Connections among different assets, asset classes, portfolios, and the stocks of individual institutions are critical in examining financial markets. Interest in financial markets implies interest in underlying macroeconomic fundamentals. In Financial and Macroeconomic Connectedness, Frank Diebold and Kamil Yilmaz propose a simple framework for defining, measuring, and monitoring connectedness, which is central to finance and macroeconomics. These measures of connectedness are theoretically rigorous yet empirically relevant. The approach to connectedness proposed by the authors is intimately related to the familiar econometric notion of variance decomposition. The full set of variance decompositions from vector auto-regressions produces the core of the 'connectedness table.' The connectedness table makes clear how one can begin with the most disaggregated pair-wise directional connectedness measures and aggregate them in various ways to obtain total connectedness measures. The authors also show that variance decompositions define weighted, directed networks, so that these proposed connectedness measures are intimately related to key measures of connectedness used in the network literature. After describing their methods in the first part of the book, the authors proceed to characterize daily return and volatility connectedness across major asset (stock, bond, foreign exchange and commodity) markets as well as the financial institutions within the U.S. and across countries since late 1990s. These specific measures of volatility connectedness show that stock markets played a critical role in spreading the volatility shocks from the U.S. to other countries. Furthermore, while the return connectedness across stock markets increased gradually over time the volatility connectedness measures were subject to significant jumps during major crisis events. This book examines not only financial connectedness, but also real fundamental connectedness. In particular, the authors show that global business cycle connectedness is economically significant and time-varying, that the U.S. has disproportionately high connectedness to others, and that pairwise country connectedness is inversely related to bilateral trade surpluses.

Granting Justice takes issue with the characterisation of the South African state as “developmental”. The crucial aspect of care is missing from the practice for this to be the case. Thus, while the grants address the immediate survival needs of many South Africans, social justice requires quite a different approach, an approach of care that would grant agency and dignity to recipients.

Tessa Hochfeld adopts a highly personal narrative style of writing that reflects the ethical standpoint that she took during her research. Telling a story is what makes her writing so strong and distinguishes it in the development literature.

The book falls into the fields of development studies, and social welfare and social development. The following are possible keywords: social justice; gender justice; care; social development; poverty; social protection; southern welfare; family strengthening; developmental social work.

The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Networks represents the frontier of research into how and why networks form, how they influence behavior, how they help govern outcomes in an interactive world, and how they shape collective decision making, opinion formation, and diffusion dynamics. From a methodological perspective, the contributors to this volume devote attention to theory, field experiments, laboratory experiments, and econometrics. Theoretical work in network formation, games played on networks, repeated games, and the interaction between linking and behavior is synthesized. A number of chapters are devoted to studying social process mediated by networks. Topics here include opinion formation, diffusion of information and disease, and learning. There are also chapters devoted to financial contagion and systemic risk, motivated in part by the recent financial crises. Another section discusses communities, with applications including social trust, favor exchange, and social collateral; the importance of communities for migration patterns; and the role that networks and communities play in the labor market. A prominent role of networks, from an economic perspective, is that they mediate trade. Several chapters cover bilateral trade in networks, strategic intermediation, and the role of networks in international trade. Contributions discuss as well the role of networks for organizations. On the one hand, one chapter discusses the role of networks for the performance of organizations, while two other chapters discuss managing networks of consumers and pricing in the presence of network-based spillovers. Finally, the authors discuss the internet as a network with attention to the issue of net neutrality.

The story of China's spectacular economic growth is well known. Less well known is the country's equally dramatic, though not always equally successful, social policy transition. Between the mid- 1990s and mid-2000s---the focal period for this book---China's central government went a long way toward consolidating the social policy framework that had gradually emerged in piecemeal fashion during the initial phases of economic liberalization. Major policy decisions during the focal period included adopting a single national pension plan for urban areas, standardizing unemployment insurance, (re)establishing nationwide rural health care coverage, opening urban education systems to children of rural migrants, introducing trilingual education policies in ethnic minority regions, expanding college enrolment, addressing the challenge of HIV/AIDS more comprehensively, and equalizing social welfare spending across provinces, among others. Unresolved is the direction of policy in the face of longer-term industrial and demographic trends---and the possibility of a chronically weak global economy. Chinese Social Policy in a Time of Transition offers scholars, practitioners, students, and policymakers a foundation from which to explore those issues based on a composite snapshot of Chinese social policy at its point of greatest maturation prior to the 2007 global crisis.

This volume offers extensive coverage of current political, economic and social affairs of the region. It provides an impartial perspective on all the countries and territores of Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia. With easy-to-use data, it contains almost 600 pages of analysis by acknowledged experts, recent statistics and useful directory material.

The concept of `economic planning' was a central theme of the popular economic policy debate in the 1930s. Dr Ritschel traces the many interpretations of planning, and examines the process of idealogical construction and dissemination of the new economic ideas. He finishes with an explanation of the planners' retreat, later in the decade, from the economics of planning towards the far less ambitious (but also less contentious) alternative - the `middle way' of Keynesian economics.

Social capital theorists have shown that inequality arises in part because some people enjoy larger, more supportive or otherwise more useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than others? Unanticipated Gains argues that the answer lies less in people's deliberate "networking" than in the institutional conditions of the colleges, firms, gyms, and other organizations in which they happen to participate routinely. The book introduces a model of social inequality that takes seriously the embeddedness of networks in formal organizations, proposing that what people gain from their connections depends on where those connections are formed and sustained. It studies an unlikely case: the experiences of mothers whose children were enrolled in New York City childcare centers. As a result of the routine practices and institutional conditions of the centers-from the structure of their parents' associations, to apparently innocuous rules such as pick-up and drop-off times--many of these mothers dramatically increased their social capital and measurably improved their wellbeing. Yet how much they gained depended on how their centers were organized. The daycare centers also brokered connections to other people and organizations, affecting not only the size of mothers' networks but also the resources available through them. Social inequality then arises not merely out of differences in skills or deliberate investments - as the conventional social scientific and political wisdom would have it - but also out of the differences in the routine organizations in which people belong. In addition to childcare centers, Small also identifies the social forces at work in many other organizations, including beauty salons, bath houses, gyms, and churches.

This is an authoritative, one-volume, and independent treatment of the history, functioning and nature of the European integration. Written by a selection of leading scholars. It covers the major institutions, policies, and events in the history of integration, whilst also providing a guide to the major theoretical approaches that have been used to study it over time. By bringing together such a distinguished cast covering such a wide array of themes, the Handbook is intended as a one stop shop for all those interested in the European Union and its predecessors. Written in an accessible style, the volume is intended to shape the discipline of EU studies, and to establish itself as the essential point of reference for all those interested in European integration, both in universities and more broadly. It represents a timely guide to an institution that is much discussed but often only imperfectly understood.

Externally-promoted institutional reform, even when nominally accepted by developing country governments, often fails to deliver lasting change. Diasporans-immigrants who still feel a connection to their country of origin-may offer an In-Between Advantage for institutional reform, which links problem understanding with potential solutions, and encompasses vision, impact, operational, and psycho-social advantages. Individuals with entrepreneurial characteristics can catalyzing institutional reform. Diasporans may have particular advantages for entrepreneurship, as they live both psychologically and materially between the place of origin they left and the new destination they have embraced. Their entrepreneurial characteristics may be accidental, cultivated through the migration and diaspora experience, or innate to individuals' personalities. This book articulates the diaspora institutional entrepreneur In-Between Advantage, proposes a model for understanding the characteristics and motivational influences of entrepreneurs generally and how they apply to diaspora entrepreneurs in particular, and presents a staged model of institutional entrepreneur actions. I test these frameworks through case narratives of social institutional reform in Egypt, economic institutional reform in Ethiopia, and political institutional reform in Chad. In addition to identifying policy implications, this book makes important theoretical contributions in three areas. First, it builds on existing and emerging critiques of international development assistance that articulate prescriptions related to alternative theories of change. Second, it fills an important gap in the literature by focusing squarely on the role of agency in institutional reform processes while still accounting for organizational systems and socio-political contexts. In doing so, it integrates a more expansive view of entrepreneurism into extant understandings of institutional entrepreneurism, and it sheds light on what happens in the frequently-invoked black box of agency. Third, it demonstrates the fallacy of many theoretical frameworks that seek to order institutional change processes into neatly definable linear stages.

Oil Booms and Business Busts looks at how government policymaking shapes a puzzling phenomenon in economic development-the "curse" of natural resources. It investigates how oil and mineral wealth shapes a government's policies toward the business environment, entrepreneurs, and innovative activities. Other similar work either ignores the role of government policymaking in oil wealth, treats it as another effect of the rentier state, or dismisses it as illogical and incoherent. One might expect that in light of such abundances governments would encourage entrepreneurship and new businesses to compete and grow in the market, but Nimah Mazaheri shows that resource wealth instead incentivizes policymakers to focus on satisfying the interests of existing elites. They, more than oil-poor nations, institute barriers that impede the activities of domestic firms and entrepreneurs, with the result being unimpressive economic performance over the past half-century. This is the first book to examine how oil wealth affects non-elite actors who own the small and medium-sized firms that absorb a majority of the economic and labor force of these countries. Looking at two of the most important oil-producing countries in the world, Iran and Saudi Arabia, the book provides an original theory about the factors that shape a logic of policymaking in oil producing states. To extend his theory Mazaheri also looks at India, which is one of the world's main coal producers. He does this to show the effects of the gain and loss of a massive resource windfall on state policymaking toward the private sector. Ultimately Mazaheri argues that such policymaking impedes the development of a middle class and therefore democratization-a factor that can have overarching political repercussions for governmental stability.

The Future of the Euro is an attempt by political economists to analyze the fundamental causes of the euro crisis, determine how it can be fixed, and consider what likely futures lie ahead for the currency. The book makes three interrelated arguments that emphasize the primacy of political over economic factors. First, the 'euro problem' is discussed as the result of the single currency's fundamental lack of institutional embeddedness, insofar as its original design omitted three 'forgotten unions' alongside of monetary union: a financial and banking union, mutually supporting institutions of fiscal union and economic government, and a political union holding similar legitimacy to the nation-state. Second, the 'euro experience' shows how the euro's unfinished design led to economic divergence - quietly altering the existing distribution of economic and political power within Europe prior to the crisis - which in turn determined the EU's crisis response. The book highlights how the euro's four most important members - Germany, France, Italy and Spain - each changed once they adopted the euro, why the crisis affected them so differently, and how each has since struggled to live with the commitments the euro necessitates. Third, the book examines three possible 'euro futures' through the lens of the politics of its reluctant leader Germany; through the lens of the EU's capacity to 'move forward' through crises; and through the geopolitical lens of the international monetary system. The book concludes that any successful long-term solution to the euro's predicament needs to start with the political foundations of markets.

A groundbreaking look at how Black visionaries—from Wall Street to Lagos and beyond—are reimagining capitalism to benefit the needs of Black people and, ultimately, everyone.

To many, the term “Black Capitalists” is oxymoronic. Black people were the labor force that built the infrastructure of American capitalism through the violent enforcement of legalized slavery, so they cannot, and should not, aspire to be the beneficiaries of it. But Wall Street professional and Yale-educated anthropologist Dr. Rachel Laryea poses a provocative question: What if there was a way to thrive within capitalism without diminishing someone else’s life chances through exploitative practices? There is—and Black Capitalists are showing us how.

Told through Dr. Laryea's own compelling narrative—growing up the child of a single mother who immigrated to the United States from Ghana and rose to the Ivy League and on Wall Street—with original on-the-ground reporting and rigorous historical analysis, Black Capitalists challenges readers to reconsider who gets to be the beneficiary of capitalism and reckons with the responsibility that comes with using the tools of our imperfect economic system to advance social good.

Dr. Laryea reveals in detail how race profoundly shapes the way we participate in capitalism—and how understanding these differences can guide us toward a more inclusive and equitable future. From newly minted undergraduates who find themselves working twenty-hour days to prove their worth on Wall Street to Nigerian startup founders working to build global credit scores, spanning the streets of Accra to the boardrooms of Goldman Sachs, Black Capitalists’ stories and analysis of innovators who are as ambitious as they are altruistic demonstrate the resilience, creativity, and ingenuity of Black people who have long been excluded from the full benefits of the American economic system. At its core, Black Capitalists shows a more productive, and more inclusive, way forward.

Business is one of the major power centres in modern society. The state seeks to check and channel that power so as to serve broader public policy objectives. However, if the way in which business is governed is ineffective or over burdensome, it may become more difficult to achieve desired goals such as economic growth or higher levels of employment. In a period of international economic crisis, the study of how business and government relate to each other in different countries is of more central importance than ever.
These relationships have been studied from a number of different disciplinary perspectives--business studies, economics, economic history, law, and political science-- and all of these are represented in this handbook. The first part of the book provides an introduction to the ways in which five different disciplines have approached the study of business and government. The second section, on the firm and the state, looks at how these entities interact in different settings, emphasising such phenomena as the global firm and varieties of capitalism. The third section examines how business interacts with government in different parts of the world, including the United States, the EU, China, Japan and South America. The fourth section reviews changing patterns of market governance through a unifying theme of the role of regulation. Business-government relations can play out in divergent ways in different policy and the fifth section examines the contrasts between different key arenas such as competition policy, trade policy, training policy and environmental policy.
The volume provides an authoritative overview with chapters by leading authorities on the current state of knowledge of business-government relations, but also points to ways in which this work might be developed in the future, e.g., through a political theory of the firm.
About the Series
Oxford Handbooks in Business & Management bring together the world's leading scholars on the subject to discuss current research and the latest thinking in a range of interrelated topics including Strategy, Organizational Behavior, Public Management, International Business, and many others. Containing completely new essays with extensive referencing to further reading and key ideas, the volumes, in hardback or paperback, serve as both a thorough introduction to a topic and a useful desk reference for scholars and advanced students alike.

This book is about science. Specifically building a science of economics, grounded in understanding of what is beneath the surface of economics using business activities and figures as a case. Economics should be, as a science, concerned with formulating theories of ideas and reality that produce descriptions of how to understand phenomenon and create experiences, hypotheses generation and data which need to be proven or dis-proven through testing and further analyses.

This book collects results from ad hoc surveys on firms pricing behavior conducted in 2003 and 2004 by nine National central banks of the Euro area in the context of a joint research project (Eurosystem Inflation Persistence Network). These surveys have proved to be an efficient way to test theories on the pricing strategies of economic agents, documenting, in qualitative terms, the underlying rationale of the observed pricing patterns. The book provides an unprecedented amount of information from more than 11,000 euro area firms, addressing issues such as the relevance of nominal and real rigidities, the information set used by firms in the price setting process, the strategy followed to review prices, the frequency of both price reviews and price changes, the reasons underlying price stickiness, and asymmetries in price adjustment. It also compares results for the euro area to those obtained for other countries by similar studies. Finally, it draws the main implications for theoretical modeling and for monetary policy.

Since the mid-2000s, India has been beset by widespread farmer protests against land dispossession. Dispossession Without Development demonstrates that beneath these conflicts lay a profound shift in regimes of dispossession. While the postcolonial Indian state dispossessed land mostly for public-sector industry and infrastructure, since the 1990s state governments have become land brokers for private real estate capital. Using the case of a village in Rajasthan that was dispossessed for a private Special Economic Zone, the book ethnographically illustrates the exclusionary trajectory of capitalism driving dispossession in contemporary India. Taking us into the lives of diverse villagers in "Rajpura," the book meticulously documents the destruction of agricultural livelihoods, the marginalization of rural labor, the spatial uneveness of infrastructure provision, and the dramatic consequences of real estate speculation for social inequality and village politics. Illuminating the structural underpinnings of land struggles in contemporary India, this book will resonate in any place where "land grabs" have fueled conflict in recent years.

Panel data econometrics uses both time series and cross-sectional data sets that have repeated observations over time for the same individuals (individuals can be workers, households, firms, industries, regions, or countries). This book reviews the most important topics in the subject. The three parts, dealing with static models, dynamic models, and discrete choice and related models are organized around the themes of controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and modelling dynamic responses and error components.

At a time of unprecedented growth in arbitrations between investors and States over energy resources, International Energy Investment Law: The Pursuit of Stability examines and assesses the variety of contract- and treaty-based instruments in commercial and international law that strive to protect the respective interests of investors and States in the international energy industry. It covers most forms of energy, especially oil and gas, and considers issues arising from energy network operation including transit. It pays particular attention to their practical impact through an analysis of their enforcement by arbitration tribunals and bodies, such as ICSID, the ICC and the LCIA. The book also examines growing challenges presented by environmental and human rights concerns to the stability of long-term agreements.
Investors in the international energy industry have long sought to secure guarantees from host States to mitigate the risk of unilateral revision of the deal at a future date. In recent years the traditional method of securing such guarantees has been supplemented by an unprecedented growth of international investment law in the form of BITs, MITs and other treaty-based instruments. Many States have also introduced guarantees into their domestic legislation. This 'multi-tier' regime of stability has fundamentally altered the legal framework for energy investors and host States and offers extensive scope for international arbitration in the event of disputes. It is a system that is currently being tested in a number of high-value commercial disputes as a result of a wave of unilateral State action, most evidently in Latin America and East Europe. The protections for investors are being tested as arbitrators develop new notions of 'legitimate expectations' and give content to 'fair and equitable treatment', while mapping out more precisely the duties which investors have to host States. This book examines critically the interaction between contract and treaty forms of stability in the new multi-tier setting, including two highly detailed regional case studies of Latin America and East Europe. In its concluding section, it looks forward to new challenges arising from climate change, human rights and environmental issues.

Both studies of political power and Europeanization studies have tended to neglect central banks. As the age of the euro reaches its 10th anniversary, it is timely to reflect on what it means for central banks, which have been at the forefront of the establishment of Economic and Monetary Union in the European Union. Central banks have been caught up in a major historic political project. What does it mean for them? What does the age of the euro tell us about the power of central banks, their Europeanization and whether they are coming to resemble each other more closely?
This book brings together a range of recognized academic specialists to examine the main political aspects of this question. How, and in what ways, has the euro Europeanized central banks (members and non-members of the Euro Area)? What have been its effects on the power of central banks and their use of power? Has the euro generated convergence or divergence in central banking? The book offers the first, in-depth and systematic political analysis of central banks in the first decade of the euro. It places the euro in its global and European contexts, including the US Fed and the Australasian central banks, patterns of differentiated integration in European central banking, and the European Central Bank. It offers a set of case studies of its effects on a representative sample of EU central banks (euro 'insiders' and 'outsiders') and looks at four main thematic areas (monetary policy, financial market supervision, accountability and transparency, and research).
The book contributes to Europeanization studies, comparative political economy, and studies of Economic and Monetary Union. It will be of major interest to students of the European Union and European integration, comparative European politics, and area and 'country' studies. More generally, it will interest all those interested in central banking and their pivotal and problematic position between politics and markets.

Consumption decisions are crucial determinants of business cycles and growth. Knowledge of how consumers respond to the economic environment and how they react to the risks that they encounter during the life-cycle is therefore important for evaluating stabilization policies and the effectiveness of fiscal packages implemented in response to economic downturns or financial crises. In The Economics of Consumption, Tullio Jappelli and Luigi Pistaferri provide a comprehensive examination of the most important developments in the field of consumption decisions and evaluate economic models against empirical evidence. The first part of the book provides the basic ingredients of economic models of consumption decisions. The central part reviews the empirical literature on the effect of income and wealth changes on consumption and on the relevance of precautionary saving and credit market imperfections. The last chapters extend the basic framework to such important areas as bequests, leisure, lifetime uncertainty, and financial sophistication. Jappelli and Pistaferri shed light on important issues, including how consumption responds to changes in economic resources, how economic circumstances and consumers' characteristics influence behavior, and whether consumption inequality depends on income shocks and their persistence.

This book is the first coherent quantified assessment of the economy of the Roman Empire. George Maher argues inventively and rigorously for a much higher level of growth and prosperity than has hitherto been imagined, and also explains why, nonetheless, the Roman Empire did not achieve the transition which began in Georgian Britain. This book will have an enormous impact on Roman history and be required reading for all teachers and students in the field. It will also interest and provoke historians of the medieval and early modern periods into wondering why their economies failed to match the Roman level. Part of the problem in assessing the Roman economy is that we do not have much in the way of numerical data, but Roman historians, who rarely have much statistical expertise, have not always recognised the potential of the data we do have. Dr Maher's reassessment of the economy of the Roman Empire has to use the same data as everyone else, but he is able to draw strikingly novel conclusions in two ways: first, by more statistically sophisticated use of a few crucial datasets and, second, by correlating and drawing a coherent picture across the whole economy. On grain yields, firstly, instead of getting bogged down in details of individual cases, George Maher shows how there is a remarkably consistent pattern from which outliers can be excluded, showing yields were much higher than normally assumed. He then demonstrates that high yields are in fact necessary to explain the exceptional urbanization of the Empire. Urbanization at this level in turn, as George Maher shows, has implications for consumption and commerce. He takes this further to show how high levels of trade imply high levels of sophistication in economic practices and mentality. In one of his most methodologically novel chapters, George Maher develops a new and simpler way of assessing average life expectancy and argues for a life expectancy almost double the traditional view. This book, Dr George Maher's doctoral thesis, is the theoretical underpinning of his book Pugnare: Economic Success and Failure.

While the depth and sophistication of South Africa’s financial and capital markets are lauded by indices the world over, South Africa is also considered to be the most unequal society in the world. The Economy On Your Doorstep probes the reasons for this tragic paradox of South African life and tries to go through and beyond the graphs, margin calls, trading updates, indices and earnings reports to explain how economic ‘actions’ frame the lives of South Africans in a transitional society faced with the challenges of unemployment, poverty and inequality.

The economy is and always has been primarily about ‘people’. How they live, what they produce, under what conditions and what social, political and environmental factors influence decisions of consumption, investment and distribution – and how they act under conditions of uncertainty, scarcity, need and crisis. After all, economies are about people coming together to produce, exchange, distribute and consume goods and services that emerge from their communities and those of others. How and under what conditions can we ensure the expansion of our productive forces, while expanding access to the base of assets, services and support that allow for the social reproduction of our entire society and workforce?

Ayabonga Cawe outlines some key areas that can and should define a policy agenda towards a ‘people’s economy’ in South Africa and the long-term objectives of such a policy programme, and engages with the political economy of 21st century South Africa through an analysis of a few selected areas of the economy and the implications of this for policy action. This is what this book is about – an exposition of what we see around us and an explanation and discussion of possible ways beyond it.

In this well-researched book, Ayabonga Cawe, a development economist, columnist and broadcaster, makes sense of the post-apartheid political economy through the lives of the many people who live and survive in it every day.