Financial Fragility and the Great Depression

We analyze a financial collapse, such as the one which occurred during the Great Depression, from the perspective of a monetary model with multiple equilibria. The economy we consider contains financial fragility due to increasing returns to scale in the intermediation process. Intermediaries provide the link between savers and firms who require working capital for production. Fluctuations in the intermediation process are driven by variations in the confidence agents place in the financial system. Our model matches quite closely the qualitative movements in some financial and real variables (the currency/deposit ratio, ex-post real interest rates, the level of intermediated activity, deflation, employment and production) during the Great Depression period.

Owenism, co-operation, socialism and political economy, 1817-1835

This thesis analyses the complex interrelationship between British socialism and political economy in the period in which both discourses flourished. The thesis begins by reviewing previous studies of Owenism and suggests an alternative thematic approach to elucidate the relationships between Owenism and political economy, in terms of both differences and similarities. Chapter one focuses on the initial period when Owenism was most closely identified with key individuals like Robert Owen, and argues that the pervasive historiographical view that Owenism was essentially incompatible with political economy is too simplistic. In fact, early Owenites were never totally successful in extricating themselves from the competitive, capitalist theoretical web which they closely identified with political economy. Chapter two extends this argument to the period when Owenism emerged from its largely eponymous stage, and a variety of Owenite, co-operative and socialist discourses developed, with divergent perspectives on their relationships with competitive capitalism. Chapter three argues that the ubiquitous view of a binary opposition between pro-private property political economists and 'communistic' Owenites ignores strong contrary evidence. Not all Owenites wanted to abolish private property; indeed some wanted to extend private property rights on the basis of the moral imperative provided by the labour theory of value. Chapters four to six examine the relationship of political economy and Owenism to the labour theory of value/exchange. The major argument in these chapters is that for both Owenites and leading political economists like Ricardo and Malthus, the labour theory of value was a transcendental organising principle, but it was an economic model which neither the socialists nor economists could sustain. Finally, chapter seven argues that the widespread view that the Malthusian population theory represented a significant site of difference between Owenites and economists is erroneous. This thesis demonstrates that the intimate links between Owenism and political economy require a reconsideration of both the historical context and the historical character of British socialism to 1835

Exorcizing Wechsler\u27s Ghost: The Influence of the Model Penal Code on Death Penalty Sentencing Jurisprudence

The constitutional law of capital sentencing currently is torn between its past and its future, its inheritance of a utilitarian, offender-based, sentencing theory and the powerful contemporary resurgence of retributivism as the dominant justification for criminal punishment. The basic procedural and jurisprudential structures all originated as the offspring of an explicitly nonretributive penal theory crafted in large part by Herbert Wechsler and codified in the Model Penal Code. To bring death penalty procedure more in line with contemporary understandings of the death penalty\u27s theoretical and moral justification, the ghost of Herbert Wechsler must be exorcized from the constitutional law of capital sentencing. Abolition of the death penalty is likely the only sure way to root out the myriad sources of discrimination and arbitrariness that currently plague administration of the death penalty. Short of that, rationalization of sentencing procedures so as to make them more consistent with the most commonly recognized justification for keeping the system in place - retributivism - might help ensure that only those fully culpable for the worst crimes are subject to its reach