We propose a virtue-based theory of ownership and governance that treats “moral ecology”—the interplay of narratives, structures, and practices—as the formative context in which virtue can develop and sustain cooperation. We argue that ownership forms and governance structures are formative ecologies that encode and teach a firm’s ends. By doing so they either cultivate or corrode the dispositions and market virtues (prudence, solidarity, reciprocity, trust) that enable cooperation. Narratives render organizational ends intelligible; structures institutionalize and authorize those ends; and practices habituate firm actors into stable dispositions over time. We develop this argument through a comparative, narrative analysis of Vanguard and Cabela’s, supplemented by comparisons involving mutual and stock insurers and Patagonia. The mutual-insurance comparison provides the institutional context for Vanguard’s mutual ownership structure and its creation of the index fund. Together, the mutual-insurance and Vanguard analyses show how ownership forms that preserve the discoverability of organizational ends can accumulate narrative capital, that is, shared meanings and expectations that stabilize trust, enable surplus-sharing, and support virtues such as stewardship and prudence. Cabela’s, by contrast, illustrates how an initial public offering (IPO) and subsequent activist pressure can fix ends externally in financial terms, accelerate learned economism, and erode authenticity-dependent relational goods. Patagonia provides a positive foil, showing how ownership can be deliberately structured to protect a nonfinancial purpose from being subordinated to financial objectives.
The article constructs and validates a new economic inequality index and calculates such indexes for modern capitalist societies and varieties of capitalism. It first overviews the state of the extant literature on economic and social inequality and its composite indexes and estimations or specific measures. It then advances and elaborates theoretical and empirical considerations about constructing a composite and comprehensive index of economic inequality and of broader economic-social inequality. It also collects and describes data and their sources and the method of empirical analysis. It presents the results of the analysis, including those of statistical analyses and of an exploratory analysis of inequality indexes among OECD countries and varieties of capitalism. Lastly, it analyzes the results, considers their theoretical and empirical relevance and outlines directions for further research.
This study examines regional differences in the efficiency of public secondary education spending in Kazakhstan and explores how budgetary financing relates to education quality and human development. The analysis responds to the limited empirical evidence on subnational efficiency and spatial interdependencies in education systems characterized by high territorial diversity. The study applies a quantitative research design combining Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with variable returns to scale and spatial econometric techniques. Regions are treated as decision-making units to estimate the relative efficiency of budget utilization in secondary education. Spatial dependence is examined using the Spatial Durbin Model and global and local Moran’s I statistics. The analysis relies on official regional statistics for the period 2020–2024 and survey data collected from 5000 respondents across all regions of Kazakhstan. The results reveal substantial regional variation in the efficiency of public education spending. Several regions display significant input and output slacks, indicating untapped potential for improving outcomes without increasing resources. Bootstrap-corrected DEA estimates show that formal efficiency scores often mask latent inefficiencies. Spatial regression results do not identify statistically significant short-term associations between funding levels, education quality, and human development. However, spatial autocorrelation analysis reveals strong clustering in human development indicators, while education quality perceptions exhibit weaker spatial patterns. The findings indicate that increased funding alone does not guarantee higher efficiency or improved human development outcomes. The study highlights the importance of effective resource allocation and management at the regional level.
The study of social practices addressing poverty and social exclusion provides an important basis for understanding processes that underpin effective interventions. This article explores, identifies, and analyzes good practices across national and international contexts, focusing on how organizational and relational processes shape intervention dynamics. The study is based on a qualitative comparative analysis of 15 programs recognized as good practices in nine countries across Europe, North America, and South America. These programs were selected based on predefined criteria related to social relevance, innovation, and recognition in the field, and constitute part of a broader research program that includes a prior Grounded Theory study and complementary thematic analysis. The analysis identifies key patterns across three dimensions: (1) intra-organizational processes, including methodological approaches, relational styles, and team dynamics; (2) perspectives of programs’ users, community leaders, and professionals; and (3) contextual variations across geographical, cultural, and linguistic groupings. The findings highlight the central role of relational and participatory processes in the development of social interventions, particularly those that promote reciprocity, engagement, and shared responsibility among stakeholders. Processes related to access to resources, relational quality, and commitment to the intervention context emerged as particularly salient across cases, although variations were observed across settings.
This study explores how individual and regional factors influence religiosity across Europe, focusing on education, income, age, and health as institutional drivers. Testing three sociological hypotheses, we find that education has a U-shaped effect on religious engagement, while age, health, and relative income significantly predict religiosity. Regional economic and educational contexts show no consistent influence. Our findings contribute to institutional economics by illuminating how education and income shape cultural norms and collective belief systems, underscoring the enduring interplay between personal conditions and institutional structures in shaping religious behavior.
Tourism has emerged as a major engine of economic growth, contributing over 10 percent of global GDP and up to 85 percent in some small developing economies. While it generates important development opportunities, international tourism may also have unintended macroeconomic consequences, including potential pressures on real exchange rate valuation. This paper uses a comprehensive panel dataset covering 139 countries over the period 1980–2023 and estimates real exchange rate misalignments using the Behavioral Equilibrium Exchange Rate (BEER) framework. It then examines whether tourism inflows are associated with deviations of the real exchange rate from its estimated equilibrium, in line with a “beach disease” mechanism analogous to the Dutch disease literature. Baseline results indicate a positive association between tourism revenues and real exchange rate overvaluation. This relationship is more pronounced in developing economies, while it is not statistically significant in advanced economies. However, the estimated effects are sensitive to specification and are generally weaker when instrumental variable approaches are employed, suggesting caution in interpreting the results as strictly causal. Overall, the analysis provides suggestive evidence that tourism inflows may be associated with real exchange rate misalignments under certain macroeconomic conditions. These findings highlight potential external-sector pressures in tourism-dependent economies, while also underscoring the importance of flexible macroeconomic frameworks and diversification strategies.
Among the dominant economic narratives, the one centred on GDP growth as a primary measure for evaluating a country’s progress and prosperity has shaped global institutions, policies, and identities. Yet, in the face of the intertwining of contemporary crises—ecological collapse, persistent social inequality, and declining marginal returns of GDP on happiness—this narrative is increasingly being questioned. This paper explores three alternative economic narratives developing over the past few years—the Economy of Francesco (EoF), Doughnut Economics (DE), and Wellbeing Economy (WE)—not merely as frameworks for reform, but as emergent paradigms with the power to reframe the purpose, structure, and moral foundation of economic life. After examining each of them through a discussion of their narrative dimension, a comparative reading is proposed to highlight similarities and differences and to assess their potential for joint action in advancing alternatives to the dominant GDP-centred economic narrative. Our main conclusion is that these paradigms function best as complementary strategies—ethical engagement (EoF), visual reframing of economic goals (DE), and policy integration (WE)—supporting a practicable, justice-centred transition from growth-dependent capitalism to wellbeing within planetary boundaries.
The Indian fintech market is fast growing and has one of the highest fintech adoption rates in the world. The new normal created by the COVID-19 pandemic also demands faster adoption of digital tools in everyday finance. This makes digital financial inclusion imperative to stay competent and achieve financial well-being. Reverse socialization - the process by which children influence and transform their parents’ attitudes and behaviors - is one way this can be achieved, as Gen Z has greater expertise in fintech products compared to their parents. Using data from 312 pairs of teenaged children and their less-educated mothers from the state of Kerala, India, this study investigated the impact of reverse fintech socialization on the confidence of parents to participate in the digital financial market. Findings revealed that the confidence of mothers to deal with digital financial products and services is positively influenced by the level of reverse fintech socialization. The study also established that the teenagers who have experienced better maternal financial socialization during their childhood tend to play a highly significant role in educating their mothers in using technology-based financial services when these mothers have positive attitudes towards fintech and trust in their children. To sum up, reverse fintech socialization is an efficient tool to keep the less educated parents capable of utilizing fintech services with confidence so that they can practice desirable financial behaviors and the fintech service providers can improve their network and volume of business.
Narratives are widely recognised as powerful in shaping economic imaginaries and educational worldviews. Yet in business education, narrative capital is frequently, and often unconsciously, mobilised in ways that reproduce hegemonic paradigms centred on rational self-interest and profit maximisation. This study aims to advance empirical understanding of how such narratives function in everyday teaching practices. Drawing on narratology, this study analyses full-lecture transcripts from a bachelor’s business programme in the Netherlands, examining plot, events, and narration to make implicit assumptions in classroom narratives analytically visible. Although classroom narratives in this case initially appear open to both social benefit and financial gain, their operationalisation reveals a consistent orientation toward financial gain, often through vague and ostensibly positive formulations such as “adding value”. In addition, rhetorical strategies are employed that normalise reductive views of human nature, while directive questions guide students toward predetermined responses. As a result, in this case, narrative capital reinforces established logics rather than enabling critical exploration, even among educators who express reservations. Transforming business education toward greater social and ecological sustainability must therefore begin at the core, by helping educators recognise and rethink how narrative capital and ideological assumptions shape foundational teaching.
This paper presents a model of the interplay between a policymaker and various interest groups, viewing the incumbent as a strategic lobbyist seeking to maximize re-election chances. We assume a political context where the government has discretionary power over tax extraction and public expenditure allocation. The model predicts that the incumbent’s optimal strategy is to form a minimum winning coalition, generating systematic asymmetry by favoring specific groups while exploiting others. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a repeated-interaction experiment involving one subject as the incumbent and two others representing interest groups. The results indicate that incumbents learn to strategically differentiate between groups to secure electoral support, a behavior that contradicts the predictions of inequality aversion models which favor equal resource distribution. Furthermore, we find that this adoption of "divide-and-rule" strategies correlates with Machiavellianism, suggesting that the mechanics of political survival in this context are driven by instrumental rationality rather than social preferences.
I argue that the market should be understood as a particular type of public space, in which general moral principles are supplemented by principles that are specific to markets. I consider the case for the principle that traders’ offers to consumers should be public, i.e., available to all potential customers. As a point of reference, I discuss how, from the late nineteenth century, price tags allowed public offers to become the norm in retail trade. I contrast public offers with personalised offers—offers that are restricted to specific potential customers. As a result of developments in digital technology, personalised offers are now becoming increasingly common in retail markets, and their legitimacy is an increasingly salient issue in public debate. In the spirit of civil economy, I characterise a well-functioning market as a network of voluntary transactions between consumers, intermediated by traders who seek profit by discovering previously unrealised opportunities for mutually beneficial transactions and by offering these opportunities to consumers in a public space. Viewing markets in this perspective, I argue that personalised offers can undermine valuable properties of the market system and that, accordingly, there should be a defeasible ethical and regulatory presumption in favour of public offers.
This study investigates the impact of environmental and social performance on financial performance in microfinance institutions (MFIs). Moreover, this study investigates the moderating role of board gender diversity and board orientation on social goals. This study utilized panel data from 139 countries where microfinance institutions (MFIs) operate, spanning 2008 to 2019, and employed panel data fixed effects models and two-stage least squares (2SLS) to ensure the robustness of the results. The results of this study suggest that environmental and social performance negatively affects MFIs' financial performance. Hence, this study supports the trade-off hypothesis. However, board gender diversity positively moderates the relationship between environmental performance and financial performance of MFIs. Similarly, a board's orientation toward social goals positively moderates the relationship between social performance and financial performance of MFIs. Based on resource dependence theory, we argue that board gender diversity brings better resources to the board, and board social orientation toward social goals brings social awareness, which boosts environmentally friendly and socially responsible business strategies and enhances MFI's financial performance. This study provides new evidence that MFIs' environmental, social, and financial goals may not be simultaneously achieved. However, MFIs' environmental, social, and financial performance can be improved by employing balanced board gender diversity and board orientation toward social goals.
This paper argues that the civil economy tradition fuses ancient with new elements to provide a relational alternative to modern contractualist and utilitarian models of economic and political life. At its core is the idea of gift as reciprocity and gratuitousness, which grounds human sociability, the production of relational goods and the pursuit of the common good. Drawing on the work of Antonio Genovesi and the Neapolitan School, the paper shows how human happiness is inherently shared and linked to the good, understood as both immanent in social practices and transcendent in its divine origin. Genovesi’s Neo-Platonist civic humanism emphasizes reciprocity, public trust and virtue as the foundations of economic cooperation and political order. Against the modern separation of private interest from public welfare and market from society, the civil economy paradigm interprets market exchange as a form of gift-exchange embedded in social ties and intermediary institutions. It advances a covenantal conception of the polity as a plural and nested union of persons, groups and corporate bodies bound by shared ends rather than merely contractual arrangements. By re-embedding economic and political structures within relationships of mutual recognition and collective action, the civil economy tradition offers conceptual and practical resources for renewing civic life and fostering a more moral, cooperative market order, including practical proposals for institutional and policy transformation.
This study examines the economic organisation developed by the Knights Templar within a political economy framework. Beyond functioning as a religious order, the Templars established structured practices of capital management, liquidity coordination, public finance, and trust-based financial administration, contributing to the emergence of an early form of organised financial activity in medieval Europe. From the perspective of institutional analysis, the Templar model may be interpreted as an important historical precursor to later financial institutions. Within the relatively rigid production structures of feudal society, the Order developed a multi-layered network linking production, trade, credit, and royal finance. In doing so, it facilitated capital mobility, supported monetary circulation, and reinforced a culture of financial trust. This process illustrates the compatibility of religious legitimacy with structured economic administration and contributed to reshaping the relationship between political authority, ecclesiastical institutions, and organised capital. The study conceptualises this model as a form of “sacred finance” and discusses its significance for the early evolution of European political economy.
This article proposes a novel conceptual framework for understanding economic choice from an Islamic perspective, highlighting how theological and normative considerations shape decision-making differently from conventional economic rationality. Employing two primary approaches, the study examines theological debates within Islam regarding human agency, action, and interpretations by Islamic scholars of Islamic turats (classical scholarly legacy) and Quranic references to “choice.” The findings reveal that economic decisions in Islamic economics diverge significantly from conventional models, emphasizing an Islamic worldview where choices are not solely grounded in rational self-interest but are also guided by theological and ethical considerations. This distinct approach highlights the importance of integrating theological and ethical factors into economic decision-making frameworks, aligning them with the principles of Islamic economics. The study offers valuable insights for practitioners and policymakers in Islamic economic systems. It contributes to the literature by reimagining rationality in economic behavior through the lens of Islamic theology and ethics.
This study investigates elite-driven inequality perceptions, drawing on data from the 2019 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP 2019) across nine countries. It focuses on how social class, status, and country dynamics shape these perceptions, providing an understanding of the socio-economic factors that influence perceptions of elite-driven inequality. The analysis reveals that both individual and family social status significantly impact perceptions of elite-driven inequality, with pronounced effects among the lower- and middle-class in developed nations and the working class in developing countries. Additionally, economic factors, particularly national unemployment rates, emerge as critical determinants, reflecting the broader structural conditions that frame individuals’ experiences with inequality. The study underscores that perceptions of elite-driven inequality are not uniform but are deeply rooted in personal socio-economic positions and national contexts. These findings highlight the importance of considering the intersection of class, status, and country-specific dynamics when assessing public perceptions toward inequality. Understanding these complex relationships is crucial for developing targeted policies that address the root causes of inequality and resonate effectively with diverse social groups across different socio-economic environments.
This paper studies the existence of competitive equilibrium in markets with indivisibles. The basis of the paper is a theorem that relates the existence of equilibrium to the core of certain associated cooperative games. From this result, we obtain a significant improvement on a classical result in this literature. We then characterize the existence of equilibrium in a two-agent three-good economy, showing that, in this particular context, the existence of equilibrium is more likely when goods are complements than when they are substitutes.
The thesis defended in this paper is that, if we are willing to make Economics a relevant discipline to cope with real-world challenges, changes in the policy paradigm still dominant, although useful and welcome, are not sufficient. What is required is a change of the scientific paradigm. The proposal here advanced is that the civil economy paradigm is a viable and promising alternative to the political economy paradigm. To this end, an essential comparison of the two paradigms, in terms of their respective ontological and epistemological characteristics, is carried on. The final section advances a proposal to overcome the disturbing intellectual monopoly still present in the discipline and to favour “a new spirit of pluralism”.
Visible inequality influences how households allocate expenditure between essential goods and status oriented consumption. While standard demand theory emphasizes income effects and Engel’s law, social comparison and relative status concerns may induce households to divert resources toward conspicuous goods when disparities are locally salient. This paper develops and tests a Veblen–Engel trade off framework in which rising inequality increases incentives for status signaling while reducing the share of spending on basic needs. Using nationally representative data from India’s Household Consumption Expenditure Surveys for 2022 to 23 and 2023 to 24, households are classified into low, medium, and high inequality environments based on dispersion in conspicuous spending within reference groups. Population weighted regressions are estimated for both expenditure levels and budget shares of conspicuous and food consumption, controlling for income, demographic characteristics, and fixed effects. The results show that higher inequality is associated with significantly higher conspicuous consumption and larger conspicuous budget shares, alongside reductions in food expenditure and food shares. These reallocations persist after accounting for income and are stronger among poorer and socially marginalized households. The findings provide evidence that inequality operates through behavioral status competition that crowds out essential consumption, thereby generating hidden welfare costs and reinforcing consumption based disparities in developing economies.
