WP: Putting Capitalism back into Capital

Working paper junto a Peter Lewin donde una vez más trabajamos con la interesección entre finanzas y teoría del capital. En esta ocasión ponemos la atención en un intercambio entre Hodgson y Braun sobre la importancia de entender «capital» con un punto de vista financiero.

En nuestro paper seguimos la recomendación en general del Hodgson y Braun pero extendemos su aplicación haciendo uso de conceptos financieros como duration.

Abstract

We agree with the recommendations of Hodgson (2014) and Braun (2015) to shift the focus away from capital as physical production-goods back to the common-sense and historical understanding of capital as money-borrowed for the purpose of acquiring productive resources to produce value. Much controversy, obscurity and confusion might have been avoided with this focus. The colloquial understanding of capital as financial-capital is to preferred to thinking of capital as a collection of physical things. A consideration of the role of time in production brings one to the realization that capital is the result of a process of evaluation, the result of ‘capital-accounting’. It is the ability to use capital-accounting that is in large part responsible for the phenomenal success of capitalism. Productive physical resources are all capital-goods, or preferably production-goods. They are different types of production-goods, human or non-human, and constitute a stock of potential value over time.

Acceder al paper en SSRN.

WP: The Time-Value of Money and the Money-Value of Time

Nuevo borrador, junto a Peter Lewin, en torno a la relación entre finanzas y teoría del capital. En este ya quinto paper discutimos menos el problema de ciclos económicos y nos enfocamos más en teoría del capital, incluyendo el problema de «reswitching.» El paper es un review de los temas que hemos tratado con algunos nuevos comentarios.

Abstract

All human action takes place in time, and with an awareness of time. We make choices in the present with a view to the future. Choices imply valuation, and the relative value to us of the things we choose depend crucially on the their connection to time. We discount the value of things depending on how long we have to wait for them. This well-known phenomenon is called the time-value of money.

When contemplating multiple receipts or payments distributed over time, if we need to judge the effect of the influence of time on the each of the values received or paid, we need some way to value the time periods involved. We may call this the money-value of time. A particular approach to capturing this idea has been developed in the finance literature, known as ‘duration’. Similar considerations can be found in the economics literature in the area of capital-theory.

In this paper we explore the interaction between these two phenomena.

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WP: The Average Period of Production (History of an Idea)

Junto a Peter Lewin, en tres ocasiones hemos extendido aplicaciones financieras a teoría del capital. Mas específicamente al concepto de período promedio de producción (roundaboutness.) En esta ocasión compartimos un borrador donde estudiamos la historia de esta idea en economía.

El tratamiento que Bohm-Bawerk hace del problema tiene analogías con el concepto de Macauly duration en finanzas. El tratamiento que hace Hayek tiene una analogía aún más cercana, dado que Hayek habla de «valor» mientras que Bohm-Bawerk hablab de «unidades de trabajo.»

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