Economic (business) cycles are some of the most noted features of market economies, also ranked among the most serious of economic problems. Despite long historical persistence, the nature and the origin of business cycles remain controversial. In this paper we investigate the problem of the nature of business cycles from the positions of the market systems viewed as complex systems of many int...

This paper discusses agri-food economies and how they evolve over time. It also analyses how these economies, which often have contradictory dynamics, are theorized. A central thesis of the paper is that different theoretical representations not only reflect the differences in agro-economies and their developmental tendencies, but are also important drivers that actively shape the trajectories ...

This article develops the concept ‘economies of affect’ to argue for increased anthropological attention to the roles of affect in facilitating economic transformations. The article draws on evidence from two ethnographic field projects, one in Mexico and the other in Indonesia, to show how affect was mobilized to create subjects commensurable with neoliberal norms. We show how embracing and cr...

The paper explores the impact of a binding external debt-servicing constraint on the sectoral composition of government expenditures in the economies of Africa, where this constraint has traditionally been most prevalent. Applying seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) to 1975-94 five-year panel data for 35 countries, the paper finds that the implied debt service burden adversely affects the shar...

For most of the 1990s, many analysts focused their attention on determining the circumstances under which a particular set of economic policies could be implemented in a post-communist state. Although that research agenda led to important breakthroughs regarding the importance of “first-round winners” in post-communist states and the short-run compatibility of democratization and marketization,...

Three sequential models of consumption economies are considered, where consumers’ only endowment is money. The existence and unicity of temporary equilibria, the neutrality of money and the validity of quantity theory are investigated. In the ...rst two models ”money” is perishable; in the second one lending between consumers is possible. In the third model money is an asset and can be created ...

This paper develops a micro-simulation framework for multinational entry and sales activities across countries. The model is based on Eaton, Kortum, and Kramarz’s (2010) quantitative trade model adapted towards multinational production. Using micro data on Japanese manufacturing firms, we first stylize the empirical regularities of multinational entry and sales activity and estimate the model’s...

The labor surplus economy model has as its basic premise the inability of unskilled agricultural labor markets to clear in countries with high man/land ratios. In such situations, the marginal product of labor is likely to fall below a bargaining wage, related to the average rather than the marginal product. The reallocation of such disguisedly unemployed workers by means of “balanced” intersec...

This thesis develops a new scalable modeling framework at the interface of game theory and machine learning to recover economic structures from limited slices of data. Inference using economic models has broad applicability in machine learning. Economic structures underlie a surprisingly broad array of problems including signaling and molecular control in biology, drug development, neural struc...