Previous research on cooperation has primarily focused on egalitarian interactions, overlooking a fundamental feature of social life: hierarchy and power asymmetry. While recent accounts posit that hierarchies can reduce within-group conflict, individuals who possess high rank or power tend to...

A substantial body of research on the UK's National Minimum Wage (NMW) has concluded that the the NMW has not had a detrimental effect on employment. This research has directly influenced, through the Low Pay Commission, the conduct of policy, including the subsequent introduction of the...

What makes the rich different? Are they more productive, as mainstream economists claim? I offer another explanation. What makes the rich different, I propose, is hierarchical power. The rich command hierarchies. The poor do not. It is this greater control over subordinates, I hypothesize, that...

From the 1980s to the present, Hollywood’s major distributors have been able to redistribute U.S. theatrical attendance to the advantage of their biggest blockbusters and franchises. At the global scale and during the same period, Hollywood has been leveraging U.S. foreign power to break...

Based on worldly experience, most people would agree that firms are hierarchically organized, and that pay tends to increase as one moves up the hierarchy. But how this hierarchical structure affects income distribution has not been widely studied. To remedy this situation, this paper presents a...

According to Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan capital is not an economic quantity but a mode of power; it could be sumarized as: "Capital is power quantified in monetary terms". So, what do we do when we "quantify"? What is the nature of "money" in a capitalist society? And, indeed, what is...

What accounts for the growth of US top income inequality? This paper proposes a hierarchical redistribution hypothesis. The idea is that US firms have systematically redistributed income to the top of the corporate hierarchy. I test this hypothesis using a large scale hierarchy model of the US...

Indirect inference testing can be carried out with a variety of auxiliary models. Asymptotically these different models make no difference. However, the small sample properties can differ. We explore small sample power and estimation bias both with different variable combinations and descriptive...

What is the unit of analysis in economics? The prevailing orthodoxy in mainstream economic theory is that the individual is the "ultimate" unit of analysis. The implicit goal of mainstream economics is to root macro-level social structure in the micro-level actions of individuals. But there is a...

This paper offers a new approach to the study of capitalist income. Building on the "capital as power" framework, I propose that capitalists earn their income not from any productive asset, but from the legal right to command a corporate hierarchy. In short, I hypothesize that capitalist income...

Human capital theory is the dominant approach for understanding personal income distribution. According to this theory, individual income is the result of "human capital". The idea is that human capital makes people more productive, which leads to higher income. But is this really the case? This...

Research on labour governance actors in global production networks (GPNs) has been limited to civil society organisations, firms and governments. Understanding the influence of actors in GPNs has been dealt with singular and overt modes of relational power. This paper contributes to both debates...

This paper discusses the concept of authority in global governance by unpacking the components that characterize its various notions. These components are the triadic relationship between power, legitimacy, and the reference to public interests, and how they are embedded in the constellation...

Free markets are, according to neoclassical economic theory, the most efficient way of organizing human activity. The claim is that individuals can benefit society by acting only in their self interest. In contrast, the evolutionary theory of multilevel selection proposes that groups must...

According to the theory of capital as power, capitalism, like any other mode of power, is born through sabotage and lives in chains – and yet everywhere we look we see it grow and expand. What explains this apparent puzzle of ‘growth in the midst of sabotage’? The answer, we argue, begins...

This paper introduces the Stata commands checkax, aei, and powers as a bundle within the package rpaxioms. The first command allows the user to test whether consumer demand data satisfy a number of revealed preference axioms at a given efficiency level, the second command calculates measures of...

This study investigates the effectiveness of six of the key international indices in estimating Saudi financial market (TADAWUL) index (TASI) movement. To investigate the relationship between TASI and other variables, six equations were built using two independent variables of time and...

Der vorliegende Beitrag gibt zunächst in Abschnitt 2 einen kursorischen Überblick über den aktuellen Stand der empirischen Forschung zum Einfluss der Medien auf Wahrnehmung und Verhalten. Dabei wird insbesondere auf den politischen Kontext fokussiert. Sodann werden einige Forschungsarbeiten...