Game theory and other approaches have been used to characterize problems involving high-exclusion-cost goods which also have the characteristic that marginal cost of an additional user is zero over some range. These analytical tools have made valuable contributions to understanding voluntary...

Heterodox scholarship at Michigan State University (MSU) was influenced by the institutional economics of John R. Commons at Wisconsin. But it was far from monolithic and had many other sources and originality of its own. A case can be made that the center of institutional economics moved across...

Social capital in the past two decades has emerged as a dominant paradigm in the various social science disciplines. However, its adoption by the different social science disciplines has led to multiple and often conflicting definitions of social capital. Some differences in the definition of...

This paper examines the relationship between the quality of local labor force and variation in regional poverty outcomes among Michigan areas. A regional poverty model is derived from the household production model for that purpose. The US Census 2000 data on small geographical areas of Michigan...

Benefit-Cost Analysis involves several steps: development of a program information structure (product categories), estimating the production function, pricing benefits and costs, adjusting for opportunity costs, choice of investment criteria, and incorporating uncertainty. Each step involves...

Introduction The purposes of this paper are: (1) to introduce the social capital paradigm; (2) to present evidence that social capital has an important role in poverty reduction; and (3) to suggest several policy prescriptions for building and using social capital to reduce poverty. The social...

Experiments and studies were conducted to investigate the role of social capital. Social capital (relationship to others) is a productive asset which is a substitute for and complement to other productive assets. The productivity of social capital leads to the expectation that firms and...