Important social benefits of the market system are predicated on the assumption that consumers can effectively pursue their interest in the marketplace. Cause for concern exists to the extent that high consumption expenditures lead to relatively low levels of personal savings in the U.S. To the...

This paper is about corporations and the principles by which they are guided. The focus is on conceptualization of control issues, and changes in such conceptualizations over time. Among individuals who are in a position to affect the overall direction of corporations, there are broadly shared...

Large corporations are invariably structured as formal institutions, and this formality is reflected in organizational charts. These charts depict a multilevel managerial hierarchy of authority within the organization typified, in the simplest case, by a pyramid. Many economic and business...

Financial innovations are associated with market crises. Hyman Minsky singles out financial innovations as particularly prone to instability so as to necessitate governmental intervention. Processes of innovation and diffusion in new products and in new financial instruments have commonalities...

Many houses purchased just before the housing bubble burst have a market value lower than the amount of the mortgages on them; they are said to be underwater. Among homeowners in such a position, a number have adequate financial wherewithal to make the payments but choose to voluntarily default...

The article argues that home equity borrowing is an instance of Max Weber's concept of increasing rationalization of society. The dramatic growth in U.S. home equity borrowing is associated with an increasingly fungible orientation to the home, in which a significant portion of this borrowing is...

Supposedly, competition among sellers in the marketplace redounds to the benefit of customers, an outcome known as consumer sovereignty. Where such is not the case, governmental regulation of the market is thought to restore the desired outcome. Among the many presumptions in this expectation is...