Richard V. Adkisson

Living Large: Evolving Consumer Credit Institutions and Privately Induced Transfer Payments

Between 1980 and 2003, real per capita personal income in the United States grew by 59 percent. Meanwhile, real outstanding consumer debt per adult over age fifteen (revolving debt, 2003 dollars) grew from

The Economy as an Open System: An Institutionalist Framework for Economic Development

712 in 1980 to

Non‐resident enrollment and non‐resident tuition at land grant colleges and universities

3,261 in 2003, an increase of 358 percent. The household debt service burden, measured as the ratio of consumer debt payments to income, rose from 11.5 percent in 1983 to 12.5 percent in 2001. Not surprisingly, the number of nonbusiness bankruptcies rose from 127 to 566 per 100,000 of population in the same period. 1 American consumers continue to fall deeper into debt and often find it difficult to service the debt they have. There are many reasons for the expansion of consumer credit (Watkins 2000) and the increase in bankruptcies. This paper offers an explanation not evident elsewhere in the literature, that evolving consumer credit institutions have created an environment in which individuals can choose to transfer consumption from society to themselves with few consequences and little public scrutiny. The paper begins by examining the basics of consumer theory from both the institutionalist and neoclassical perspectives. This examination will establish that, from either perspective, the typical consumers motives are consistent with the desire to consume beyond their income constraint. The second section provides a brief overview of the evolution of bankruptcy and debt collection institutions. Finally the paper will discuss how institutional evolution has created the opportunity for privately induced transfer payments.

Multi-level administrative structure and the distribution of social service expenditures: A Nebraska example

The main purpose of this chapter is to set the stage for the rest of this volume by describing the economic system in a way consistent with original institutionalist principles, principles that prescribe an open system view of economies. The chapter emphasizes the ways in which technology, nature, and culture transact with the economic process. From this view the terms sustainability and development take on broader meanings. Strict sustainability requires adherence not only to environmental criteria but also to technological and social criteria. Development implies that the socioeconomic system changes in the direction of improved adherence to social criteria broadly defined.

Tax structure and state economic growth during the Great Recession

Universities around the United States are seeking ways to attract students to their institutions. One possible strategy is to compete for out‐of‐state students. Since an early 1970s examination of the determinants of student migration by Tuckman, there have been several subsequent studies that have either further developed the methodology of the studies or taken some different perspective on the problem. This paper differs from the existing literature in two ways. First, it focuses exclusively on land‐grant institutions. Second, it uses panel data rather than just time‐series or cross‐sectional data. Evidence regarding the impact of historical Black college/university status and regional variations are presented as well. The evidence indicates that quality has more influence on student migration than price, indicates that historical Black college/universities attract fewer out‐of‐state students than other land grant institutions and indicates that there are non‐specific regional differences in land grant institutions’ abilities to attract migrant students.

Conditionality, Restructuring, and the Reperipherization of Latin America

Abstract During the decade of the 1980s Nebraska restructured its social service (welfare) delivery system. Prior to the change, administrative responsibility for many social service programs was shared between the state and county governments. The restructuring brought the entire program under state administration. A primary reason for this policy change was to eliminate administrative inconsistencies evident in the decentralized structure. This article utilizes 1980 and 1990 data on the distribution of Food Stamp and AFDC program expenditures in Nebraska to analyze the impact of the restructuring on expenditure distribution. The results indicate that expenditures were more equally distributed and that arbitrary decision making was reduced when social service administration was centralized.

Quantifying Culture: Problems and Promises

Abstract Concern about the effect of taxes on economic growth and development in the United States is longstanding. While most studies are concerned with the growth impacts of tax burden, marginal rates, or the impact of a particular tax, there are few works that examine the impact of tax structure in the way it is defined in this work. Here, tax structure is defined as the shares of revenue collected by various taxes. Using a pool of data on the 50 states between 2004 and 2010, this paper explores the relationship between state and local tax structure and growth of real per-capita GDP through the Great Recession centered in 2008. The results are used to generate estimates of the growth impacts of revenue neutral changes in tax shares.

Pragmatism to Dogmatism: The Laissez Faire Myth and the Disabling of the American Fisc

During recent decades, many Latin American nations have undertaken marketoriented economic reform programs. These reforms have arisen in response to perceived failures of the structuralist-inspired import substitution approach to development of prior decades. Structuralist policies were designed with hopes of narrowing the economic gap between the developed nations at the center of the world trading system and the less developed nations at the periphery. In a sense, neo-liberal reformers promise the same thing. The purpose here is to ask whether neo-liberal reform has fulfilled its promise or whether it has instead ushered in an era of reperipherization in Latin America. The paper begins with a review of the center-periphery distinction and briefly outlines the forces driving the neo-liberal reform efforts.

Welfare Reform: What Are the Numbers, and Does Anyone Care?

Recently economists, even many in the mainstream, have come to acknowledge the influence of culture on the economic process. Some, like original institutionalists, have a thorough understanding of and appreciation for the richness of culture and are, therefore, suspicious of any attempt to quantify cultural information. Others, particularly those trained in the use of statistical methods, are anxious to incorporate culture into statistical/quantitative models and may rush to quantify and include cultural information in their models without a full appreciation of the meaning(s) of culture. This paper reiterates the role of culture in the economy, explores several attempts to quantify culture, and reviews a number of papers that incorporate cultural information into statistical analyses. The broad purpose is to evaluate the prospects for incorporating culture into statistical models in ways that respect the richness of culture as it is perceived by institutionalists.

United States-Mexico Income Convergence?

Abstract  The authors argue that the recent upsurge in anti-tax sentiment has its roots evolving social conditions and adherence to the laissez faire myth. Content analysis reveals that political anti-tax rhetoric increased in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time of social distress in the US. This increased political attention provided a rhetorical punctuation whereby a substantial portion of Americans moved toward a much more dogmatic adherence to the laissez faire myth. The result has been to convert the laissez faire myth into a disabling myth that severely limits open discussion of fiscal issues and reduces the options in public finance decisions.