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LPE Originals

LPE on COVID-19 (vol. 5)

Dear Readers,  Today we’re bringing you a special Saturday edition of our ongoing covid-19 series. Take care, LPE Blog Your first stop after reading this post should be here, to listen to Amy Kapczynski and Gregg Gonsalves on The Dig podcast. They talk about how to survive this plague – the politics of public health and…

LPE Originals

Money in Context: Part 2

This is the second post on ‘Money in Context.’ You can read the first post here.  The observation with which I closed Part 1 implicates a challenge – or perhaps better put, it extends an invitation. In light of the inherently infrastructural role played by payment systems and their associated monies in any ‘exchange economy’…

LPE Originals

Money in Context: Part 1

This is the first of two posts on Money in Context. Read Part II here.  We’ve all heard the adage. ‘Time is money.’ The utterer usually means that time can be spent earning money, so that to ‘waste time’ is to incur a pecuniary opportunity cost. But there’s another sense in which money is time – or…

LPE Originals

The Truth about Buybacks

People claim to be worried about stock buybacks. In fact, the buybacks are a stand-in for what we can all see: business in this country works for wealthy shareholders, not workers, customers, or communities.

LPE Originals

Enriching the Narrative Economics of Public Options

Inspired by Anne Alstott & Ganesh Sitaraman’s The Public Option, this post suggests that it is time to tell new stories about the nature and purpose of economic institutions, and that infrastructural investments should be put to work to ensure there is a world we can retire into.

LPE Originals

Tracking Extraction

If “law and political economy” examines the role of law in constituting and regulating marketcraft and statecraft, one way of “doing” LPE is to look for the role of law in managing the processes by which capitalists extract value from activity putatively outside “the economy.”

LPE Originals

How Finance Structures Global Value Chains

NB: This post is part of a symposium on law and global value chains co-convened with the Institute for Global Law and Policy’s Law and Global Production Working Group. The Law-in-Global-Value-Chains perspective adopted in the Research Manifesto and introduced the initial blog of this series is based on the recognition that law is endogenous to…

LPE Originals

On Law and Value

NB: This post is part of a symposium on law and global value chains co-convened with the Institute for Global Law and Policy’s Law and Global Production Working Group. We are witnessing a new moment in economic development: what Richard Baldwin calls the global value chain (GVC) revolution. As our symposium suggests, critical legal realist…

LPE Originals

Cracking the Code of Global Value Chains

NB: This post is part of a symposium on law and global value chains co-convened with the Institute for Global Law and Policy’s Law and Global Production Working Group. Global Value Chains (GVCs) form a backbone of our global economy that eludes easy characterization. In media or policy reports, corporate brochures or academic publications, the…

LPE Originals

Global Value Chains as a Legal Concept

NB: This post is part of a symposium on law and global value chains co-convened with the Institute for Global Law and Policy’s Law and Global Production Working Group. In the first blog post of this symposium Dan Danielsen and Jennifer Bair argue that law can open up a window into understanding global political economy,…

LPE Originals

When All Social Problems Become Financial Problems

When it comes to government programs, credit support is often cheaper and less controversial than direct expenditures. Understand this, and you can understand why government officials have an incentive to define all sorts of social problems as financial ones. Government officials face considerable pressure to promote credit markets. Wall Street firms leverage money, expertise and…