Drawing broadly on the literature on the political economy of the financial crisis, the paper looks at deregulation as a market driven process that culminated in a collective action failure. In the run up to the 2008 Financial Crisis strong competition and moral hazard went hand in hand and that...

In simple textbook treatment of bilateral exchange traders end up on the contract curve such that the trading surplus is maximized regardless of any asymmetric bargaining power they might have. However, that need not be true when the terms of exchange are determined by uncooperative bargaining,...

Since around 2000 the education premium and the level of employment in high-skill occupations has stagnated, if not actually begun to shrink. This brings into question the generally held view that in advanced countries, while potentially harmful for those who work with their hands, globalization...

Marx discussed institutional innovations in the context of a complex dynamic between inter versus intra-group opportunism, which contains clues for understanding how capacity for class agency develops. His lengthy discussion of the English Factory Acts in his Vol. I of Capital is an important...

The paper lays out a hypothesis about the effect global oversupply of labor had on induced technological change, clarifying how it might have contributed to the demand reversal for high skill workers and other recent observed trends in technological change in the US. The argument considers the...

The paper argues that financial deregulation incentivized financial firms to take excessive risks and over-expand because it turned social insurance against systemic risk into a common pool (or open) resource. The increased size and complexity of deregulated financial markets in turn raised the...

The paper explores how elites can develop capacity for collective agency through coordination. Elites' challenge is to simultaneously deter the state from abusing power while at the same time relying on it to discipline defectors in their midst. The basic insight holds that the credibility of...

The essay argues that a crisis of collective agency is at the root of the global economic crisis we face today. The secret of prosperous capitalism, the so-called golden age, was the ability of the state to uniformly impose welfare enhancing market restrictions that made it possible to husband...