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James P. Stodder 

Ph.D., Economics (Yale,1990) 

West Hartford, CT, USA

JimStodder@gmail.com

jstodder@bu.

www.JimStodder.com
 jim_beth_stl
University of Virginia Veconab 
  Logon VEconLab
Research Links for Economics 

Curriculum Vitae 

Research Projects 
Some Publications


Interesting Reading-- Below is a graph of the Cyclically Adjusted Price/Earnings ("CAPE") Ratio (in blue), compared with the long-term average 
interest rate; i.e. 10-year US Gov't Bonds (in red).  (See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P/E_ratio
).  Data from  website for Robert Shiller's Irrational Exuberance:  http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm.  See: https://www.amazon.com/Magazine-September-October-economist-Shiller/dp/B0043H9TOE

Monthly data are current to November 2022.

       

For a source on "Q",  goto the website for Valuing Wall Street by Smithers and Wright, www.smithers.co.uk/faqs.php   You can also download their spreadsheet for q at www.ems.bbk.ac.uk/faculty/wright/pdf/Wright2004dataset.xls.   An interesting summary of their case is made in the following paper by Wright: "Measures of Stock Market Value and Returns for the US Nonfinancial Corporate Sector, 1900-2002": http://www.ems.bbk.ac.uk/faculty/wright/pdf/wrightReviewOfIncomeAndWealth2004.pdf


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Research Links for Economics

IDEA Database of Economic Research, now based at the Universityof Connecticut, is the largest FREE database of research papers in economics.

The Economist .  The best weekly news magazine in the English language, Time Magazine for grown-ups.  Widely read by corporate and government policy makers, and by professional economists.  The "premium" material on this Economist web site is only accessible via a Rensselaer subscription; you will need your Rensselaer login ID to get the code.  Go to the library's link for the Economist  

 RFE -- Resources for Economists on the Internet This is the most widely-used general gateway for economic data-links. Be sure to look at the Short-cuts section for a general listing. Three of the most commonly used and most interesting links are given below. 

 Economic Data & Links This is a good quick look at the most commonly used USdata sources. 

 International Economics Gateway The name says it all. 

WEBSITES of some prominent economists:       Brian Arthur   Samuel Brittan    Bradford DeLong     NicholasEconomedis  PaulKrugman  BarryNalebuff  Stephen Roach Nourile Roubini  RobertShiller  JosephStiglitz   Hal Varian   

Debates about The IMF Joe Stiglitz, the chief economist at the World Bank , was recently forced to step down. This may be because he had initiated a fundamental criticism of the IMF as a 'global central bank'. This was similar to the way, in the 1930s, J.M. Keynes said that the Fed and the Bank of England were doing exactly the wrong things. 

 Economics of the Internet, Information Goods Maintained by Hal Varian, a well-known micro-economist and Dean at UC Berkeley’s School of Information Management & Systems. This is the best source for "Network Externalities," a very hot topic. 

More on Network Externalities by Brian Arthur, the economist whose ideas helped launch the case against Microsoft.
   
Debates about Intellectual Property on the Web A listing of organizations and publications engaged in the battle to define and protect ownership for that form of wealth most valuable in the information age. 

The Third Industrial Revolution: Technology, Productivity, and Income Equality , by Jeremy Greenwood.  A brilliant paper, relating paradoxes of the IT revolution to earlier revolutions in (1) railroads and (2) electrification.  Really helps to clarify many recent debates about the "Internet bubble" in equity markets, the long productivity slump of 1972-1995, and rising income inequality.  Published by the Federal Reserve of Cleveland.

  More Specialized Research 

Brilliant essay in changes in Intellectual Property that are transforming our world: "Coase'sPenguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm."

 

Bio-economicstries to promote the idea that economies are more like living systems than like mechanical objects. Interestingly enough, the founder of this group, Michael Rothschild, author of "Bionomics" ,is also helping to make the good old profit mechanism within firms work better, by integrating IT process monitoring and feedback with basic optimization techniques. 

 

 

  The Santa Fe Institute The high-powered and increasingly influential world of non-linear, "complexity" approaches to economics and other "Complex Evolving Systems." Fascinating computer graphic simulations of evolutionary processes. 

 

 

University of Iowa's Electoral "Stock Market" This is a game in which you can buy "stock" in one candidate’s winning a Congressional or Presidential race. It has shown itself to be far more accurate than ordinary polling, and much cheaper besides!   

 

 

Money – Past, Present & Future This is, IMHO, the best link on my list – a rare mix of history, economics, and financial-political debate. You may think you know what money is, but that’s probably an illusion. It’s amazing how little economists really understand about this force that "makes the world go round." 

 

 

EXPERIMENTAL ECONOMICS SITES: This research is changing our understanding of how decisions get made, and how markets actually work.  The University of Virginia's Veconabis an excellent site with tools for running online experiments.  Here you can LOGON to the VECONLAB. The University of Arizona's Economics Science Lab is another research program on controlled laboratory experiments. 

 

 

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 Current Research Projects   (Fully downloadable articles are **starred, those un-starred are available here only in a summary form.)

 

 

** The Macro-Stability of Swiss WIR-Bank Credits: Balance, Velocity and Leverage  uses WIR-Bank data by industrial sector to understand the way that this Community Curency enhances long-term relationships and reciprocity between large enterprises and their network of small to medium distributors and suppliers.  This form of muli-lateral credit is analogous to the merely bilateral "trade credits" so basic to these networks -- as recognized by Silvio Gessel in the early 20th century.  The  article was published in Comparative Economic Studies in 2016.

** Complementary Credit Networks and Macro-Economic Stability** uses data from a Swiss barter network (WIR-Bank) to argue that large scale internet barter helps to stabilize the business cycle.  My paper was recently invited for a 2nd presentation to the Central Bank of Brazil, and is in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.     **  A translation of the Swiss banking magazine article ** , originally in German and French, is available here, taken from the magazine of Wir-Bank.  Barter networks have recently attracted the attention of leading policy makers like MervynKing, former Director of the Bank of England.  A  very recent article, soon to be published, looks at WIR-Bank lending by industrial sector, and finds that this shows even stronger counter-cyclical tendencies. 

** Macroeconomic Stability of Centralized and Decentralized Exchange: Anthropological Data ** This paper revisits an anthropological and historical data set I used years ago, and tests implications about macro-economic stability.  It is a companion piece to the "Reciprocal Networks" piece mentioned in the previous piece. 

** Connecticut's State' Tax Expenditures'**  -- a form of spending 'Best Left in the Dark'  (Testimony before the State StateLegislatures Joint Finance Committee, April 2005. 

** 'Uncorruption,' Health and Education as Complementary Public Goods **  The criminalization of international bribery by the United States, accomplished by the late 1990s, is now widespread.  But it has not yet been very effective in reducing corruption. This paper’s focus is on other measures of corruption, such as education and health care. The paper starts with the empirical observation that income growth within a poor country may not mean less corruption. Empirically, it tends to mean more corruption. This paper finds that better provisionof public health and education outcomes improves voluntary social provision of other public goods, such as transparency and the rule of law.  Version of the paper  delivered at XIII World Congress of the International Economics Associationin Lisbon,Portugal, August 2002.
 

** Scientific and Engineering Workers: Education Supplies, Occupational Demands **  Alook at the relationship between scientific/technical education and the demand for highly educated workers.  Using a newly-developed data set, the paper concludes that educational supply may be highly responsive, especially in the lower degree programs, to modest increases in salaries.  A shorter version of this paper was presented at the 2002 IEMC (International Engineering Management Conference) in Cambridge,England. 

 ** "Consumer Confidence and Income Inequality" **tests the degree to which income distribution can explain changes in US Consumer Confidence. This paper was delivered at the XII World Congress of the International Economics Association inBuenos Aires, August 1999. The statistical tests give surprisingly high estimates for Atkinson’s parameter of "inequality aversion", the social preference for more equality relative to more growth. 

** "The Case for Redistributive Liberalism" appears in a "discussion roundtable" on Eastern Europe in Economic Systems (March ‘98) published by the Osteruopa Institut of the Universityof Munich. I argue that the dramatic growth of inequality in Russia and most East European countries has slowed development, in contrast with property-redistributing market reforms that have spurred the remarkable growth of China and Vietnam. 

** "Have Most People Benefited from the Recovery?" in the Winter 1998 issue of  The Connecticut Economy ,published by the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis at the Universityof Connecticut. Contrary to most reports, something like a majority of CT residents were poorer by 1996 than in 1992, the end of the last recession. The article considers how this is possible in a "recovery." Census Bureau data on state-level income distribution are available, and deserve more analysis than they have so far received. 
 

I have a long term interest in The Evolution of Exchange Systems seen in "primitive" economies through anthropology, in economic history, and in current technological developments. This is based on my earlier articles on the Evolution of Complexity in Primitive Economies and Corporate Barter . 

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Some Other Publications

 

 

(Fully downloadable articles are ** starred, those un-starred and are available here only in a summary form.) 

 

 

**  Op-eds in the HARTFORD COURANT and other Connecticut newspapers:  

 

 

 ** Who Will Pay for the Energy Transition?

 ** Taxes Less Drain than Spending Cuts 

 ** China's Wall and Ours,   

 ** Criminals Love Pot Prohibiton

 ** A Bailout that puts Taxpayers First 

 ** Property Taxes Perpetuate Inequality,   

 ** China as an Economic Rival 

 

 

** Price Discrimination and Resale: A Classroom Experiment ** (2008)  Article shows how price discrimination can be efficiency and welfare improving.  Appeared in the Journal of Economic Education. 

Shingo Prize(2003) for co-authored Book on Lean Management: "Better Thinking, Better Results" 

 

 

**  CONNECTICUT’S PROPERTY TAXES: ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS  - a Study for the Governor's Blue Ribbon Commission on Property Tax Reform.  How Regressive are Property Taxes in Connecticut? (Go to P. 8) ** in The Connecticut Economy, published by UConn. 

 

 

The Evolution of Externality Rights: Flexibility vs. Ambiguity appeared in the  European Journal of Law & Economics . A shorter article on the same themes is** "An Experiment on Externality Rights" **, in  Classroom Expernomics . 

 

 

 ** Complexity Aversion**  appeared in  Eastern Economic Journal .

 

 

** The Evolution of Complexity in Primitive Economies: Theory**  appeared in the Journal of Comparative Economics,  in the first issue of Vol. 20, 1995.  Its companion piece --

** The Evolution of Complexity in Primitive Economies: Empirical Tests**  appeared in the Journal of Comparative Economics,   in the second issue of the same volume.  

 

 

Ex-Communist Economics: the Logic of Capital Reform , appeared in the New York Economic Review .

 

 

** Experimental Moralities: The Ethics of Classroom Experiments ** appeared in the Journal of Economic Education .

 

 

 

 

 **Equity-Efficiency Preferences in Poland and the Soviet Union: Order Reversals under the Atkinson Index **   , appeared in the Review of Income and Wealth

 

 

**Double-Surnames and Gender Equality: A Proposition**appeared in the Journal of Comparative Family Studies.