe paper proposes a comparative analysis of Smith's and Ricardo's views on the sinking fund. It shows that Smith and Ricardo agreed in stressing the ineffectiveness of the sinking fund as a policy instrument targeted at public debt repayment and tax-burden relief, pointing out that its actual workings had paradoxically helped to increase rather than reduce British total debt-load. Moreover, their explanation of the sinking fund paradox integrates a defective fiscal commitment technology with powerful politicians’ incentives to siphon off the money stored in the sinking fund to meet sudden increases of public expenditure whenever the occasion arose.
From stationary state to endogenous growth: International trade in the mathematical formulation of the Ricardian system
2015
In his 1814–15 correspondence with Malthus and in his Essay on Profits, Ricardo championed the free importation of wage goods as a highly effective growth-enhancing policy. In order to capture this aspect in the mathematical formulation of the Ricardian system first introduced by Pasinetti in 1960 in the context of a closed economy, we produce a variant of that model where the economy is a small open one. We show that this economy is characterised by endogenous growth since the growth rate is bounded from below and we locate two thresholds concerning the allocation of labour among the two sectors of the economy and the pattern of international trade.
From endogenous growth to stationary state: The world economy in the mathematical formulation of the Ricardian system
2016
AbstractWe analyse international trade in a Pasinetti–Ricardo growth model in the world economy scenario in which several small trading countries coexist and international commodity prices are determined by the interplay of supply and demand amongst them. We demonstrate that all the trading countries eventually reach the stationary state, though this process is not monotonic and the dynamics of capital and population may actually push some countries towards the stationary state and others away from it. We also use our model to assess an argument which Malthus employed in the second edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803) to support a policy of agricultural protectionism.
Is Food Self-Sufficiency Conducive to Long-Term Growth? An Assessment of Malthus (1803) on the International Corn Trade.
2017
In this article, we have reconstructed Malthus’s views on growth and international corn trade in the second edition of his An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803) and shown their theoretical consistency with Malthus’s food self-sufficiency policy proposal advanced in Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn ([1815] 1986b), the protectionist pamphlet that elicited Ricardo’s vehement reaction in “Essay on Profits.” Malthus’s (1803) main thesis was that the contemporary British unbalanced growth pattern was not viable. In order to avoid premature stagnation, he thought that Great Britain should both follow a pattern of balanced growth and pursue…
John M. Clark and frank H. Knight on the adding-up theorem, overhead costs, and more
2018
This note offers new archival insight into a 1925 polemical exchange between Frank Knight and John Maurice Clark that was hosted in the pages of Journal of Political Economy. Although the exchange centered on the effects of overhead costs on marginal productivity theory and the so-called adding-up theorem, it also provided significant elements to assess the methodological differences between two of the most representative American economists of the interwar years.
An appraisal of Piero Sraffa's 'The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions'
2001
The paper proposes a new interpretation of Sraffa's 1926 Economic Journal article, ‘The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions’, according to which the latter derives from the same strategy of research which underlies its 1925 Italian precursor, ‘Sulle relazioni fra costo e quantità prodotta’. Sraffa tested the explanatory power of a Marshallian monopolistic partial equilibrium model and concluded that that model is able to treat one source of variable returns (firm-internal economies); but this articulation of Marshall‘s theory does not substantially improve on the trade-off between logical consistency and empirical relevance which afflicted the theory in its whole. © 2001, Taylor & …
CRIMINOLOGY AND ECONOMIC IDEAS IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
2009
My purpose is to point out that during the Age of Enlightenment, and its later 19th century expressions, the most relevant works on law contain examples of economic ideas about criminal phenomena and their legal repression. I will comment the analytic conclusions to which the authors of the time got to, with reference to specific questions such as the definition of crime, the determination of punishment, the judicial procedure. I will take into account some of the most representative European writers: Montesquieu, Beccaria and Bentham. The authors I selected share the characteristic of being all exponents of utilitarianism and of presenting elements which forerun neoclassical economics in t…