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Italy is famous worldwide for its co-operative sector, and this firm model has proven to be efficacious in redressing many social inequalities over the past two centuries. This paper aims to examine how local communities in diverse regions have adapted this traditional form to the contemporary trend of bottom-up community development processes. Furthermore, the paper compares the Italian initiatives with the international literature on community co-operatives and assesses to which extend similarities and differences are viewable. The qualitative analysis considers 7 co-operatives in various areas of Italy, and analyses result from 15 semi-structured interviews with managers. Findings show the intense work undertaken before the co-operatives' registration, the negotiation of purposes and objectives with external partners, how founder groups have a key role in determining each firm's approach to local development, and how further networks with external subjects are deeply influence the co-operatives' work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a political economy analysis of the bilateral trade relations and patterns of exchange that existed between Iran and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) from 1962 to 2021. The paper contributes to the growing literature on Iran–Africa relations by empirically delineating not just the changes, but also the continuities between Iran and its African trading partners before and after the Iranian Revolution. It also adds nuance to the broader scholarship on South–South cooperation by showing the disparity between the rhetoric of South–South solidarity and reciprocity between Iran and SSA, on one side, and their low and fluctuating trade volumes, on the other. These volumes resulted from historical inertia or path dependency and structural factors, including trade complementarities and geopolitical conditions, more than demographic, cultural, or religious realities. They were also shaped by the agency and decision-making of Iranian and African leaders and officials regarding the extent to economically engage with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A science, business, or law that is basing its validity on the level ofp-values,tstatistics and other tests of statistical significance is looking less and less relevant and more and more unethical. Today’s economist uses a lot of wit putting a clever index of opportunity cost into his models; but then, like the amnesiac, he fails to see opportunity cost in statistical estimates he makes of those same models. Medicine, psychology, pharmacology and other fields are similarly damaged by this fundamental error of science, keeping bad treatments on the market and good ones out. A few small changes to the style of the published research paper using statistical methods can bring large beneficial effects to more than academic research papers. It is suggested that misuse of statistical significance be added to the definition of scientific misconduct currently enforced by the NIH, NSF, Office of Research Integrity and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note first describes the details of an interesting incident of plagiarism where the author of a previously published paper was sent a verbatim copy of that paper for his review for possible publication in another journal. It then offers a few insights into the possible reasons underlying such blatant plagiarism attempts, and provides caveats against them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the relationship between the reliance on informal financial support and social insurance programs such as unemployment insurance to meet financial hardships imposed during the economic downturn associated with COVID-19. We use the U.S. Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey to compare the likelihood of receiving informal financial support from family and friends for households that did or did not receive social insurance controlling for observable household characteristics. We pay special attention to differences by race/ethnicity and by homeownership – a proxy for wealth. Our results suggest that (1) some types of social insurance receipt are a weak substitute for informal financial support, (2) the substitution between informal financial support and social insurance receipt is stronger among White households than households of color, and (3) wealth is a more consistent buffer against financial hardship than social insurance receipt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Direct cash transfers to households during the COVID-19 pandemic, including relief checks and Child Tax Credit payments, were delayed by weeks for recipients without bank accounts and were not received by many non-filers who lacked the time or resources to complete necessary paperwork. A postal banking system has the potential to expand access to financial infrastructure and enable the rapid distribution of resources to households in need during economic downturns – often the same households that are currently excluded from the financial system. This paper examines the history of the US Postal Savings System and the feasibility of a return to postal banking using evidence on the socioeconomic and spatial patterns of financial exclusion. We find that postal banks would be well positioned to compete with both alternative and conventional financial institutions, address issues with physical branch access, and improve outreach to vulnerable populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the different symbolic meanings of goods give rise to three institutionally different market types. We start from the realization that consumption has symbolic meaning, which individuals use to communicate and construct their identity to their social networks. We argue that firm behavior (including size, pricing and marketing strategies) must be congruent with the symbolic meaning of goods. We distinguish between two stylized meanings of goods, status and taste, which we derive from the socio-anthropological literature on consumption. We argue that these different meanings, articulated by consumers to communicate their identity, give rise to three ideal-typical market types. We present the institutional differences between these market types as well as the implications for firm behavior and demonstrate how firm behavior and marketing strategies differs significantly from markets in which the symbolic meaning of goods is relatively unimportant. We use the recent transformation of the beer market by the craft-beer producers, to illustrate our theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the mainstream economics view of production based on the conventional factors of production is socially and empirically inaccurate, giving a distorted view of the nature of the production process and the agents responsible for it. Although the factors of production are essential, just as important are the various social, cultural, and political enabling conditions, or what is termed the ‘understructure’ of market production (the complex of infrastructures which underlie and enable market production). We gain an enriched understanding of what the economy truly is by studying the functioning of the understructure and the ancestral labour and care encompassed in it. If this revised view is correct, it has radical ethical implications. In particular, it implies that individuals do not morally deserve the bulk of the income (90% or more) that they receive in the market. High levels of redistributive taxation may therefore be legitimatea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twenty-first-century global arena is profoundly shaped by the intensifying US–China rivalry. While theories in the US, such as the Thucydides’ Trap and the Clash of Civilizations, forecast a prospective ‘Cold War II,’ many experts in China propound a ‘divided peace,’ advocating for the stable coexistence of dual powerhouses. Introducing a nuanced lens, the ‘Security in Context’ (SiC) approach argues for a more interconnected and multi-dimensional understanding of great power dynamics. This study dives into the practicalities of a SiC approach, examining key strategies including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy. As we venture into the era of economic and technological decoupling, epitomized by measures like the Chip Act and Restrict Act, the paper suggests that the SiC framework remains central to deciphering the evolving US–China narrative, even in the face of burgeoning uncertainties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Annual budgets are key to constituting and governing imagined futures. This paper examines how the signifier 'future' is constructed within the Irish budget speeches delivered by finance ministers to parliament between 1970 and 2015. To investigate the discourses of these budget speeches, we employ post-structural discourse theory operationalised through two methods: close reading and corpus-linguistic analysis. Close reading is used to identify the discourses employed and how meanings of signifiers were partially fixed at different moments. This was further examined using corpus-linguistics, specifically a collocate analysis of the word 'future', allowing further close examination of such collocates in context. Thus, the paper offers a unique insight into the discursive structuring of 'future' in Irish budget speeches over 45 years, highlights the changing structure of the budgetary discourse, periodising these changes, and shows how economic imaginaries of the 'future' are produced and reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This symposium focuses on the relationship between financialization and the social economy, specifically examining the role of finance and financial markets in the lives of US households. Financialization refers to the growth and dominance of the financial system, extending beyond the financial sector itself to impact social relationships and households' economic decision-making. The articles in this symposium explore various aspects of financialization, including the economic precarity of US households, the concentration of asset management, and the potential for alternative financial institutions to mitigate dependence on private institutions. The papers also address racial disparities in access to financial infrastructure and the conflicts of interest within asset management firms. Overall, these articles provide valuable insights into the intersection of financialization, inter-household relationships, public policy, and households' financial security. [Extracted from the article]

This paper uses data for 53 countries from the World Values Survey in a multilevel regression analysis that seeks to disentangle individual, institutional and other-regarding factors affecting ethical decision-making. The dependent variable is an index of how intolerant people are of unethical conduct. The explanatory variables indicate the perceived trustworthiness and fairness of others. Controls include variables for individual and institutional factors. Findings are that perceptions of trustworthiness in people unknown to them and perceptions of fairness in others correlate with a greater tolerance of unethical behavior, especially in countries with moderate levels of institutional quality. High institutional quality moderates the negative relationship between perceptions and ethical attitudes. The findings confirm the relevance of other-regarding factors and reinforce the importance of quality institutions in supporting ethical decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to suggest a mathematical model of unpaid housework and empirically test its main predictions using data from Mexico (2014) and Colombia (2017) time-use surveys. The model, based upon the Marxist-feminist approach, suggests that the magnitude of unpaid housework is determined by the super-exploitation of labor, i.e. the gap between wages and the value of labor-power. The outcome is an equation that relates positively the magnitude of unpaid housework with the super-exploitation of labor. The parametric and nonparametric regression estimates applied in both countries show preliminary empirical support for the theoretical model. The theoretical and empirical findings have several implications for Marxist-feminist literature as well as for empirical research on unpaid housework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a gap in the existing literature in exploring comprehensive capability needs and degree of functioning achievements of indigenous people living in developing nations. This study offers a nine-dimensional 43-item statistically valid, and reliable model that captures capability and functioning achievement indicators as perceived by the indigenous people of Bangladesh. Also, the paper investigates the extent to which the impacts of capability dimensions on functioning achievements change concerning the degree of use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) by the indigenous community. The methodology of the study is based on 1741 primary data collected by way of a survey and analyzed through Structural Equation Modeling. Results revealed that effects of seven out of eight capability dimensions on functioning achievements had improved significantly due to the higher use of ICT. The study also revealed that frequent use of ICT could reduce the degree of vulnerability among the indigenous poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, and in particular since the shift towards independent central banks, there has been no explicit coordination of fiscal and monetary policy. In the Eurozone, this lack of coordination represents an important flaw, especially since the Eurozone is not an optimal currency area. Complementing monetary union with a transfer union represents one possible solution. This paper argues that the negative impact of post-2008 and post-Covid-19 unconventional monetary policy on income inequalities provides a second reason to coordinate fiscal and monetary policy. Among various institutional arrangements to implement such coordination, the paper defends the idea that the European Central Bank should be sensitive to distributive considerations when formulating its monetary policy. Such an arrangement would help both to contain the distributive side-effects of monetary policy and to at least partially remedy the flaw at the heart of the Eurozone as long as an outright transfer union remains unfeasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much discrimination works through exclusion. Poor access to public goods disadvantages minority individuals before they reach the job market. Market impediments to competition cannot explain exclusionary discrimination, and the question is, what can? This paper draws on two different nonmarket theories of discrimination, ‘discriminatory equilibrium’ and ‘stratification economics’, to address the question. In one, group cognitive biases are (re)generated by the tenor of inter-group interaction, while in the other the majority finds exclusionary discrimination remunerative given its asymmetric power. This paper models these views as different types of bad equilibria. In a couple, Pareto-improving policy interventions are possible as the problem arises from bad intra-group coordination within, respectively, the minority and the majority. Yet, in a third, the majority is in a payoff-dominant strategy game when discrimination pays off irrespective of coordination dynamics. The mitigation of discrimination in this case is more political than a policy problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we account for differences in the extent of risk disclosure among companies? The paper expands the existing explanations by claiming that corporate risk reporting is not just financial but also political communication. The presented empirical analysis of how corporations disclose Brexit-related uncertainties suggests that risk reporting is a part of a company's holistic conversation with multiple audiences in society (e.g. politicians, regulators, journalists and customers) and might have well-targeted but also unforeseen effects on each of them. The quantity and quality of risk disclosure can be explained – among other factors – by the extent to which companies want to participate in public discourse and wish their opinions on a particular political issue, such as Brexit, to be heard. In other words, risk reporting is a part of 'the politics of expectations' which should be investigated in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early twentieth century, scholarly interest in the intersection between knowledge and political rationality in advanced liberal democracies has drawn attention to two general and contradictory processes: first, the rise of technocracy, and of the institutions, and experts, who use technical knowledge as a lever of power; second, the democratization of expertise – the emergence of lay audiences as stake-holders and competent participants in technical and scientific decisions and debates. In this paper, I analyze the annual reports on the Italian economy written by the Bank of Italy between 1960 and 1984, and trace the debate they spurred in three national newspaper outlets. I detail the emergence of public expertise on the economy, as well as the emergence of crisis and reputation management as techniques for the Bank to bolster its authority. I argue that the Bank of Italy, by framing the present as an exception, achieved a form of performativity that I call fictional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies on the rural non-agricultural sector in India have not examined profit rates to understand the growth of the sector. Most studies have examined the rapid increase in this sector's workforce size, and some have probed the share of this sector in the rural National Domestic Product (NDP). This paper addresses this gap. It examines the profit rate and growth in output (net value added) of the rural organised manufacturing industries segment, in the period 1998–1999 to 2007–2008. For comparison, the same parameters have been examined for urban industries. It is found that the profit rate of rural industries grew faster than urban industries. Given the significance of the profit rate, the factors driving change in the profit rate have been identified in this paper. It is found that worsening wage share and improving output-capital ratio underpinned by the rising labour productivity were responsible for rising profit rates of rural industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that firm ownership heterogeneity is a feature of all market economies. Although shareholding capitalist owners do not contribute very much to an enterprise, it does not follow that worker ownership would automatically supplant capitalist property relations and become the dominant ownership form in a post-capitalist, market socialist society. We develop this argument by using the institutionalist analysis of Henry Hansmann who provides a useful typology of different ownership forms and an explanation of why ownership relations are not homogeneous. While we critique Hansmann for overemphasizing the importance of efficiency in determining property relations, there are reasons to think that heterogeneous forms of social ownership will continue to exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines attribute substitution in terms of both heuristics and attribution theory in social psychology. Alternative 'old' approaches in psychology were special because they considered choice in terms that were similar to attributional inference in social psychology and anticipated limitations of the static heuristics and biases approach. Attribute substitution plays an important role in reflective reasoning as an independent entity relative to rationality and produces good decisions, even those are sub-optimal and may be influenced by primitive processes such as intuition and habits. The attribute-substitution research enhances our understanding of intense shifts in economic expectations. It makes possible the conceptual incorporation of substantive theoretical constructions, which are inherent in psychological propensities of alternative, and mainly, heterodox approaches in economics such as Post Keynesian, Institutional and Austrian economics. This research agenda paves the way for possible forms of synthesis of those theories with behavioural economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical debate on the relationship between the quality of government, social capital and corruption remains underspecified in relation to the analysis of local governance. This paper asks how quality of government (QoG) impacts on the role of social capital (SC), and how SC connects with corruption in the local governance context. The paper develops a local governance approach in order to better understand this relationship through an in-depth qualitative case-study of the governance of Batkhela Bazaar in Malakand District of Pakistan. Three findings emerge: Firstly, the results demonstrate how QoG and socioeconomic inequalities shape the context for SC development and its role in corruption, which feeds into the poor QoG. Secondly, unlike the existing mainstream literature, the results show the fundamental importance of petty corruption to levels of trust within a society. Thirdly, reciprocity plays a crucial role in maintaining trusting ties in the context of ineffective formal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electra was developed by an unknown man, Electra01. Following its emergence in cryptocurrency markets in 2018, its market capitalization briefly reached 136 billion USD, exceeding Bitcoin in value. The project’s community of 20,000 individuals, wrote its white papers, updated its blockchain, instituted a foundation, introduced a payment system, and voted to be the best crypto project in 2020 in the world by a global vote. Following a fundamental controversy in its community, Electra collapsed as the founder sold his hundreds of millions of Electras in November 2020, effectively killing the project. Within a short period, the community left the founder behind, and moved on to a new project, giving (re)birth to their community money, this time called Electra Protocol. Drawing on an empirical case study, this paper presents an analysis of how cryptocurrency communities emerge, mature and migrate as they make data monies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The normative vocabulary of republican political theory can be fruitfully applied to evaluate the phases of market turbulence in sovereign debt markets witnessed during the Eurozone crisis. A view of justice that requires the minimisation of dominating relationships between agents highlights how the institutional preconditions of undominated sovereignty were lacking in the Eurozone. The agreed-upon structure within which countries operated fuelled self-fulfilling market movements in sovereign bond markets, which bear the hallmark of unjust domination as weaker Member States formed a social relationship with investors over which they did not have meaningful control. In motivating the thesis, the paper touches upon the recent debates on the sources and site of domination and on the stance, republican scholars should take toward competitive markets. Given this diagnosis, Eurozone countries have an obligation to establish supranational institutions that increase private and public channels of risk-sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU is a new form of political organisation which can be defined as an "experimental polity". Its distinctiveness lies in a novel assemblage of the constituent elements of polity (boundaries, binding authority, and bonding ties), and in the constant testing of new combinations of such elelements when facing functional and political challenges. Experimentalism is not always successful and can occasionally trigger off dynamics of polity disruption. The paper illustrates two instances of 'bad experiments' along the bounding and binding dimensions, i.e. Brexit and the euro crisis. It then focuses on the Covid 19 crisis and shows that in this case EU leaders were able not only to launch an ambitious plan of response based on joint action, but also to re-establish an "ethos of togetherness" among the Member States, on which to build for securing both social solidarity and political stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the presence and consideration of economics in sociology, specifically its classical version. It identifies certain original and independent economic theories, concepts and approaches in classical sociological theory as central and its derivations, implications and extensions of economics as peripheral. The paper argues and demonstrates that classical sociology is far from being the science of noneconomic or irrational phenomena, as often sociologists conceive it and economists perceive it in counter-distinction from economics defined as the science of rational behavior, and indeed encompasses virtually all economic activities and processes, and thus prefigures New Economic Sociology adopting the same approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a country, the United States spends significantly more on healthcare than other advanced industrialized countries, and Americans have comparably worse health outcomes. Both are developments of the last four decades. In this paper, we look at how change in antitrust and patent law and thus change in market power in the largest four subsectors of healthcare, hospitals, physician groups, prescription drugs, and net medical insurance, have contributed to the increasing cost of medical care in the United States. We show that the annual rent – the degree to which health care is overpriced as a result of market power – was between 2.47 and 4.30 percent of GDP in 2016 – truly a big cost for big medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2011, climate activists have advanced divestment campaigns against private fossil fuel corporations that aim to inflict damage on fossil fuel corporations through two channels: stigmatizing them and undermining their financial operations. We focus in this paper on this second purpose, considering the extent to which divestment campaigns have succeeded in inflicting financial damage on fossil fuel corporations. We present descriptive data on the level of divested fossil fuel stocks and bonds as well as econometric analysis of the impact of divestment events on the stock market prices of fossil fuel companies. We find that divestment campaigns have not been successful in inflicting significant economic damage on fossil fuel corporations, even though the movement has been successful in mobilizing public opinion against the fossil fuel corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the claim that to avoid labour market domination we must be market socialists committed to an extensive sector of worker-owned firms. The labour republican tradition offers three perspectives on this argument: Ellerman argues that non-domination demands that all workplaces be worker owned. Hockett has argued that it demands a policy that the state function as the employer of last resort. Taylor argues that all that republicanism requires is a strengthened exit right for workers. This paper develops the claim that mandatory market socialism would be illiberal by thinning the market for labour and removing the fair value of exit rights. The most reasonable view, overall, accepts that the state must be the employer of last resort so as to eliminate labour market domination, but this is a macro-level commitment that does not place any meso-level restrictions on the nature of the firm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists, in particular sociologists, claim that the distinction between universalistic and particularistic values is relevant to explaining the social behaviour of individuals (and societies). This paper provides preliminary empirical evidence that supports the claim. It first defines a number of proxies for the degree of particularism embedded into long-celebrated dimensions of social behaviour (trust, political awareness, and associational activities). Then, it shows that the particularistic measures are positively correlated to each other and negatively correlated to some established generalist measures for all dimensions of social behaviour considered, both across and within countries and regions. Moreover, the paper relates that the various proxies for particularism share the same set of covariates (such as low education and income), which are neatly distinguishable from the determinants of the generalist measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard economic theory assumes that individuals' preferences are independent of their social environment. However, this basic assumption seems partly unrealistic because individual utility can be affected by a variety of social interactions. This paper assesses the role of peer effects on the informality of Micro and Small firms. We use the instrumental variable approach with fixed effects on survey data in the informal sector in Cameroon. Our results show a positive impact of informal behavior of peers of the firm on its level of informality. Thus, we find a social multiplier of 9.43 and 4.65 according to the nature of the reference group. These results show that, in reality, a policy leading one firm to formalize will lead at least nine (or four depending on the reference group) others to do so due to peer effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volunteers are reputedly healthier and happier than their non-volunteering counterparts. But is this a causal link or are healthier, happy individuals simply more likely to volunteer? Some papers have attempted to identify the causal relationship using an instrumental variable methodology, mostly relying on measures of religiosity as instruments for volunteering – however, religiosity may also affect health thus calling into question the validity of this approach. We rely on a novel instrument, a measure physical proximity to volunteer opportunities, to help identify the causal link from volunteering to health and happiness using econometric regression techniques. We find that volunteering is a robustly significant predictor of health, and positively affects life satisfaction for all but those aged under 35. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse a large-scale UK quarterly Labour Force Survey data covering a period of 16 years (2002–2017) to compare labour market outcomes for women of different religious and ethnic denominations. The paper contributes to the existing literature in analysing three labour outcomes: economic activity (participation), unemployment and occupational choice. While the religious penalties facing Muslim women in unemployment were notoriously high and persistent, the results suggest that their participation is significantly lower. Finally, the occupational distribution of Muslim women shows they are similar to white Christian women in higher occupations but have a much higher probability of belonging to lower occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imperialism in the context of capitalism has been explained either in terms of the suspension of the laws of capitalist competition, or by focusing on the relationship of capitalism with pre-capitalist regions. This paper puts forward a theory of imperialism that is specific and internal to capitalism. The argument put forward in this paper is that the critical element of the empire of capital is the manner in which imperial power is exercised to bring the workers across the globe under the dominion of the network of capitalist relations. The distinctive logic of imperialism is understood to arise from the use of imperial power to expand the pool of available surplus value available for capital as a whole to exploit. It can be interpreted as the network externality of expanding the web of control of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that exploitation is a form of domination, domination for self-enrichment. In a slogan, exploitation is a dividend of servitude—a benefit the powerful extract by converting the vulnerable into their servants. The paper argues that what makes exploitation wrong is that it constitutes domination-induced unilateral service to others; that this form of servitude is necessarily cashed out in terms of labour time or effort; that competing accounts of exploitation fail to do justice to the servitude dimension; and that what distinguishes capitalism historically is the way it reproduces a structural dilemma between dominated work and no work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Market liberalization in the energy sectors has created several regulatory gaps that ‘heterodox forms’ of economic experiences – such as Community Renewable Energy Organizations (hereinafter, CREOs) – can fill. CREOs are cooperatives or corporations, financing the installation of energy devices. But how do CREOs establish themselves? What are the different ‘social features’ that CREOs assume over time? To deal with these questions, the paper investigates several CREOs through comparative case studies located in the region of New Aquitaine (France). With this aim, we argue that it is useful to cross-fertilize two streams of the literature of economic sociology: the first is the theory of conventions; the latter is that of embeddedness. We will show that CREOs assume distinctive ‘social features’ based on different aggregations of conventions driving social actions, the interaction patterns between the participants and the interactions with local institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyse to what extent the willingness to pay of art gallery visitors for the preservation of cultural artefacts is affected by the identity traits of the objects. To this purpose, we designed a discrete choice experiment that took place during a major exhibition dedicated to the artist Costantino Nivola (1911–1988) in Sassari (Sardinia, Italy). His works are known worldwide and many of them were produced after he moved from Sardinia to the United States in 1939. As a result, both the American and the Sardinian culture show up in his works and, in particular, were clearly visible in the exhibition under study. The discrete choice experiments allowed us to elicit respondents' preferences towards the identity features stemming from Nivola's artefacts. The results confirm the importance of this component indicating that its presence almost doubles respondents' willingness-to-pay for the acquisition of these artefacts to a permanent collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The injustices that have been visited upon racial minorities in the United States have a substantial economic legacy, both in terms of wealth disparities and resulting structural differences in economic opportunities. In response, some prominent Black scholars and policymakers have proposed a ‘baby bonds’ wealth-building policy. In this paper, I complement the economic justifications for this policy by examining the case for the proposal in terms of racial justice. The common justifications in the literature use a ‘justice as rectification’ framework, but this framework is a poor fit for the baby bonds proposal, unless we first examine the policy as a way to mitigate barriers to economic opportunity caused by persistent wealth gaps. This analysis focuses the case for baby bonds on their real selling point: a universal wealth policy can limit the intergenerational impact of injustice and misfortune of all kinds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political theorists have been framing the problems of unfreedom and domination at work as inconsistent with the requirements of political democracy, undermining the democratic potential of the workplace and inducing psychological and status harm. Although these are important insights, political theorists are often unwilling to frame the hierarchical workplace as an issue of distributive justice. This paper, by bringing in the empirical literature on work autonomy, offers a framework to explicate the relationship between freedom at work and the distribution of essential goods at paid work. Through such framework, the paper argues that procedural and substantive freedom at work are essential to the fair distribution of the goods of work. By examining the empirical literature, the paper further argues that there exists a polarization of the goods of work between high-skilled and low-skilled labor, and the polarization offers a pro-tanto justification of workplace democracy for the least advantaged workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workplace democracy is often defined, and has recently been defended, as a form of intra-firm governance in which workers have control rights over management with no ownership requirement on their part. Using the normative tools of republican political theory, the paper examines bargaining power disparities and moral hazard problems resulting from the allocation of control rights and ownership to different groups within democratic firms, with a particular reference to the European codetermination system. With various qualifications related to potentially mitigating factors, such as workforce and shareholder composition or risk aversion and reallocation, the paper contends that forms of workplace democracy in which workers control and own the firm, such as cooperativism, are preferable to other forms, such as codetermination, in which ownership and control rights are formally separated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the macroeconomic and social determinants of voting behavior, and especially of political polarization – defined here as the increasing electoral success of far-right and far-left parties – in 20 advanced countries using annual data from 1970 to 2016 and covering 291 parliamentary elections. Our analysis indicates that the link between income inequality and political polarization appears to have significantly changed over the last 20 years. Indeed, we find that both average net income inequality, as well as the bottom 10% income share are statistically linked to the recent success of far-right parties (but not of far-left parties), while the top 10% or top 20% income shares are not. The link of income inequality and political polarization, and in particular the increasing success of far-right parties, thus seems to be based on the deterioration of the relative economic position especially of the poorest fraction of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses various forms and sources of algorithmic discrimination. In particular, we explore the connection between – at first glance – 'voluntary' sharing or selling of one's data on the one hand and potential risks of automated decision-making based on big data and artificial intelligence on the other. We argue that the implementation of algorithm-driven profiling or decision-making mechanisms will, in many cases, disproportionately disadvantage certain vulnerable groups that are already disadvantaged by many existing datafication practices. We call into question the voluntariness of these mechanisms, especially for certain vulnerable groups, and claim that members of such groups are oftentimes more likely to give away their data. If these existing datafication practices exacerbate prior disadvantages, they 'compound historical injustices' (Hellman, 2018) and thereby constitute forms of morally wrong discrimination. To make matters worse, they are even more prone to further algorithmic discriminations based on the additional data collected from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces the notion of 'digital behavioral technologies' and discusses them from the perspectives of vulnerability and justice, thereby integrating perspectives from bioethics or public health ethics and political philosophy. Digital behavioral technologies have seen a massive uptake in recent years, but the market for them is hardly regulated. We argue that understanding the impact of digital behavioral technologies requires understanding individuals not as abstract, atomized agents, but rather to take their embeddedness into social structures into account. This also allows extending the focus to groups, relationships and whole societies, which are often structurally unjust. This perspective provides a corrective to an overly individualistic consideration of digital behavioral technologies, which may suggest itself because of their focus on individual bodies. We point out some implications of this integrated approach with regard to the regulation of digital behavioral technologies. We conclude by describing some implications both for those who work on digital behavioral technologies and for those who work on questions of vulnerability and justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the application of information theory and game theory to questions arising in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx's critical reformulation of Smith's analysis in Capital. After introducing the key theoretical concepts of entropy-constrained behavior and the social interaction model, the paper applies them to some central issues in Marxian and classical political economy: the long-period method analysis of commodity production, the social division of labor, commodity production and money, alienation, and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at three contaminated communities in southern Europe facing pollution from industrial and mining activity and analyses forms of avoidance behaviour, using both economic and sociological approaches. Based on a quantitative household survey, we show that avoidance behaviour is mainly explained by residential location and socio-economic characteristics. Pollution perception is not statistically correlated to most avoidance behaviour. From in-depth qualitative interviews, we learn more about people’s risk perception and whether and why people adopt avoidance behaviour, including discovering some inventive solutions. To conclude, our results cast doubt on the efficacy of current public advisory communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the severity of the European economic crisis, its relation to key aspects of material deprivation remains understudied. In this paper, I use the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions dataset to analyze household food insecurity in austerity-ridden Greece between 2009 and 2014. First, I show that low-income, low-asset and non-EU citizens, as well as households in Athens and island regions, are more likely to experience higher rates of food insecurity. Second, low-income and immigrant households experience disproportionate increases in food insecurity during the crisis; low-income and single-mother households experience higher increases in child food insecurity during the same period. Third, I examine the hypothesis that households turned to the land during the crisis. I show evidence of a negative association between food self-provisioning and food insecurity; however, the share of households that produce food decreases during the crisis, casting doubt on self-provisioning as a widespread coping strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses why on the one hand William Edmundson thinks that market socialism is superior to property-owning democracy, while on the other hand Alan Thomas thinks that an egalitarian version of property-owning democracy is superior to market socialism. For the purpose of this discussion, the concepts of property-owning democracy and market socialism are systematized and it is argued that those concepts, as understood by Rawls, do not exhaust the list of possible alternatives to capitalism and state socialism. Economic democracy, understood as mandatory workplace democracy, will be introduced as a middle ground, somewhat closer to market socialism than property-owning democracy. Against this background, it is argued that questions of transition and stability are important for deciding between these regimes and the importance of two realistic constraints in making this choice, namely egoism of powerful agents and path-dependency in institutional design, is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social institutions that seek to realize justice must foster the moral disposition to act on the norms of justice. In order to spell out this claim, the paper turns to Hegel's idea of Sittlichkeit (ethical life). In Hegel's framework, the institutions of ethical life have the task of nurturing the 'ethical disposition', something akin to what Rawls calls the 'sense of justice'. This task places particular constraints on institutions. The formation of ethical dispositions requires what I call an 'internal' transformation of the economic sphere, allowing individuals to develop their moral capacities. This stands in contrast to many theories of distributive justice, including Rawls's, which treat the market as a 'black box', whose main virtue is seen in maximizing economic output. By reconstructing Hegel's institutional suggestions systematically, it turns out that Hegel's social philosophy offers convincing arguments for a liberal socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that influential contemporary models of market socialism fail to do justice to traditional socialist concerns about exploitation and, by implication, about workplace oppression. More precisely, neither pure public ownership models (such as Roemer's), nor hybrid models of public ownership plus worker control (such as Schweickart's) suffice individually to attenuate exploitation and workplace hierarchy. Quite independently of alienable capital, these theories fail to account for the labour epistocracy, a class of workers who, by dint of higher marketable epistemic credentials and talents, can subjugate the labour of those with lower epistemic credentials. An improved model of market socialism would, I argue, account for the labour epistocracy by combining universal worker control with a strongly predistributive form of public ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a feminist critique of market socialism. I argue that two important socialist values, equality and freedom, can only be realised by a form of socialism that adequately distributes and values tasks associated with social reproduction. My argument proceeds in five steps: first, I outline of the main characteristics of market socialism. Second, I provide an understanding of social reproduction and show that its current organisation raises a feminist concern. Third, I discuss the relation between markets under market socialism and social reproduction and draw implications from this for the market socialist project. Finally, I show that market socialism has the potential to bring about a more equal distribution of responsibility for social reproductive work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]