Econometric policy evaluation: A critique

The difficulty in defining a field for the so-called institutional economics is the uncertainty of meaning of an institution. Sometimes an institution seems to mean a framework of laws or natural rights within which individuals act like inmates. Sometimes it seems to mean the behavior of the inmates themselves. Sometimes anything additional to or critical of the classical or hedonic economics is deemed to be institutional. Sometimes anything that is "economic behavior" is institutional. Sometimes anything that is "dynamic" instead of "static," or a "process" instead of commodities, or activity instead of feelings, or mass action instead of individual action, or management instead of equilibrium, or control instead of laissez faire, seems to be institutional economics.

On Institutional Economics

Quasi-markets and social policy

Nature's capacities and their measurement

Book review: introduction and reply to - the dappled world: a study of the boundaries of science

(1997). The Nature of Transaction Cost Economics. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 781-804.

The nature of transaction cost economics

PART I. The Cambridge approach to social ontology 1. A conception of social ontology 2. Quine and the ontological turn in economics 3. The scope of ontological theorising PART II. Traditions and projects 4. The nature of heterodox economics 5. Economics as progress: The LSE approach to econometric modelling and critical realism as programmes for research 6. An evolutionary economics? On borrowing from evolutionary biology 7. Structure, agency and causality in post-revival Austrian economics: tensions and resolutions PART III. Interventions in the history of economic thought 8. Smith and Newton: Some methodological issues concerning general economic equilibrium theory 9. Metatheory as the key to understanding Schumpeter after Shionoya 10. Order without equilibrium: A critical realist interpretation of Hayek's notion of spontaneous order PART IV. Methods 11. Methods of abstraction and isolation in modern economics 12. Applied economics, contrast explanation and asymmetric information PART V. Ethics 13. Critical ethical naturalism: an orientation to ethics 14. Realism, universalism and capabilities PART VI. Elaborating conceptions of social reality 15. Ontology and the study of social reality: emergence, organisation, community, power, social relations, corporations, artefacts and money 16. Open and closed systems and the Cambridge school 17. The nature of gender 18. Technological objects, social positions, and the transformational model of social activity 19. Technology and the extension of human capabilities 20. What is an institution?

Social Ontology and Modern Economics

Se proposant d'expliquer l'abandon du projet d'une analyse biologique des «Principes d'economie» qui devait consituter le second volume de l'oeuvre d'A. Marshall, l'A. avance l'hypothese d'une conception standard de la science inadequate au projet. Decelant les formes du realisme transcendantal qui sera systematise quelques cinquante ans apres la mort de l'economiste, l'A. montre que la position positiviste de Marshall est a l'origine de tensions et de contraintes qui posent problemes tant du point de vue de la methodologie statique que du contenu substantiel de son propos, et qui s'avere impropre a l'elaboration systematique d'une ontologie sociale structuree

Marshall on tendencies, equilibrium, and the statical method

Despite recent advances, economic methodology has found it difficult to transcend certain positivist premisses and concerns. We argue that developments in philosophy and social theory under the heading of critical realism are particularly significant with respect to overcoming these problems. To illustrate, we focus upon various themes that arise in a recent collection concerned with economic methodology and institutionalist economics, relating these themes to relevant aspects of this realist position. In so doing, we argue that an economic methodology restricted to description and an institutionalism committed to some form of methodological individualism are not only unnecessary but problematic.

Realism, underlabouring and institutions

In this paper I accept that just as mainstream economics can be characterized by its insistence upon a deductivist method, so the least contentious, most widely accepted aspects of Post-Keynesianism can be accounted for by its anti-deductivist stance and more specifically by its tacit commitment to something like critical realism. I argue that neo- Ricardian economics, to the extent that it takes closure for granted as a natural and useful starting point for analysis, retains an underlying commitment to deductivism and so is difficult to reconcile with Post- Keynesianism. By providing a criterion for assessing whether neo- Ricardianism belongs within a coherent Post-Keynesianism I also clarify why the nature of this rclationship has for so long remained unresolved. Not until it was recognized that coherence within Post-Keynesianism turns upon methodological issues, and essentially involves the abandon- ment of the deductivist framework, could progress in understanding its relationship with neo-Ri...

Stephen Pratten

Papers

The nature of transaction cost economics

Social Ontology and Modern Economics

Marshall on tendencies, equilibrium, and the statical method

Realism, underlabouring and institutions

The “Closure” Assumption as a First Step: Neo-Ricardian Economics and Post-Keynesianism