The inversion of the ‘really big trade-off’:Homeownership and pensions in long-run perspective

The hypothesis of a trade-off between homeownership and welfare state provision, first proposed by Jim Kemeny around 1980, is a foundational claim in the political economy of housing. However, the evidence for this hypothesis is unclear at both macro and micro levels. This paper examines the link between welfare and homeownership at the macro level using new long-run data and a multilevel modelling approach. It shows that the negative cross-sectional correlation between homeownership and public welfare provision observed in the earliest available data disappears and becomes neutral by the 1980s and possibly positive subsequently. Within-country trajectories vary, but are significantly positive in more countries than significantly negative, suggesting that in some contexts welfare and homeownership are complements rather than competitors. The paper posits a dual ratchet effect mechanism in both pension benefits and homeownership capable of producing this inversion, and further suggests that rising public indebtedness and the debt-stabilising effects of welfare states may account for the emergence of complementarity in the pension‒homeownership relationship. The latter supports the hypothesis that some countries have avoided the trade-off by ‘buying time’ on credit markets.Abstract Literature and theory Data and methods The trade-off in the long run: descriptive findings Multivariate analysis Country trajectories: buying time? Conclusion Supplemental material Reference

Toward a Sociology of Contract

Economic sociology has neglected contract as an institutional foundation for market relations. It has also given inadequate attention to the role of forms of social difference such as race, gender, and sexuality in constituting market exchange. We argue that these omissions share common origins in the status/contract division that figured prominently in nineteenth-century sociological and legal thinking. In excavating these origins, we trace two alternative routes to “socializing the economy” associated with sociological and sociolegal traditions, respectively. The sociological approach rests on a dichotomous understanding of “status” and “contract,” with the result that social (“status”) relations are seen as regulating market exchange from the outside. By contrast, Legal Realists treat status and contract as copresent elements of social organization. Because status and contract are intertwined, they operate through the internal constitution of power and inequality in the bargaining relationship. We conclude by considering how insights from sociology and Legal Realism might be productively joined in analyzing the labor contract

On Kimberly Kay Hoang's, Dealing in Desire. Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Oakland, CA, University of California Press, 2015

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The Crisis in Context: Democratic capitalism and its contradictions

The lecture was delivered on 20 April 2011.The “financial crisis” and its sequel, the current sovereign debt crisis, appear to be the latest permutations of an old conflict between capitalism and democracy that forcefully reasserted itself after the end of the postwar growth period. Present calamities were preceded by high inflation in the late 1960s and 1970s, rising public deficits in the 1980s, and growing private indebtedness in the 1990s and 2000s. In each case, governments were faced with popular demands for prosperity and security that were incompatible with an allocation of life chances by free markets alone. Rather than the result of faulty economic management, inflation, deficits and financial under-regulation must be understood as temporary stopgaps to satisfy democratic-political claims for “social justice” alongside economic capitalist requirements of profitability and distribution by marginal productivity. The risks associated with the inherent contradictions of democratic capitalism may have increased in recent years, with potentially disruptive consequences for the social integration of democratic polities as well as for the system integration of advanced market economies