894 Posts Found

Companies have always caused “externalities” — benefits for society for which they are not fully compensated and costs on society which they don’t have to fully pay for. A major change in global business in recent years is that these externalities are becoming increasingly rare — what was once extraneous to a business is increasingly affecting corporate revenues, costs, and risk profiles. This is a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: George Serafeim, Ronald Cohen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Economics, Social Responsibility (ESG)

Professor Edward I. Altman of the Stern School of Business, New York University, is a leading expert in credit and debt. He has written or edited two dozen books and more than 160 articles on finance, accounting, and economics. He is also the creator of the Altman Z-Score, developed originally as a means of predicting bankruptcy probabilities. McKinsey researchers successfully used the Z-Score to test … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Edward I. Altman | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics, Finance

The first big test of strategy is: Does your strategy beat the market? And by that, what we really mean is, did you generate economic profit, which is the evidence that you overcame perfect markets? Because—and perhaps this is a scary flashback to your economics textbooks—in perfect markets there is no economic profit. The residual of market imperfections, or what we call competitive advantages, is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Chris Bradley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics, Strategy

If you look holistically at our known history, like the past 10,000 years, with the invention of agriculture, we’ve been trapped in repetitive work that produced goods and then trapped more and more people in the same cycle. And I think now, we are on the verge of reversing this cycle. So automation technology will free people from doing work they don’t like, because nobody … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Daniel Dines | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Economics

This conceit that markets exists outside of government and that government intrudes on the marketplace is fundamentally wrong. Markets exist in the context of a well-regulated society, they are creatures of that well-regulated society. They have rules, either implicitly or explicitly. And if you’re not writing those rules and just defaulting to the principle that companies can do what they want, you’re going to get … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Binyamin Appelbaum | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Economics

Economist Pavlina R. Tcherneva demolishes the idea that there is an optimal rate of unemployment and makes a timely case for a national job guarantee.

Content: Article | Authors: Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Theodore Kinni | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Economics

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, then, retains some of the exploitative elements that characterised the very first. What’s more, the very term “industrial revolution” has always been something of a misnomer, according to Gianpiero Petriglieri, INSEAD Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour.

Content: Article | Authors: Benjamin Kessler, Gianpiero Petriglieri | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Economics

Modern capitalism’s fundamental myth is that acquiring money is the equivalent of achieving success.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ginia Bellafante | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

To the alarm of governments and financiers, forecasts for GDP growth in many high-income countries are flat-lining, opening up a crisis in growth-based economics. Mainstream economics views endless GDP growth as a must, but nothing in nature grows forever, and the economic attempt to buck that trend is raising tough questions in high-income but low-growth countries. That’s because today we have economies that need to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Kate Raworth | Source: ChangeThis | Subject: Economics

In the 20th century economic theory whispered a powerful message when it comes to inequality: it has to get worse before it can get better, and growth will eventually even things up. But extreme inequality, as it turns out, is not an economic law or necessity: it is a design failure. Twenty-first century economists recognize that there are many ways to design economies to be … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Kate Raworth | Source: ChangeThis | Subject: Economics

In the new book Fully Grown, economist Dietrich Vollrath argues that the recent spell of moderate growth in the U.S. is a sign of success.

Content: Article | Authors: Dietrich Vollrath, Mike Jakeman | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Economics

Mariana Mazzucato has demonstrated that the real driver of innovation isn’t lone geniuses but state investment. Now she’s working with the UK government, EU and UN to apply her moonshot approach to the world’s biggest challenges.

Editor’s Note: Mazzucato also has a couple of interesting TED talks, including this one:

Content: Article, Multimedia Content | Authors: João Medeiros, Mariana Mazzucato | Source: Wired | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

Market failure is the economic situation defined by an inefficient distribution of goods and services in the free market. This happens when the market does not supply products in the correct quantity or at the price consumers want to pay due inefficiency in the allocation of goods and services. A price mechanism fails to account for all of the costs and benefits involved when providing … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Anastasia Belyh | Source: Cleverism | Subject: Economics

In most U.S. industries, the biggest firms have a higher market share than they did three decades ago. One study found that 75% of U.S. industries have become more concentrated since the 1990s and that the average size of the largest players in the economy has tripled. A potential concern with this rise in industry concentration is that it reduces workers’ employment options, and thus … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Wenting Ma | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Economics

Whether our economic airplane can keep on cruising or is about to stall mid-air, one thing is evident: it is currently heading for a destination that we do not want to reach, one that is degenerative and deeply divisive. If we reorient ourselves to the economic destination that we do want—an economy that is regenerative and distributive by design—then new questions about growth come to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Kate Raworth | Source: ChangeThis | Subject: Economics

Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth. Socialism is the equal distribution of poverty.

Content: Quotation | Author: Winston Churchill | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics

When looking at artificial intelligence from the perspective of economics, we ask the same, single question that we ask with any technology: What does it reduce the cost of? Economists are good at taking the fun and wizardry out of technology and leaving us with this dry but illuminating question. The answer reveals why AI is so important relative to many other exciting technologies. AI … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ajay Agrawal | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics, IT / Technology / E-Business

A study of millions of patents lifts the veil on how new ideas influence productivity.

Content: Article | Authors: Amit Seru, Bryan Kelly, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Matt Taddy | Source: Kellogg Insight | Subject: Economics

Rotman School of Management professor Ajay Agrawal explains how AI changes the cost of prediction and what this means for business.

Content: Article | Author: Ajay Agrawal | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics, IT / Technology / E-Business

The sort of world that is being produced by the market managerialism that the business school sells is not a pleasant one. It’s a sort of utopia for the wealthy and powerful, a group that the students are encouraged to imagine themselves joining, but such privilege is bought at a very high cost, resulting in environmental catastrophe, resource wars and forced migration, inequality within and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Martin Parker | Source: The Guardian | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, MBA Related