SEC Strategic Plan SEC Strategic Plan focuses on helping “Main Street“make “informed investment decisions.” Little or no attention is paid in the draft Plan to helping us make informed governance decisions. (more…)
Tag Archives | economics
Review: Carl Gershenson – Protecting Markets from Society
Carl Gershenson – “Protecting Markets from Society: Non-Pecuniary Claims in American Corporate Democracy” forthcoming in Politics & Society looks at the role of the state as ‘market protector.’ Protecting us from inside trading, pump and dump schemes, policing market players? Yes, that may be the primary duty of agencies such as the SEC. However, Gershenson turns our attention to […]
Review: The Rise and Fall of Homo Economicus
The Rise and Fall of Homo Economicus: The Myth of the Rational Human and the Chaotic Reality by Yannis Papadogiannis deserves wide circulation for documenting the failed state of economics as science. Humans are a far cry from the rational creatures mainstream economics assumes. Economics as a science will never be as mathematically precise as Newtonian […]
Review – Competition, Diversity and Economic Performance: Processes, Complexities and Ecological Similarities
Mainstream microeconomics has emphasized the search for perfectly competitive markets within a framework of equilibria in a quest to maximize economic efficiency. Tisdell argues that intense competition can reduce economic performance. He concentrates on market adjustments and the evolution of economic systems where the role of diversity, product niches, cooperation between firms and comparisons with […]
Two+ Calls for Papers – Towards Sustainable Re-embedding & Civil Society
The next European Academy of Management conference will take place in Valencia (Spain) between the 4th and the 7th of June 2014. The conference will be held at the Valencia Conference Centre and the Faculty of Economics of University of Valencia. The theme of the conference, Waves and Winds of Strategic Leadership for Sustainable Competitiveness, […]
Video Friday: When Shareholders Vote Go & Board Says No + Top 20 Films about Finance
Recommended viewing this week is a discussion between TK Kerstetter, Chairman, NYSE Governance Services / Corporate Board Member and Scott Cutler, EVP, NYSE Euronext. Learn when directors most frequently get withhold votes. Shareholder communication is critical. To watch this one, you will need to go directly to This Week in the Boardroom. In our second of […]
Video Friday: Joseph Stiglitz – The Price of Inequality
From a friend: He came to the SEC a month ago and gave such an awesome talk about his new book, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future … incredible talk. This guy is serious, Nobel Prize in economics and whatnot. He’s talking about industry entrenchment, the finance industry, manipulation of government, […]
Video Friday: Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman
The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), and Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers hosted a remarkable evening of conversation between two economic heavyweights: Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. (more…)
Contest: Post-Modern Portfolio Theory
Second Annual Contest for Best Research on Post-Modern Portfolio Theory: Uniting the Real Economy with Portfolio & Investment Theory. (more…)
Review: Governance Reimagined – Risk Capital as Commons
Governance Reimagined: Organizational Design, Risk, and Value Creation (Wiley Finance) by David R. Koenig envisions a fundamental redesign based on a networked/distributive model centered around risk capital viewed as a “commons.” Like Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond, Koenig weaves together ideas from a wide variety of sources, exploding many myths […]
Review: Economic Governance Matters
Does Economic Governance Matter?: Governance Institutions and Outcomes edited by Mehmet Ugur and David Sunderland. The answer is an unqualified yes! More questionable is if citizens can shape governance to be more efficient to society as a whole. It does not require immense imagination to see that technically-feasible economic outcomes may remain socially-unfeasible if the […]
Capitalism vs. the Climate
Shop Amazon’s Cyber Monday Week This article by the award-winning Naomi Klein from The Nation is well worth the read. She takes on one of the most important subjects of the day. Here’s a brief clip: In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, I explore how the right has systematically used crises—real and trumped up—to push through […]
Extracurricular Reading
From August 2011 Harper’s Index: Portion of employers who say they conduct criminal-background checks on potential employees: ¾ Chance that an American adult has a criminal record: 1 in 4 Percentage of applicants offered undergraduate admission to Harvard this year: 6.2 Percentage of applicants accepted for employment on McDonanld’s National Hiring day in April: 6.2 […]
Economics of Good and Evil: The Secret Foundations of a Science
Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street, by Thomas Sedlacek, explores the path dependency of modern Western economics through mythology, religion and fables. I wish the book had been published and influential forty-five years ago when I was a freshman economics major. When I was an undergraduate student […]
Video Friday: MIT World – The Evolution of Macroeconomics
This panel first looks inward, at the evolution of macroeconomics in the past century, and the emergence of microeconomic foundations in macroeconomics, then shifts outward, to the application of economic analysis to such issues as structural unemployment, the ongoing U.S. (more…)
Video Friday: Economic Outlook & TARP Hearing
Watch, as BNY Mellon’s Chief Economist Richard Hoey presents a summary of his October update. We continue to expect a broad sustained global economic expansion over the next several years with the fastest growth in those countries in the strongest financial position (largely in the developing world) and the slowest growth likely in those countries […]
Behavioral Economics
Remarks by Dan Ariely, author of The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home, at the SEC Investor Advisory Committee (May 17, 2010, morning session) are well worth watching. Just a few cryptic observations to whet your appetite. Duration doesn’t matter as much as intensity. High pain that […]
European Corporate Governance: Readings & Perspectives
This new reader, edited by Thomas Clarke and Jean-Francois Chanlat offers up one of the first critiques of the subprime financial crisis within a framework that compares Anglo-American governance features with those of Europe. At the heart of the collapse was the growth of the derivatives market that was supposed to hedge against losses. Settlements […]
Handbook of Social Capital
When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, it was our propensity for civic association that impressed him as the key to making democracy work. "Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition:’ he observed, "are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which […]
Archives: November 2008
Noteworthy What Will TARP Bring? (RMG, 11/24/08), see especially comments from Connecticut State Treasurer Denise Nappier Issues to Consider: Special Meetings to Authorize TARP Preferred Stock(TheCorporateCounsel.net Blog, 11/25/08). Most companies don’t have the authority to issue preferred shares under their charter and are scrambling to file preliminary proxy materials for a special meeting to obtain shareholder […]
Governance and Ownership
Governance and Ownership (Corporate Governance in the New Global Economy Series), Robert Watson, editor (Edward Elgar, 2005). This is an excellent collection of 20 papers, most published in the late 1990s, enhances our understanding of the relationships between ownership corporate ownership governance. Issues investigated include: diversity of ownership forms and corporate control implications effectiveness of […]