Professor Thomas Miceli has recently published the second edition of his popular law and economics textbook, The Economic Approach to Law (2009, Stanford University Press). He has also just completed the manuscript for a book on eminent domain, tentatively titled “Private Property, Public Use: The Economic Theory of Eminent Domain.” Professor Miceli is a nationally recognized authority on eminent domain, and this book is the culmination of nearly twenty years of his research on this controversial topic. He has previously collaborated with Professor Kathleen Segerson to publish two books and numerous articles on eminent domain and the closely related issue of regulatory takings.
Faculty publication
Langlois book subject of glowing review
Professor Richard Langlois’s (IDEAS) 2007 book The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy recently received a flattering review on EH.Net, the premier website in economic history and the history of economic thought. The author of the review, Arthur Diamond, Jr. (IDEAS), the Lucas Professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska, praised the book’s “erudition in issues addressed, methods respected, and fields of research perused. To pull so much together, so well, is impressive. Equally impressive are Langlois’ credentials as a Schumpeter scholar: he was invited to deliver the Graz Schumpeter Lectures, which serve as the basis for the current succinct monograph. And in 2006, the manuscript was named a co-winner of the Schumpeter Prize from the International Schumpeter Society. Hopefully the accolades will be enough to … bring the book the wide readership that it deserves.”
EH.Net operates the Economic History Services web site and several electronic mailing lists to provide resources and promote communication among scholars in economic history and related fields. It is supported by the Economic History Association and other affiliated organizations: the Business History Conference, the Cliometric Society, the Economic History Society, and the History of Economics Society. Its book reviews are distributed by email to a large number of economic historians, historians of economic thought, and interested readers of all sorts, thus reaching a wider audience than traditional book reviews in scholarly journals.
Prof. Hallwood publishes book on finances of Scotland
Professor Paul Hallwood will publish his eighth book in July this year: The Political Economy of Financing Scottish Government: Considering a New Constitutional Settlement for Scotland (with Ronald MacDonald), Edward Elgar Publishers, Cheltenham, 2009. Series editor Wallace Oates writes of the book “Hallwood and MacDonald make a compelling case for the devolution of fiscal authority to Scotland to increase fiscal autonomy and improve fiscal performance. They suggest not only the need for such devolution but provide a careful analysis and blueprint of how to do it.” Additionally, the book is motivated to find a fiscal settlement for Scotland that is most likely to hold the United Kingdom together at a time when the separatist Scottish National Party forms the Scottish administration. The topic is creating quite a stir already, see this article in the Scotsman.
The book is also available on Amazon
Prof. Dharmapala publishes chapter on the impact of taxes on dividends and corporate financial policy
Dhammika Dharmapala (IDEAS) recently published a chapter in a book on tax policy lessons from the 2000s, edited by Alan Viard at the American Enterprise Institute.
In his chapter, Dharmapala finds that the 2003 dividend tax cut triggered a large and immediate increase in dividend payments by firms. The biggest increases occurred in firms whose stockholders were most affected by the tax cut. Dharmapala documents an investment shift following the cut, in which Americans moved their investments out of foreign firms whose dividends did not qualify for the cut and into foreign firms whose dividends did qualify. He concludes that the shareholder-level approach taken by the reform “may be less effective in a financially integrated world economy than measures directed specifically at U.S. firms.”
Additional information about this book is available at the American Enterprise Institute.
Prof. Zimmermann edits special journal issue on the Economics of Open Access publishing
Christian Zimmermann (IDEAS) has recently guest-edited a special issue of Economic Analysis and Policy dedicated to the Economics of Open Access publishing. More and more journals are disseminating their content for free through the web, and the articles in this issue discuss why and how this trend is happening. In particular it highlights that publication costs are much lower once the print medium is abandoned and that financing models different from the traditional subscriptions are perfectly viable. Some articles cover the experience of some open access journal editors, others discuss the publishing industry or the consequences of open access.
The journal can be viewed here, and the special issue can be directly accessed from this RePEc blog post.
Prof. Minkler publishes book
Lanse Minkler‘s (IDEAS) recent book, Integrity and Agreement: Economics When Principles Also Matter, argues that moral principles— not mere self-interest—drives rational decision making. Starting with the elementary principle “lying is wrong,” Minkler examines the ways in which a sense of morality guides real-life decision making. Whether one feels committed to specific or general moral principles, Minkler explains, integrity demands consistently acting on that commitment. Because truthfulness is the most basic moral principle, integrity means honesty. And honesty extends beyond truth-telling. It requires good faith when entering an agreement and then standing by one’s word. From this premise, Minkler explores the implications of integrity for contracts between buyers and sellers and understandings between employers and employees. He also finds a role for integrity in an individual’s religious vows, an elected official’s accountability to constituents, and a community’s obligation to human rights.
Commenting on the book, Geoffrey Hodgson, Research Professor in Business Studies, University of Hertfordshire, and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics writes: “Facing massive evidence that people do not act generally as self-regarding payoff maximizers, economists have become increasingly interested in issues of cooperation, altruism, identity, and morality. Lanse Minkler’s contribution is particularly important because of his powerful argument that the evidence of cooperation cannot be explained adequately by a more complicated preference function. A disposition for honesty is not simply a matter of preference—it is an issue of personal integrity, identity, and commitment. This has major implications. In particular we have to reconstruct the theory of the firm from first principles. No economist committed to the pursuit of truth should ignore this volume.”
You can find out more about Integrity and Agreement at University of Michigan Press.
That book follows on the heels of Minkler’s co-edited volume, Economic Rights: Conceptual, Measurement, and Policy Issues. This edited volume offers new scholarship on economic rights by leading scholars in the fields of economics, law, and political science. It analyzes the central features of economic rights: their conceptual, measurement, and policy dimensions. In its introduction, the book provides a new conceptualization of economic rights based on a three-pronged definition: the right to a decent standard of living, the right to work, and the right to basic income support for people who cannot work. Subsequent chapters correct existing conceptual mistakes in the literature, provide new measurement techniques with country rankings, and analyze policy implementation at the international, regional, national, and local levels. While it forms a cohesive whole, the book is nevertheless rich in contending perspectives.
You can find out more about Economic Rights at Cambridge University Press.
Prof. Ross publishes in Journal of Political Economy
Professor Ross‘s (IDEAS) study “Place of Work/Place of Residence” with Patrick Bayer at Duke and Giorgio Topa and the NY Federal Reserve was published in the Journal of Political Economy in December (UConn working paper version). The Journal of Political Economy is considered to be one of the top three journals in Economics. This paper provides strong evidence that individual’s success in the labor market is influenced by their immediate neighbors, and that this influence is larger when the neighbors share key traits, such as both having children, being similar in age, or having similar levels of education, possibly because they are more likely to share information about jobs with each other. Individuals whose neighbors have such similar traits are more successful in the labor market having higher employment rates and earnings.
A key feature of the study is its design that is intended to approximate what someone might obtain from a randomized experiment. We use the detailed geography available in confidential census data so that we can control for neighborhoods and then examine whether the attributes of someone’s immediate neighbors within the broader neighborhood have a disproportionate impact on their outcomes. We assert and then demonstrate for key attributes that once households have chosen a neighborhood they appear to be almost randomly distributed across blocks within that neighborhood, which is the source of our quasi-experimental variation.