Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience offer systematic evidence that fictional works exert a surprisingly strong influence on readers and have the power to shape their opinions and worldviews. Building on these findings, we study ‘Potterian economics’, the economic ideas, insights...

In this paper, we revisit the relation between institutional factors and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in developing countries by employing a dynamic panel methodology, which enables us to deal with the persistency of FDI flows and endogeneity issues. We also contribute to the...

This paper analyzes the causes of corruption in contemporary Bolivia. It argues that, along with the well-documented observation that richer countries tend, on average, to be less corrupt than poorer ones, corruption is directly dependent on FDI inflows, with higher levels of FDI associated with...

The traditional relationship of patronage and clientship between the landlords and the growing commercial class in Bida and in other Nigerian Emirates - firmly established during the 19th century - left indelible marks which influenced the pattern of social communication between these two...

The study attempts to highlight the interrelation between three central points in the ongoing debate on the political economy of development: viability, surplus, and class-formation. A case study of the development of rural labour systems in Northern Nigeria is meant to provide both a better...

Where should we look to understand the origin of inequality? I propose an unusual window of evidence—modern societies. I hypothesize that evidence for the origin of inequality is encoded in the institutional structure of industrial societies. To test this idea, I use a model to project modern...

This paper argues that the traditional social contract that underlies the free market economy has run its course and needs to be replaced by a new contract, based on a new conception of the 'empowering economy.' Whereas different social contracts are relevant to different societies, all these...

This essay interweaves two stories—one theoretical and empirical, the other autobiographical. The first story embeds the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the broader political economy of the Middle East and the global accumulation of “capital as power.” The second story narrates the...

This article discusses the aggregation problem and its implications for ecological economics. The aggregation problem consists of a simple dilemma: when adding heterogeneous phenomena together, the observer must choose the unit of analysis. The dilemma is that this choice affects the resulting...

Max Weber's path to economic science was impacted to a large degree by political motives. The question emerges how the depiction, which has been maintained by historians of economics, of Weber as a methodologist – who demands objectivity and value freedom in scientific analysis – is...