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3071 books match the query 'Business & Economics' and 174 start with e

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Empirical Foundations of Household Taxation

Edited by Martin Feldstein and James M. Poterba

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Tax policy debates—and reforms—depend heavily on estimates of how alternative tax rules would affect behavior. Yet there is considerable controversy about the key empirical links among tax rates, household decisions, and revenue collections.

The nine papers in this volume exploit the substantial variation in U.S. tax policy during the last two decades to investigate how taxes affect a range of household behavior, including labor-force participation, saving behavior, choice of health insurance plan, choice of child care arrangements, portfolio choice, and tax evasion. They also present new analytical results on the effects of different types of tax policy. All of this research relies on household-level data—drawn either from public-use tax return files or from large household-level surveys—to explore various aspects of the relationship between taxes and household behavior.

As debates about the effects of proposed tax reforms continue in the 1990s, this volume will be of interest to policy makers and scholars in the field of public finance.

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Empirical Studies of Commercial Policy

Edited by Robert E. Baldwin

University of Chicago Press, 1991

The need for careful research on trade policy is particularly acute, and this volume empirically addresses these and many other important issues. The contributors offer studies which integrate the institutional details of current trade policy with creative economic analyses.

Marked by a shift from a traditional reliance on simulation models, these papers take their inspiration from recent changes in the assumptions traditionally underlying research in international trade theory. No longer are government policies viewed as being somehow "given" to the researcher; in part 1, "Analyses with a Political Economy Perspective," four papers treat such policies as endogenous and explicable in terms of political economy. Neither are product and factor markets seen as perfectly competitive; instead, the three papers in part 2, "Trade Policy Effects under Imperfectly Competitive Market Conditions," assume that firms consider the actions of other companies when formulating their decisions. In part 3, "A New Measure of Trade Restrictiveness and Estimates of Trade Policy Effects with CGE Models," the first essay explores the quantitative restrictions on cheese to develop and implement a new model of restrictive trade. Two final contributions address problems for which simulation modeling is especially useful. The first considers the effectiveness of an import surcharge in reducing the U.S. trade deficit and the second treats the welfare effects of liberalization in South Korea where increasing returns to scale are significant

These innovative studies focus on economic behavior that will provide valuable insights for policymakers, academic economists, and students.

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Empirical Studies of Strategic Trade Policy

Edited by Paul Krugman and Alasdair Smith

University of Chicago Press, 1994

Since the 1980s, economists have used the concept of strategic trade policy, which takes account of imperfect competition and increasing returns in the international marketplace, to criticize conventional views about free trade. According to the new view, a government can take strategic steps to raise its income at another country's expense—by subsidizing exports or erecting trade barriers, protecting certain firms from foreign competition, or promoting the development of new industries. This volume looks at the experience of specific industries in order to determine the effectiveness of strategic trade policy in promoting economic growth.

The nine papers cover the U.S. and European auto industries, the U.S. steel industry, the commercial aircraft industry, airline deregulation in Scandinavia, and labor and industrial policy in Korea and Taiwan. The authors refine the basic techniques for measuring policy effectiveness, extend them to encompass industry dynamics, and test the implications of new trade models.

International economists and trade experts in government and business will find important new insights into the role of strategic trade policy in international competitiveness.

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Empowering Exporters

Reciprocity, Delegation, and Collective Action in American Trade Policy

Michael J. Gilligan

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Until the New Deal, most groups seeking protection from imports were successful in obtaining relief from Congress. In general the cost of paying the tariffs for consumers was less than the cost of mounting collective action to stop the tariffs. In 1934, with the passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, all of this changed. The six decades that followed have produced a remarkable liberalization of trade policy in the United States. This occurred despite the fact that domestic politics, according to some of the best developed theories, should have prevented this liberalization.

Michael Gilligan argues that liberalization has succeeded because it has been reciprocal with liberalization in other countries. Our trade barriers have been reduced as an explicit quid pro quo for reduction of trade barriers in other countries. Reciprocity, Gilligan argues, gives exporters the incentive to support free trade policies because it gives them a clear gain from free trade and thus enables the exporters to overcome collective action problems. The lobbying by exporters, balancing the interests of groups seeking protection, changes the preferences of political leaders in favor of more liberalization.

Gilligan tests his theory in a detailed exploration of the history of American trade policy and in a quantitative analysis showing increases in the demand for liberalization as the result of reciprocity in trade legislation from 1890 to the present. This book should appeal to political scientists, economists, and those who want to understand the political underpinnings of American trade policy.

Michael J. Gilligan is Assistant Professor of Politics, New York University.

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End of the Line

Autoworkers and the American Dream

Edited by Richard Feldman and Michael Betzold

University of Illinois Press, 1988

"This marvelous book captures in a most poignant and accurate way what life is like for the millions who still make up the 'blue collar' backbone of American industry."--Barry Bluestone, author of The Deindustrialization of America

"A richly detailed, well-crafted portrait of a cross section of autoworkers in the midst of an identity crisis and a crisis gripping the U.S. auto industry."--Frank Hammer, President, United Auto Workers Local 909

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Energy in the Nordic World

Mogens Rüdiger and Anna Åberg

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

Norway and Sweden are among the biggest consumers of energy per capita, yet the Nordic nations also lead the world in clean power production and have ambitious goals of decarbonizing their energy systems by 2050. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland vary drastically in geography and the availability of natural resources, but each consistently generates electricity from renewable sources at multiple times the average rate of other high-income countries.

Mogens Rüdiger and Anna Åberg present a concise and timely history of energy production, trade, and consumption in Norden, starting with a review of the regional energy mix—from wind, solar, tide and wave, geothermal, biomass, nuclear, coal, and gas sources. Brief chapters describe the diversity of Nordic energy markets, assess how far the green transition has come, and explore what comes next as global crises, domestic politics, and technological developments present novel challenges and opportunities. Energy infrastructures and economic activities, Rüdiger and Åberg argue, serve as unique cultural focal points in the region. The coauthors summarize the national policy frameworks for the sector as well as the key energy and economic indicators used in infrastructure planning, regulation, and the opening of the electricity and gas markets to free competition.

Energy in the Nordic World is the essential primer to the power markets at the heart of Europe’s energy transition.

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Engaging Diverse Communities

A Guide to Museum Public Relations

Melissa A. Johnson

University of Massachusetts Press, 2020

As U.S. museums evolve from their role as elite institutions to organizations serving multiple stakeholders, they must adopt new communication practices to meet their social missions and organizational goals. Engaging Diverse Communities, the first book-length study of museum public relations for practitioners since 1983, details how institutions can use communication fundamentals to establish and maintain relationships with a wide range of cultural groups and constituencies.

Melissa A. Johnson interviews communicators at cultural heritage museums to understand the challenges of representing communities based on racial and ethnic, generational, immigrant, and language identities. Exploring how communications professionals function as cultural intermediaries by negotiating competing and intersecting identities and mastering linguistic and visual code-switching, she presents an analysis of the communication tactics of more than two hundred art, history, African American, American Indian, and other diverse museums. Engaging Diverse Communities illuminates best public relations practices, especially in media relations, digital press relations, website content production, social media, and event planning. This essential text for museum professionals also addresses visual aesthetics, cultural expression, and counter-stereotypes, and offers guidance on how to communicate cultural attractiveness.

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Engineering Culture

Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation

Gideon Kunda

Temple University Press, 2006

Engineering Culture is an award-winning ethnography of the engineering division of a large American high-tech corporation. Now, this influential book—which has been translated into Japanese, Italian, and Hebrew—has been revised to bring it up to date. In Engineering Culture, Gideon Kunda offers a critical analysis of an American company's well-known and widely emulated "corporate culture." Kunda uses detailed descriptions of everyday interactions and rituals in which the culture is brought to life, excerpts from in-depth interviews and a wide variety of corporate texts to vividly portray managerial attempts to design and impose the culture and the ways in which it is experienced by members of the organization. The company's management, Kunda reveals, uses a variety of methods to promulgate what it claims is a non-authoritarian, informal, and flexible work environment that enhances and rewards individual commitment, initiative, and creativity while promoting personal growth. The author demonstrates, however, that these pervasive efforts mask an elaborate and subtle form of normative control in which the members' minds and hearts become the target of corporate influence. Kunda carefully dissects the impact this form of control has on employees' work behavior and on their sense of self. In the conclusion written especially for this edition, Kunda reviews the company's fortunes in the years that followed publication of the first edition, reevaluates the arguments in the book, and explores the relevance of corporate culture and its management today.

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England's Asian Renaissance

Su Fang Ng

University of Delaware Press, 2022

England's Asian Renaissance explores how Asian knowledges, narratives, and customs inflected early modern English literature. Just as Asian imports changed England's tastes and enriched the English language, Eastern themes, characters, and motifs helped shape the country's culture and contributed to its national identity. Questioning long-standing dichotomies between East and West and embracing a capacious understanding of translatio as geographic movement, linquistic transformation, and cultural grafting, the collection gives pride of place to convergence, approximation, and hybridity, thus underscoring the radical mobility of early modern culture. In so doing, England's Asian Renaissance also moves away from entrenched narratives of Western cultural sovereignty to think anew England's debts to Asia.

Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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England's Great Transformation

Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution

Marc W. Steinberg

University of Chicago Press, 2016

With England’s Great Transformation, Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi’s landmark The Great Transformation. The conventional wisdom has been that in the nineteenth century, England quickly moved toward a modern labor market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the contrary that labor contracts, centered on insidious master-servant laws, allowed employers and legal institutions to work in tandem to keep employees in line.

Building his argument on three case studies—the Hanley pottery industry, Hull fisheries, and Redditch needlemakers—Steinberg employs both local and national analyses to emphasize the ways in which these master-servant laws allowed employers to use the criminal prosecutions of workers to maintain control of their labor force. Steinberg provides a fresh perspective on the dynamics of labor control and class power, integrating the complex pathways of Marxism, historical institutionalism, and feminism, and giving readers a subtle yet revelatory new understanding of workplace control and power during England’s Industrial Revolution.

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English Majors at Work

Career and Life Pathways

Helene Meyers

Rutgers University Press, 2027

English Majors at Work: Career and Life Pathways details the professional superpowers—the many marketable skills—gained from studying literature, creative writing, film, and popular culture. It prepares English majors to know themselves and their worth so that they can feed their bodies and souls in rapidly changing 21st century economies. Written for prospective and current English majors as well as recent grads, the book shows that skills associated with the major--innovative thinking, excellent written communication, and the ability to read people, rooms, and data---can sustain lifelong successful careers. It also provides real talk about internships, networking, and graduate school. In keeping with a major that focuses on storytelling and analysis, each chapter concludes with a lively discussion of a relevant literary or media text. English Majors at Work is an essential guide for literature students as well as the professors, career services professionals, and parents who advise them.

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Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits

Or Why the Democracy Given to Us Must Become One We Fight For

Robert Menasse

Seagull Books, 2016

In 2010, Robert Menasse journeyed to Brussels to begin work on a novel centered on the European Union. His extended stay resulted in a completely different book—Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits, a work of nonfiction examining the history of the European project and the evolving politics of nation-states.

Spanning from the beginning of the transnational idea with 1951’s Montanunion—the European Coal and Steel Community—to the current financial crisis, Menasse focuses on the institutional structures and forces both advancing and obstructing the European project. Given the internal tensions among the European Commission, Parliament, and Council, Menasse argues that current problems that are frequently misunderstood as resulting from the financial crisis are, in fact, political. Along the way, he makes the bold claim that either the Europe of nation-states will perish—or the project of transcending the nation-states will.

A provocative book, Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits deftly analyzes the financial and bureaucratic structures of the European Union and sheds much-needed light on the state of the debt crisis. Menasse brings his considerable literary expertise to the unraveling of the real state of the Union, along the way weaving an intriguing tale of one continent’s efforts to become a truly postnational democracy.

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Ensuring Corporate Misconduct

How Liability Insurance Undermines Shareholder Litigation

Tom Baker and Sean J. Griffith

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Shareholder litigation and class action suits play a key role in protecting investors and regulating big businesses. But Directors and Officers liability insurance shields corporations and their managers from the financial consequences of many illegal acts, as evidenced by the recent Enron scandal and many of last year’s corporate financial meltdowns. Ensuring Corporate Misconduct demonstrates for the first time how corporations use insurance to avoid responsibility for corporate misconduct, dangerously undermining the impact of securities laws.

As Tom Baker and Sean J. Griffith demonstrate, this need not be the case. Opening up the formerly closed world of corporate insurance, the authors interviewed people from every part of the industry in order to show the different instances where insurance companies could step in and play a constructive role in strengthening corporate governance—yet currently do not. Ensuring Corporate Misconduct concludes with a set of readily implementable reforms that could significantly rehabilitate the system.

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Entering Cultural Communities

Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts

Grams, Diane

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Arts organizations once sought patrons primarily from among the wealthy and well educated, but for many decades now they have revised their goals as they seek to broaden their audiences. Today, museums, orchestras, dance companies, theaters, and community cultural centers try to involve a variety of people in the arts. They strive to attract a more racially and ethnically diverse group of people, those from a broader range of economic backgrounds, new immigrants, families, and youth.

The chapters in this book draw on interviews with leaders, staff, volunteers, and audience members from eighty-five nonprofit cultural organizations to explore how they are trying to increase participation and the extent to which they have been successful. The insiders' accounts point to the opportunities and challenges involved in such efforts, from the reinvention of programs and creation of new activities, to the addition of new departments and staff dynamics, to partnerships with new groups. The authors differentiate between "relational" and "transactional" practices, the former term describing efforts to build connections with local communities and the latter describing efforts to create new consumer markets for cultural products. In both cases, arts leaders report that, although positive results are difficult to measure conclusively, long-term efforts bring better outcomes than short-term activities.

The organizations discussed include large, medium, and small nonprofits located in urban, suburban, and rural areas—from large institutions such as the Smithsonian, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the San Francisco Symphony to many cultural organizations that are smaller, but often known nationally for their innovative work, such as AS220, The Loft Literary Center, Armory Center for the Arts, Appalshop, and the Western Folklife Center.

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Enterprise Exit Processes in Transition Economies

Downsizing, Workouts, and Liquidation

Leszek Balcerowicz

Central European University Press, 1998

The rebirth of competition and the extensive "exit" that has resulted are among the most important developments in Central Europe since the demise of Communism. This text examines why, how, and to what extent enterprises have reduced their size or left the market altogether during the first years of the transition from socialism to capitalism in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.

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Enterprising America

Businesses, Banks, and Credit Markets in Historical Perspective

Edited by William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo

University of Chicago Press, 2015

The rise of America from a colonial outpost to one of the world’s most sophisticated and productive economies was facilitated by the establishment of a variety of economic enterprises pursued within the framework of laws and institutions that set the rules for their organization and operation.

To better understand the historical processes central to American economic development, Enterprising America brings together contributors who address the economic behavior of American firms and financial institutions—and the associated legal institutions that shaped their behavior—throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Collectively, the contributions provide an account of the ways in which businesses, banks, and credit markets promoted America’s extraordinary economic growth. Among the topics that emerge are the rise of incorporation and its connection to factory production in manufacturing, the organization and operation of large cotton plantations in comparison with factories, the regulation and governance of banks, the transportation revolution’s influence on bank stability and survival, and the emergence of long-distance credit in the context of an economy that was growing rapidly and becoming increasingly integrated across space.

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Entrepreneurial Arts and Cultural Leadership

Traits of Success in Nonprofit Theatre

Bonnie Fogel and Brett Ashley Crawford

Intellect Books, 2025

A tactical guide for nonprofit arts leaders, revealing the entrepreneurial traits that turn creative passion into sustainable success.

Entrepreneurial Arts and Cultural Leadership focuses on real-world strategies for developing the entrepreneurial mindset necessary for leading and sustaining nonprofit arts organizations. Bonnie Fogel and Brett Ashley Crawford examine the leadership traits that drive innovation, adaptability, and long-term viability in the ever-evolving arts sector.

Through the case study of Imagination Stage, they highlight how successful nonprofit theater leaders can navigate financial instability, advocate for equity and inclusion, and implement sustainable business models in a landscape forever impacted by national and global events. With practical insights, tools, and a resource-rich appendix, this book offers arts managers, educators, and nonprofit leaders a roadmap for resilience and growth. Whether you are an advanced student, a researcher, or an arts executive seeking inspiration, this book provides an essential framework for building the future of nonprofit theatre.

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Entrepreneurial Goals

Development and Africapitalism in Ghanaian Soccer Academies

Itamar Dubinsky

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

The idea that the African private sector will generate economic prosperity and social wealth—an objective many governments and foreign charitable organizations have failed to achieve—continues to attract attention in business and policy circles. Yet little research has actually been conducted on Africapitalist endeavors. With the immense popularity of sports and the many aspirations they foster, the successes and shortcomings of soccer academies have kicked their way into the spotlight. Entrepreneurial Goals breaks away from studies that focus on the international relations consequences of soccer ventures, which are often rebuked as extended forms of European colonialism and exploitation of local talent, and instead centers Ghanaian establishments and the opportunities they create for local development within their surrounding communities.

Itamar Dubinsky’s extensive ethnographic research offers an innovative theoretical approach by assessing three institutions—Mandela Soccer Academy, Kumasi Sports Academy, and Unistar Soccer Academy—through an Africapitalist prism. He demonstrates that these business endeavors, when viewed from the perspective of local interests, realize many of the educational, financial, and community building ambitions of the region. This pioneering examination of locally owned academies in Ghana reflects Dubinsky’s aim of illuminating the entrepreneurs and programs whose success passes to participating youth and their families, while also exposing the contradictions of for-profit development initiatives that purport to reap collective social benefits.

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Entrepreneurial Seoulite

Culture and Subjectivity in Hongdae, Seoul

Mihye Cho

University of Michigan Press, 2019

Entrepreneurial Seoulite might be read as a memoir on Hongdae based on the author’s observations as a member of South Korea’s Generation X. During the 1990’s, Hongdae became widely known as a cool place associated with discourses on alternative music, independent labels, and club culture. Today, Hongdae is well known for its youth culture and nightlife, as well as its gentrification.

Recent research on Korean culture approaches the K-wave phenomenon from the perspectives of cultural consumption, media analysis, and cultural management and policy. Meanwhile, studies on Seoul have centered on its transformation as a global, creative city. Rather than examining the K-wave or the city itself, this book explores the experience of living through the city-in-transition, focusing on the relationship between “the ideology that justified engagement in capitalism” and the “subjectification process.” The book aims to understand the project to institutionalize a cultural district in Hongdae as a demonstration of the coevolution of ideologies and citizenship in a society undergoing rapid liberalization—politically, culturally, and economically.

A cultural turn took place in Korea during the 1990s, amid the economic prosperity driven by state-led industrialization and the collapse of the military dictatorship due to democratization movements. Cultural critiques, emerging as an alternative to social movements, proliferated to assert the freedom and autonomy of individuals against regulatory systems and institutions. The nation was hit by the Asian financial crisis in 1997, and witnessed massive economic restructuring including layoffs, stakeouts, and a prevalence of contingent employment. As a result, the entire nation had to find new engines of economic growth while experiencing a creative destruction. At the center of this national transformation, Seoul has sought to recreate itself from a mega city to a global city, equipped with cutting-edge knowledge industries and infrastructures.

By juxtaposing the cultural turn and cultural/creative city-making, Entrepreneurial Seoulite interrogates the formation of new citizen subjectivity, namely the enterprising self, in post-Fordist Seoul. What kinds of logic guide individuals in the engagement of new urban realities in rapidly liberalized Seoul—culturally and economically? In order to explore this query, Mihye Cho draws on Weber’s concept of “the spirit of capitalism” on the formation of a new economic agency focusing on the re-configuration of meanings, and seeks to capture a transformative moment detailing when and how capitalism requests a different spirit and lifestyle of its participants. Likewise, this book approaches the enterprising self as the new spirit of post-Fordist Seoul and explores the ways in which people in Seoul internalize and negotiate this new enterprising self.

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Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy

Volume 1

Edited by Josh Lerner and Scott Stern

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

Entrepreneurship and innovation are widely recognized as key drivers of long-term economic growth. Understanding the forces that influence them is essential for policy design. Building on the twenty-year legacy of the NBER Innovation Policy and the Economy series, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy showcases recent research on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship policy. The volume reports on five research projects. First, leveraging detailed data from the Business Formation Statistics, John Haltiwanger documents a striking uptick in new business formation during the pandemic, and considers the future economic impact of this renewed rate of business dynamism. The next two chapters focus on disparities in the degree of inclusion of women and people of color in innovation and entrepreneurship. Lisa Cook, Janet Gerson, and Jennifer Kuan examine the history of unequal access to education, training, and the practice and commercialization of invention, and the subsequent loss in innovative capacity and productivity. They also consider the potential effects of policies that address these inequalities. Mercedes Delgado and Fiona Murray complement this analysis by characterizing and analyzing the gender gap in patented innovation, including the substantial variation in inclusion of women across locations, industries, and individual firms. The remaining chapters focus on the organization of research and commercialization. Chiara Franzoni, Paula Stephan, and Reinhilde Veugelers consider the operation of current research funding systems with regard to risky research projects. They also describe the consequences of documented biases against novelty in funding decisions in the context of research on mRNA technology. Drawing on historical lessons from World War II as well as current analysis of innovation policy during COVID-19, Daniel Gross and Bhaven Sampat consider the unique challenges that arise when a crisis necessitates unusually rapid innovation and the deployment, at scale, of research findings.

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Entrepreneurship, Technological Innovation, and Economic Growth

Studies in the Schumpeterian Tradition

Frederic M. Scherer and Mark Perlman, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1992

Papers presented at the third biennial meeting of the International J. A. Schumpeter Society

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Entropy Economics

The Living Basis of Value and Production

James K. Galbraith and Jing Chen

University of Chicago Press, 2025

Economists dream of equilibrium. It’s time to wake up.

In mainstream economics, markets are ideal if competition is perfect. When supply balances demand, economic maturity is orderly and disturbed only by shocks. These ideas are rooted in doctrines going back thousands of years, yet, as James K. Galbraith and Jing Chen show, they contradict the foundations of our scientific understanding of the physical and biological worlds.

Entropy Economics discards the conventions of equilibrium and presents a new basis for thinking about economic issues, one rooted in life processes—an unequal world of unceasing change in which boundaries, plans, and regulations are essential. Galbraith and Chen’s theory of value is based on scarcity, and it accounts for the power of monopoly. Their theory of production covers increasing and decreasing returns, uncertainty, fixed investments over time, and the impact of rising resource costs. Together, their models illuminate key problems such as trade, finance, energy, climate, conflict, and demography.

Entropy Economics is a thrilling framework for understanding the world as it is and will be keenly relevant to the economic challenges of a world threatened with disorder.

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Environmental Challenges in the MENA Region

The Long Road from Conflict to Cooperation

Hamid Pouran and Hassan Hakimian

Gingko, 2019

The Middle East and North Africa region is well-known for its abundant natural resources and important geostrategic position. This position is often overshadowed by continued sectarian violence and trans-boundary conflicts that threaten the stability of the entire region with serious global implications. This preoccupation with conflict has come at the expense of addressing the region’s other challenges.

Although the region’s fragile environmental state has increasingly preoccupied policymakers in individual countries, there is currently insufficient attention paid to coordinating collaborative action to recognise and address problems relating to its environmental sustainability and climatic change. In the absence of a positive agenda for tackling these issues, recurrent environmental setbacks and rapid depletion of the region’s natural resources continue to pose a major threat to the long-term economic, political, and social stability of the region.

Despite the urgency of these challenges, there is little research dedicated to studying MENA’s environmental sustainability. Environmental Challenges in the MENA Region: The Long Road from Conflict to Cooperation draws from the proceedings of a seminal international conference on the subject at SOAS in October 2016, which was held as a celebration of the SOAS Centenary. This led to a collective contribution by experts and policy-makers concerned with the state of the MENA region’s environmental predicament with the aim of addressing these problems in a constructive and forward-looking approach.

The chapters in this book are predicated upon two critical premises. First, expertise and awareness from a wide range of disciplines is required to understand and address environmental challenges. And, second, to have a real chance of success, MENA countries need to confront these problems as their common threats and to see them as an opportunity for regional cooperation and policy coordination. This book provides the results of an interdisciplinary effort to address the various dimensions of the region’s environmental challenges from across the region and disciplines.

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Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy

Volume 1

Edited by Matthew J. Kotchen, James H. Stock, and Catherine D. Wolfram

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020

This volume presents six new papers on environmental/energy economics and policy. Robert Stavins evaluates carbon taxes versus a cap-and-trade mechanism for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, arguing that specific design features of either instrument can be more consequential than the choice of instrument itself. Lucas Davis and James Sallee show that the exemption of electric vehicles from the gasoline tax is likely to be efficient as long as gasoline prices remain below social marginal costs, even though it results in lower tax revenue. Caroline Flammer analyzes the rapidly growing market for green bonds and highlights the importance of third-party certification to the financial and environmental performance of publically traded companies. Antonio Bento, Mark Jacobsen, Christopher Knittel, and Arthur van Benthem develop a general framework for evaluating the costs and benefits of fuel economy standards and use it to account for the differences between several recent studies of changes in these standards. Nicholas Muller estimates a measure of output in the U.S. economy over the last 60 years that accounts for air pollution damages, and shows that pollution effects are sizable, affect growth rates, and have diminished appreciably over time. Finally, Marc Hafstead and Roberton Williams illustrate methods of accounting for employment effects when evaluating the costs and benefits of environmental regulations.

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Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy

Volume 2

Edited by Matthew J. Kotchen, James H. Stock, and Catherine D. Wolfram

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020

This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and related policy issues. Robert Pindyck provides a systematic overview of what is known, and remains unknown, about climate change, along with the implications of uncertainty for climate policy. Shaikh Eskander, Sam Fankhauser, and Joana Setzer offer insights from a comprehensive data set on climate change legislation and litigation across all countries of the world over the past thirty years. Adele Morris, Noah Kaufman, and Siddhi Doshi shine a light on how expected trends in the coal industry will create significant challenges for the local public finance of coal-reliant communities. Joseph Aldy and his collaborators analyze the treatment of co-benefits in benefit-cost analyses of federal clean air regulations. Tatyana Deryugina and her co-authors report on the geographic and socioeconomic heterogeneity in the benefits of reducing particulate matter air pollution. Finally, Oliver Browne, Ludovica Gazze, and Michael Greenstone use detailed data on residential water consumption to evaluate the relative impacts of conservation policies based on prices, restrictions, and public persuasion.

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Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy

Volume 3

Edited by Matthew J. Kotchen, Tatyana Deryugina, and James H. Stock

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and policy in the United States. Rebecca Davis, J. Scott Holladay, and Charles Sims analyze recent trends in and forecasts of coal-fired power plant retirements with and without new climate policy. Severin Borenstein and James Bushnell examine the efficiency of pricing for electricity, natural gas, and gasoline. James Archsmith, Erich Muehlegger, and David Rapson provide a prospective analysis of future pathways for electric vehicle adoption. Kenneth Gillingham considers the consequences of such pathways for the design of fuel vehicle economy standards. Frank Wolak investigates the long-term resource adequacy in wholesale electricity markets with significant intermittent renewables. Finally, Barbara Annicchiarico, Stefano Carattini, Carolyn Fischer, and Garth Heutel review the state of research on the interactions between business cycles and environmental policy.

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Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy

Volume 4

Edited by Matthew J. Kotchen, Tatyana Deryugina, and James H. Stock

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023

Rigorous, careful, and nonpartisan research with a high policy impact on environmental and energy economics.

Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy focuses on the effective and efficient management of environmental and energy challenges. Research papers offer new evidence on the intended and unintended consequences, the market and nonmarket effects, and the incentive and distributional impacts of policy initiatives and market developments.

This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and policy. Gilbert Metcalf examines the distributional impacts of substituting a vehicle miles-traveled tax for the existing federal excise tax in the United States. David Weisbach, Samuel Kortum, Michael Wang, and Yujia Yao consider solutions to the leakage problem of climate policy with differential tax policies on the supply and demand for fossil fuels and on domestic production and consumption. Danae Hernandez-Cortes, Kyle Meng, and Paige Weber quantify and decompose recent trends in air pollution disparities in the US electricity sector. Severin Borenstein and Ryan Kellogg provide a comparative analysis of different incentive-based mechanisms to reduce emissions in the electricity sector on a path to zero emissions. Sarah Anderson, Andrew Plantinga, and Matthew Wibbenmeyer document distributional differences in the allocation of US wildfire prevention projects. Finally, Mark Curtis and Ioana Marinescu provide new evidence on the quality and quantity of emerging “green” jobs in the United States.

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Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy

Volume 7

Edited by Matthew J. Kotchen, Tatyana Deryugina, and Catherine D. Wolfram

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2026

Rigorous, careful, and nonpartisan research with a high policy impact on environmental and energy economics.

Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy focuses on the effective and efficient management of environmental and energy challenges. Research papers offer new evidence on the intended and unintended consequences, the market and nonmarket effects, and the incentive and distributional impacts of policy initiatives and market developments.

This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and policy. Judson Boomhower and Meredith Fowlie illustrate the distributional consequences of improving risk pricing efficiency in wildfire insurance markets. Claire Brunel and Arik Levinson develop a conceptual framework for understanding the economic and environmental consequences of taxes on imports of goods based on their carbon content. Karen Clay, Danae Hernandez-Cortes, Akshaya Jha, Joshua Lewis, Noah Miller, and Edson Severnini study the long-run distributional implications of US power plant sitings over more than a century. Todd Gerarden, Mar Reguant, and Daniel Xu provide a comprehensive overview of industrial policy in the renewable energy sector, with comparisons across the US, EU, and China. Jamie Hansen-Lewis and Michelle Marcus show how failure to account for behavioral responses can affect policy predictions regarding maritime emissions. Finally, Richard Sweeney and Joseph Wilske estimate the externalities associated with correlated intermittency in electricity generation from US wind power investments.

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Environmentality

Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects

Arun Agrawal

Duke University Press, 2005

In Kumaon in northern India, villagers set hundreds of forest fires in the early 1920s, protesting the colonial British state’s regulations to protect the environment. Yet by the 1990s, they had begun to conserve their forests carefully. In his innovative historical and political study, Arun Agrawal analyzes this striking transformation. He describes and explains the emergence of environmental identities and changes in state-locality relations and shows how the two are related. In so doing, he demonstrates that scholarship on common property, political ecology, and feminist environmentalism can be combined—in an approach he calls environmentality—to better understand changes in conservation efforts. Such an understanding is relevant far beyond Kumaon: local populations in more than fifty countries are engaged in similar efforts to protect their environmental resources.

Agrawal brings environment and development studies, new institutional economics, and Foucauldian theories of power and subjectivity to bear on his ethnographical and historical research. He visited nearly forty villages in Kumaon, where he assessed the state of village forests, interviewed hundreds of Kumaonis, and examined local records. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork and archival research, he shows how decentralization strategies change relations between states and localities, community decision makers and common residents, and individuals and the environment. In exploring these changes and their significance, Agrawal establishes that theories of environmental politics are enriched by attention to the interconnections between power, knowledge, institutions, and subjectivities.

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Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century

Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Model

Kezar, Adrianna

Rutgers University Press, 2016

The institution of tenure—once a cornerstone of American colleges and universities—is rapidly eroding. Today, the majority of faculty positions are part-time or limited-term appointments, a radical change that has resulted more from circumstance than from thoughtful planning. As colleges and universities evolve to meet the changing demands of society, how might their leaders design viable alternative faculty models for the future?

Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century weighs the concerns of university administrators, professors, adjuncts, and students in order to critically assess emerging faculty models and offer informed policy recommendations. Cognizant of the financial pressures that have led many universities to favor short-term faculty contracts, higher education experts Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey assemble a top-notch roster of contributors to investigate whether there are ways to modify the existing system or promote new faculty models. They suggest how colleges and universities might rethink their procedures for faculty development, hiring, scheduling, and evaluation in order to maintain a campus environment that still fosters faculty service and student-centered learning.

Even as it asks urgent questions about how to retain the best elements of American higher education, Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century also examines the opportunities that systemic changes might create. Ultimately, it provides some starting points for how colleges and universities might best respond to the rapidly evolving needs of an increasingly global society.

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Envy Up, Scorn Down

How Status Divides Us

Susan T. Fiske

Russell Sage Foundation, 2011

An insightful examination of why we compare ourselves to those above and below us. The United States was founded on the principle of equal opportunity for all, and this ethos continues to inform the nation's collective identity. In reality, however, absolute equality is elusive. The gap between rich and poor has widened in recent decades, and the United States has the highest level of economic inequality of any developed country. Social class and other differences in status reverberate throughout American life, and prejudice based on another's perceived status persists among individuals and groups. In Envy Up, Scorn Down, noted social psychologist Susan Fiske examines the psychological underpinnings of interpersonal and intergroup comparisons, exploring why we compare ourselves to those both above and below us and analyzing the social consequences of such comparisons in day-to-day life. What motivates individuals, groups, and cultures to envy the status of some and scorn the status of others? Who experiences envy and scorn most? Envy Up, Scorn Down marshals a wealth of recent psychological studies as well as findings based on years of Fiske's own research to address such questions. She shows that both envy and scorn have distinctive biological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral characteristics. And though we are all "wired" for comparison, some individuals are more vulnerable to these motives than others. Dominant personalities, for example, express envy toward high-status groups such as the wealthy and well-educated, and insecurity can lead others to scorn those perceived to have lower status, such as women, minorities, or the disabled. Fiske shows that one's race or ethnicity, gender, and education all correlate with perceived status. Regardless of whether one is accorded higher or lower status, however, all groups rank their members, and all societies rank the various groups within them. We rate each group as either friend or foe, able or unable, and accordingly assign them the traits of warmth or competence. The majority of groups in the United States are ranked either warm or competent but not both, with extreme exceptions: the homeless or the very poor are considered neither warm nor competent. Societies across the globe view older people as warm but incompetent. Conversely, the very rich are generally considered cold but highly competent. Envy Up, Scorn Down explores the nuances of status hierarchies and their consequences and shows that such prejudice in its most virulent form dehumanizes and can lead to devastating outcomes—from the scornful neglect of the homeless to the envious anger historically directed at Tutsis in Rwanda or Jews in Europe. Individuals, groups, and even cultures will always make comparisons between and among themselves. Envy Up, Scorn Down is an accessible and insightful examination of drives we all share and the prejudice that can accompany comparison. The book deftly shows that understanding envy and scorn—and seeking to mitigate their effects—can prove invaluable to our lives, our relationships, and our society.

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Equal Freedom

Stephen Darwall, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1995

"Egalitarian" and "libertarian" are frequently seen as opposing political labels. These two views and their oppositions are the topic of this collection of important essays by an exceptionally distinguished group of thinkers.This collection of essays can be read as a critique of libertarianism. A libertarian, in contemporary discussion, is one who supports no more than a minimal state--a government that protects individuals from assault, murder, theft, and other invasions of their "Lockean" rights, but otherwise does not interfere with voluntary economic or personal activity. "Egalitarian," on the other hand, generally refers to someone who is prepared to favor such interference if it is necessary to reduce substantial inequalities of certain kinds and if, perhaps, it is democratically authorized.Several of the essays, those of John Rawls, T. M. Scanlon, G. A. Cohen, and Ronald Dworkin, advance different versions of this liberal egalitarian line of argument. Each maintains that the ideas of freedom and equality enter into moral and political philosophy at a more fundamental level than the substantive, rights-determining norms on which libertarianism makes its stand. Each proposes a distinctive vision of this fundamental role. And each argues, on this basis, for egalitarian moral or political principles. Amartya Sen's essay can also be placed within a broadly liberal egalitarian tradition, although it is less an argument for substantive equality (and against libertarianism) than a discussion of what form a reasonable egalitarianism might take. Finally, Quentin Skinner directly criticizes libertarianism in ways that arguably tend to support egalitarianism, although this is not his primary aim.This book offers deep thinking across one of the main fissures of current political debate. It will thus be of interest to all with a serious interest in the fundamentals of political beliefs and action.

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Equality for Contingent Faculty

Overcoming the Two-Tier System

Keith Hoeller

Vanderbilt University Press, 2014

Vice President Joseph Biden has blamed tuition increases on the high salaries of college professors, seemingly unaware of the fact that there are now over one million faculty who earn poverty-level wages teaching off the tenure track. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story entitled "From Graduate School to Welfare: The PhD Now Comes with Food Stamps." Today three-fourths of all faculty are characterized as "contingent instructional staff," a nearly tenfold increase from 1975.

Equality for Contingent Faculty brings together eleven activists from the United States and Canada to describe the problem, share case histories, and offer concrete solutions. The book begins with three accounts of successful organizing efforts within the two-track system. The second part describes how the two-track system divides the faculty into haves and have-nots and leaves the majority without the benefit of academic freedom or the support of their institutions. The third part offers roadmaps for overcoming the deficiencies of the two-track system and providing equality for all professors, regardless of status or rank.

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Equality in the Nordic World

Carsten Jensen

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

By most measures, the Nordic countries regularly rank among the best in terms of equality and business friendliness. Political scientist Carsten Jensen delves into what is exceptional about equality in the region, and outlines “the four equalities” that set it apart: economic, intergenerational, gender, and health.

The four types of equality have their origins in unique political compromises made in the twentieth century. The resulting social market economies of these countries affect their growth and levels of equality even today.

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Equality of Permission

The Politics of Feasible Liberalism

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

University of Chicago Press, 2026

From a revered public intellectual, an essential argument for the political preconditions of a liberal society.

Liberalism has always suffered from messaging challenges. It simultaneously implies a pursuit of individual liberty and social equality, two projects often regarded as at odds. Or: Liberal means the opposite of conservative. Except when it doesn’t. The list goes on.

Liberal bard Deirdre Nansen McCloskey understands these rhetorical troubles. Equality of Permission is her stirring and career-defining intervention on this essentially contested yet critical topic—a forceful case for liberalism as our best hope, and an essential vision of the political conditions necessary for its survival. McCloskey prescribes a liberalism built around liberty from the bottom up: “equality before the law and equality of political and economic permissions,” lightly administered.

The state, McCloskey argues, is increasingly the source of our discontents—an illiberal institution, hindered by a quixotic fixation on pursuing equality of wealth or opportunity. Equality of Permission evangelizes for a better, and earlier, version of liberalism—that of John Locke, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Henry David Thoreau—as against a top-down quest for an unattainable utopia. McCloskey shows that statism in pursuit of a chimerical general will, even when well-intentioned, leads to tyranny.

Brimming with energy and erudition, drawing on wisdoms from Alexis de Tocqueville to Mae West, Equality of Permission is McCloskey at the peak of her powers—brilliant, lacerating, garrulous, funny, worldly, and warm. Amid intense debate over the use and abuse of government institutions, McCloskey shares her singular vision for a true democracy, one grounded in respect and conducive to universal human flourishing.

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Equality of Permission

The Politics of Feasible Liberalism

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

University of Chicago Press, 2026

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Equipping The Saints

Barbara Elliott

Templeton Press, 2004

For any individual donor or foundation giving money to a faith-based organization, this guide is indispensable. Equipping the Saints offers sage advice on recognizing the qualities of good leaders, effective programs, and the methods of evaluating outcomes. Based on hundreds of interviews with donors and civic leaders, this guide provides a candid look at the unique strengths and weaknesses of these groups. Equipping the Saints is packed with useful tools like a donor's interest inventory, a checklist for making a site visit, tips on reading nonprofit financial statements, and hands-on recommendations for making grants that are both effective and prudent.

"An excellent guide for philanthropists seeking to unleash the power of faith in healing troubled souls and transforming troubled neighborhoods." —Adam Meyerson, president, Philanthropy Roundtable

"Most donors quickly learn how all that glitters is not gold. Some go on to learn how all that is gold does not glitter. In this book Barbara Elliott provides the lessons in discernment and the tools for evaluation that donors need. Take advantage of her understanding by making it your own." —Marvin Olasky, ditor of World magazine, author of Compassionate Conservatism and The Tragedy of American Compassion

"Any donor with even a hint of interest in exploring investments in the work of faith-based organizations (FBOs) needs this book. It is packed with practical information about how to understand and assess FBOs. Its numerous examples of real-life donors making real-life differences through partnerships with faith-inspired community healers ought to stimulate much creative brainstorming among philanthropists." —Dr. Amy L. Sherman, senior fellow and director, Faith in Communities Initiative of the Foundation for American Renewal

"From the perspective of a local foundation giving to faith-based ministries, we have found Barbara Elliott's work to be inspiring, practical and instructive to us as we think through our priorities and principles for funding decisions…I have extraordinary respect for Barbara's scope of understanding, ability to communicate with passion and reason, and her deep understanding of a very complex field. She gives all of us—ministries and funders—genuine hope and invaluable insight." —Fred Smith, president, The Gathering

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Essays in History

Financial, Economic, Personal

Charles P. Kindleberger

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Essays in History is a collection of papers and articles covering a breathtaking span across the twentieth century and delving into such diverse topics as economic and financial crises in the sixteenth century, retirement reading for bankers, and a first-hand account of the genesis and formation of the Marshall Plan. Who else to explore such far-flung topics and bring such intelligence and wit to them but Charles P. Kindleberger?Readers will find here a strong view on the need for economic history to guide theoretical research. They will also detect Kindleberger’s doubtfulness regarding economic theory based on assumptions that all participants in society are honest, well informed, and make their judgments independently. And finally, readers will be led to the conclusion that, in light of these views, those who think that finance and the economy should be completely unregulated are woefully misguided.The book’s foreword by Peter Temin, economics professor at MIT and former student and colleague of Kindleberger’s, provides a warm and informative introduction to the life and work of this formidable economist and delightful writer.

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Essays in Positive Economics

Milton Friedman

University of Chicago Press, 1966

"Stimulating, provocative, often infuriating, but well worth reading."—Peter Newman, Economica

"His critical blast blows like a north wind against the more pretentious erections of modern economics. It is however a healthy and invigorating blast, without malice and with a sincere regard for scientific objectivity."—K.E. Boulding, Political Science Quarterly

"Certainly one of the most engrossing volumes that has appeared recently in economic theory."—William J. Baumol, Review of Economics and Statistics

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Essays on Economics and Economists

R. H. Coase

University of Chicago Press, 1994

How do economists decide what questions to address and how to choose their theories? How do they tackle the problems of the economic system and give advice on public policy? With these broad questions, Nobel laureate R. H. Coase, widely recognized for his seminal work on transaction costs, reflects on some of the most fundamental concerns of economists over the past two centuries.

In fifteen essays, Coase evaluates the contributions of a number of outstanding figures, including Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, Arnold Plant, Duncan Black, and George Stigler, as well as economists at the London School of Economics in the 1930s.

Ronald H. Coase was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1991.

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Essays on Economics and Economists

R. H. Coase

University of Chicago Press, 1994

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

How do economists decide what questions to address and how to choose their theories? How do they tackle the problems of the economic system and give advice on public policy? With these broad questions, Nobel laureate R. H. Coase, widely recognized for his seminal work on transaction costs, reflects on some of the most fundamental concerns of economists over the past two centuries.

In fifteen essays, Coase evaluates the contributions of a number of outstanding figures, including Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, Arnold Plant, Duncan Black, and George Stigler, as well as economists at the London School of Economics in the 1930s.

Ronald H. Coase was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1991.

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Essays on Liberalism and the Economy, Volume 18

F. A. Hayek

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A deft selection of unpublished and little-known works by F. A. Hayek that will serve to enlighten and enliven debates around the ever-changing face of Western liberalism

Across seventeen volumes to date, the University of Chicago Press’s Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series has anthologized the diverse and prolific writings of the Austrian economist synonymous with classical liberalism. Essays on Liberalism and the Economy traces the author’s long and evolving writings on the cluster of beliefs he championed most: liberalism, its core tenets, and how its tradition represents the best hope for Western civilization.

This volume contains material from almost the entire span of Hayek’s career, the earliest from 1931 and the last from 1984. The works were written for a variety of purposes and audiences, and they include—along with conventional academic papers—encyclopedia entries, after-dinner addresses, a lecture for graduate students, a book review, newspaper articles, and letters to the editors of national newspapers. While many are available elsewhere, two have never appeared in print, and two others have not been published in English.

The varied formats collected here are enriched by Hayek’s changing voice at different stages of his life. Some of the pieces resonate as high-minded and noble; some are meant as cuts to “intellectuals” (a pejorative term when used by Hayek) like Keynes and Galbraith. All serve to distill important threads of his worldview.

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Essential Economics for Heritage

Peter G. Gould

University College London, 2025

A comprehensive introduction to the economics of cultural heritage for heritage professionals.

Essential Economics for Heritage provides tools from economics that will aid scholars, professionals, and students in heritage-related fields, such as archaeology, museum and site management, research, presentation, and conservation. With a wealth of practical examples ranging from wealthier countries in the Global North to nations that depend on heritage as a key economic resource, this guide applies relevant economic theory and business analysis to issues regularly faced in the field, from heritage tourism and sustainability to the role of heritage in economic development, investment decision making, and financing for heritage organizations.

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Ethereum for Business

A Plain-English Guide to the Use Cases that Generate Returns from Asset Management to Payments to Supply Chains

Paul Brody

Epic Books, 2023

In Ethereum for Business, Paul Brody provides a plain English guide to doing business on the world's largest blockchain. The book covers an overview of Ethereum, business applications on Ethereum, and various advanced topics. Including case studies and examples from the world of Ethereum, Ethereum for Business is readable both linearly and by dipping in and out of chapters.

The book is aimed at business executives who want to understand the potential of blockchain for solving real-world business problems, and readers with technical knowledge who want to understand the business use cases.

Ethereum for Business covers topics such as:

• Basics of blockchain technology and key components on wallets, tokens, and keys.
• Decentralization in digital marketplaces, smart contracts, privacy, scalability, supply chain management, trade finance, payments and asset transfers, and tokenomics.
• Transforming the world of enterprise computing by enabling companies to model and manage assets, real or digital, that exist off-chain.
• A guide for implementation that contains key success metrics for enterprises considering blockchain-based solutions.

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Ethics at Work

Creating Virtue at an American Corporation

Daniel Terris

Brandeis University Press, 2013

The defense industry has, to some people’s surprise, the broadest and most sustained set of ethics programs of any sector of American business today. Lockheed Martin, which specializes in a host of high-technology products and services for the federal government, has dramatically escalated its formal ethics and business conduct program since the mega-corporation was formed through a merger in 1995. The Ethics and Business Conduct Division employs 65 “ethics officers” in sites around the United States, and it requires the firm’s 130,000-plus employees to devote at least one hour per year to consideration of the ethical issues of the business, at a cost of millions of dollars per year. Daniel Terris spent two years researching Lockheed Martin materials and interviewing its ethics officers and ordinary employees to develop this rich case study of the ethics program at this powerful global corporation. This study begins with a survey of American attitudes toward ethics in business over the past century, raising the question of whether ethics can be genuinely built into the modern mega-corporation. Terris then develops a portrait of Lockheed Martin—its history and the nature of its far-flung businesses—turning at last to its ethics program, which was created following a series of bribery, overcharging, and corruption scandals in the 1970s and 1980s. By 1996, Lockheed Martin had in place some dull, preachy ethics programs designed to provide basic information on telling right from wrong in business practice. But then-CEO Norm Augustine wanted to liven things up, so he turned to an unlikely source of inspiration: the irreverent Dilbert comic strip. The company came up with a board game that resembled Clue, but used Dilbert characters to explore ethical case studies drawn from real-life Lockheed Martin incidents. Terris examines the success of the board game, as well as subsequent efforts including special workshops, a film festival, and biennial ethics surveys to engage employees in broad-based discussions of ethics at work. Although Terris applauds Lockheed Martin’s ethics program as “gloriously democratic” in its focus on the responsibility of every worker for the ethical dimensions of his or her actions, he is concerned that the broad-based focus tends to divert attention from the ethical responsibilities of senior management and the moral complexities of collective decision-making. While he admires the ambitious scope of the program, he notes that the corporation’s definition of “ethics” focuses on individual behavior rather than on the impact of the corporation’s broader policies on local, national, and global communities. The ultimate effect of such programs may be to create more ethical business practices—but, ironically, at the expense of the public good.

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Ethics, Business and Capitalism

Thailand and Indonesia in an Asian Perspective

Edited by Janet Hunter, Patnaree Srisuphaolarn, Pierre van der Eng, and Julia Yongue

National University of Singapore Press, 2024

Academic analysis of business ethics in Southeast Asia.

Taking cues from the Japanese concept of ethical or stakeholder capitalism, this book demonstrates how the business activities of firms in Thailand and Indonesia are guided by their perceptions of morality in society and their concerns about the environment. The authors explore the likelihood that foreign influences contributed to the development of such management philosophies, for example through the expansion of Japanese subsidiary firms in the 1980s or the spread of foreign articulations of the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) since the 2000s. Companies in both countries may exercise a degree of pragmatism in how they develop these activities. As the authors reveal, the perceptions of morality in business that have shaped many entrepreneurs and companies in Thailand and Indonesia are their responses to the dynamic political, social, and economic factors that have formed the business environments of both countries.

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Ethnic Entrepreneurs, Crony Capitalism, and the Making of the Franco-Mexican Elite

José Galindo

University of Alabama Press, 2021

A groundbreaking historical narrative of corruption and economic success in Mexico.

Ethnic Entrepreneurs, Crony Capitalism, and the Making of the Franco-Mexican Elite provides a new way to understand the scope and impact of crony capitalism on institutional development in Mexico. Beginning with the Porfiriato, the period between 1876 and 1911 named for the rule of President Porfirio Díaz, José Galindo identifies how certain behavioral patterns of the Mexican political and economic elite have repeated over the years, and analyzes aspects of the political economy that have persisted, shaping and at times curtailing Mexico’s economic development.

Strong links between entrepreneurs and politicians have allowed elite businessmen to receive privileged support, such as cheap credit, tax breaks, and tariff protection, from different governments and to run their companies as monopolies. In turn, successive governments have obtained support from businesses to implement public policies, and, on occasion, public officials have received monetary restitution. Galindo notes that Mexico’s early twentieth-century institutional framework was weak and unequal to the task of reining in these systematic abuses. The cost to society was high and resulted in a lack of fair market competition, unequal income distribution, and stunted social mobility.

The most important investors in the banking, commerce, and manufacturing sectors at the beginning of the twentieth century in Mexico were of French origin, and Galindo explains the formation of the Franco-Mexican elite. This Franco-Mexican narrative unfolds largely through the story of one of the richest families in Mexico, the Jeans, and their cotton textile empire. This family has maintained power and wealth through the current day as Emilio Azcárraga Jean, a great-grandson of one of the members of the first generation of the Jean family to arrive in Mexico, owns Televisa, a major mass media company with one of the largest audiences for Spanish-language content in the world.

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