Archivo de la categoría: Papers

WP: Hayek’s Two Epistemologies: Economics and Sciences in General

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Borrador con Gabriel Zanotti sobre las dos epistemologías de Hayek, la relacionada a la economía en particular y la relacionada a las ciencias en general.

This chapters explores Hayek’s two epistemologies; that of economics and science in general. We track how Hayek’s early work on economics epistemology ultimately evolved to his epistemology of sciences in general. In particular, we explore Hayek’s insights on knowledge and economic coordination and its connection to his theory of complex phenomena.

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WP: Open Roads in Macroeconomics

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Desde la crisis financiera del 2008 hace una década, un interesante debate se ha dado en el ámbito de la macroeconomia sobre el rol y eficiencia de los modelos formales. En particular en lo que respecta a los modelos DSGE.

Este paper resume el debate y plantea «puertas abiertas» en el campo de la macroeconomia que pueden beneficiarse de la literatura austriaca.

An ongoing debate has been going on since the 2008 crisis on the stance of macroeconomic modelling and what changes, if any, should the discipline take. Besides model improvements, the use of DSGE modeling in policy making continued unaltered. This situation has been defended and criticized by different scholars. This paper reviews the stance of the DSGE debate and discusses open roads in macroeconomic theory.

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WP: Latin American Populism in the 21st Century

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Junto a Alex Padilla estudiamos el impacto económico e institucional del populismo en cinco países latinoamericanos en el siglo 21.

Abstract

This paper offers an economic and institutional assessment of 21st-century Latin American populism, particularly in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. We find that populism fails to offer the significant economic and social improvements that leaders promise and voters hope for. Instead, it produces a marked deterioration of economic and political institutions.

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WP: The Upper Turning Point in the Austrian Business Cycle Theory

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Roger Garrison describe a la teoría austriaca del ciclo económico (ABCT) como una teoría de auge insostenible, en lugar de ser una teoría que explique (en detalle) la caída o crisis económica. Para mantener el efecto sobre producción y empleo, la autoridad monetaria debe incrementar el ritmo de expansión, lo cual es un camino insostenible.

Pero que sucede, se pregunta Jeffrey Hummel, si la expansión monetaria es constante en lugar de creciente. Debe, eventualmente, la economía caer en una crisis o es una situación estable (aunque no optima). O incluso, es posible que la economía se acomode a la expansión monetaria y este sea el nuevo «equilibrio»? De acuerdo al ABCT, debe toda expansión monetaria culminar en crisis?

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WP: Hayek’s Average Period of Production (A step forward and a missed opportunity)

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Latest work with Peter Lewin, Hayek centered, for a forthcoming Hayek Companion edited volume by Rosolino Candela.

One of Hayek’s most important contributions is his work on capital theory and business cycles as presented in Prices and Production. Hayek made significant contributions in this field. Significant contribution, however, usually are not free of issues. In this chapter, we discuss the distinctive characteristics of Hayek’s work on capital theory and how the questions his treatment raised can be answered with modern financial calculations. We also discuss Hayek’s work on capital theory after Prices and Production.

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WP: Does Bitcoin Have the Right Monetary Rule?

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The growing literature on Bitcoin offers little more than passing mentions to Bitcoin’s monetary rule. This is the topic of this short paper.

The growing literature on Bitcoin can be divided in two groups. One performs an economic analysis of Bitcoin focusing on its monetary characteristics. The other one looks takes a financial look at the price of Bitcoin. Interestingly, both of these groups have not given much more than passing comments to the problem whether or not Bitcoin has the right monetary rule. This paper argues that Bitcoin in particular, and cryptocurrencies in general, do not have a good monetary rule, and that this shortcoming seriously limits its prospect of becoming a well-stablished currency.

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WP: Substance and Semantics (The Question of Capital)

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Junto a Peter Lewin estudiamos el difícil problema de definir «capital» en economía. En este articulo sugerimos volcar el énfasis a su definición tradicional, donde el capital es el valor de mercado de todos los bienes de producción (sean maquinas -bienes de capital- u otros bienes.) Es la concepción que se empezo a dejar de lado con Adam Smith. Y también es la concepción de Mises. Aquí el borrador del articulo que saldrá en el Journal of Economic Behavios and Organization.

The perennial question ‘What is Capital’ has been getting some attention recently. Although the distinction between capital as a financial construct and capital as a collection of physical production-goods is well known, we argue that the former concept is underappreciated. The two concepts are often conflated in practice, and the relationship between them is seldom well understood. We spell out the financial concept of capital emphasizing its importance as an indispensable instrument of calculation and accounting. We consider some views of human, social and other capital and how we differ from them. We present reasons for rejecting the notion of an aggregate production function in standard growth theory (which uses the notion of an aggregate stock of physical capital) and as recently used by Thomas Piketty in his well-known work.

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WP: The Grecian Horse (Does Immigration Lead to the Deterioration of American Institutions?)

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Si bien existe cierto consenso sobre los beneficios económicos de la libre inmigración, una de las objeciones mas importantes es de hecho cultural. Borjas, por ejemplo, argumenta que una fuerte inmigración (a Estados Unidos) puede afectar sus instituciones produciendo un perjuicio económico.

Junto a Alexandre Padilla estudiamos el efecto de stock y flujo de inmigrantes en los grados de liberad económica de los distinto estados dentro de Estados Unidos. En el estudio no encontramos evidencia de que ni el stock ni flujo de inmigrantes estén correlacionados con un deterioro en las libertades económicas. Debajo se encuentra el link al borrador del articulo, cuya versión final saldrá publicado en el journal Public Choice.

Concerns about the institutional impact of immigration, particularly, in the United States, are not new. We can trace them all the way back to Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. More recently, in response to a literature that questions the efficiency of current immigration restrictions, Borjas (2015) expresses similar concerns about the institutional impact of immigrants coming from countries with poor institutions. Using economic freedom as proxy for institutional quality of the American states since 1980, using several estimation techniques and control variables, our results show that concerns about the institutional impact of immigrants are so far not supported.

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WP: The Role of Capital Structure in ABCT

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En este corto paper junto a Peter Lewin resumimos nuestro trabajo en teoría del capital y ciclos económicos que hemos realizado en los últimos dos o tres años. Este paper fue para un panel especial sobre el rol de la teoría del capital en la teoría austriaca del ciclo económico. Para los interesados en una lectura corta y no técnica sobre nuestro trabajo en temas de ciclos, este paper es un buen resumen.

We argue that the application of financial analysis, especially that of duration, clarifies and supports the application of the average period of production in ABCT. We also suggest that the focus in the recent ABCT literature should be more on the average period of production (APP) and less in the stages of production as depicted in Hayek’s triangle in Garrison’s model.

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WP: What Is So Extreme About Mises’ Extreme Apriorism: Reply to Scott Scheall

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In Zanotti and Cachanosky (2016) [SSRN version] we argue that the widespread interpretation that for Mises (and by implication most Austrians) economic science can be carried out without empirical assumptions that are not deduced from what Mises calls praxeology is simply wrong. This interpretation, we argue, has a strong root in Rothbard’s (1957) «In Defense of Extrem Apriorism.» We maintain that Mises himself did not maintain this position.

Scott Scheall argues not only that our setting is irrelevant, but that can also be misleading. He even feels comfortable implying that we are not being objective in our analysis because we are more concerned about defending Mises than actually analyzing the epistemological issue.

In this paper we reply to Scheall’s arguments. Even if the problem that Scheall is dealing with is interesting, it remains a different problem to the one we tackle.

Abstract

We reply to Scott Scheall’s What is so Extreme About Mises’s Extreme Apriorism. We restate the setting of the topic of our paper and we argue that Scheall is not providing a clear distinction between (a) Mises the person and his epistemological position and (b) praxeology and economics. We also clarify misrepresentations of our own positions in Scheall’s treatment of our paper.

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