The social capital has strengthened the solidarity funds when the legal mechanisms and institutions for monitoring and assistance would not have been present. The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of social capital on productivity and performance of the Mexican solidarity funds. For...

Born out of the conscious effort to imitate mechanical physics, neoclassical economics ended up in the mid 20th century embracing a purely mathematical notion of rigor as embodied by the axiomatic method. This lecture tries to explain how this could happen, or, why and when the economists’...

This paper argues that the international financial crisis is just the last in a series of economic calamities produced by a type of theory that converted the economics profession from a study of real world phenomena into what in the end became mathematized ideology. While the crises themselves...

The purpose of this note is to clarify how the idea of "causal depth" can play a role in finding the more "approximately true" explanation through causal comparisons. It is not an exhaustive treatment but rather focuses on a few aspects that may be the most critical in evaluating the explanatory...

The institutional economics if John Commons (1934) contained two related objectives. The first was to explain the evolution of economics. The second was to analyze the effects of institutions on resource allocation and the distribution of income. The method of explaining the evolution of...

There has been a fundamental development in theory and understanding of market, private, collective and public organizations in recent years. This paper incorporates achievements of the interdisciplinary New Institutional and Transaction Costs Economics (combining Economics, Organization, Law,...

We summarize Francis Fukuyama’s State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century (London, Profile Books, 2005)and explore the limits of its arguments. State Building is a book with a very wide scope that essentially tries to “ground” and expand the fields of political...

European competition policy has been one of the common policies since the beginning of European integration. The European level economic policy coordination and the customs union have required a uniform framework for competition policy covering the whole Community. Nowadays the economic...

Pay What You Want (PWYW) pricing has received considerable attention recently. Empirical studies show that a PWYW pricing mechanism is able to increase a seller’s turnover and profit. This paper addresses PWYW pricing for bundles of experience goods. The paper shows that a PWYW pricing...

This paper discusses how profit and loss sharing ratios will be determined at the micro and micro levels in an interest free system of financing business operating side by side of an interest based conventional financing.It shows that leverage magnification of return on owners' equity is also...