Search results

The onset of global competition in the 1970s began to change the manufacturing environment drastically. The advent of the computer created an opportunity for the developers of material requirements planning (MRP) concepts to automate many of the manual practices employed in manufacturing for acquiring and tracking of materials. This resulted in more efficient manufacturing operations in terms of labor for planning activities and better material control. Technology was expanded to include capacity planning and production schedule control. The acceptance in industry for the new “tool” was monumental and soon a new industry was born. For some time MRP allowed manufacturers to perform at higher levels of proficiency. However, the demands and expectations of the customers have continued to change and manufacturers wishing to keep pace with competition are beginning to question if MRP is still a valid tool for production planning and control. As a result new concepts have begun to emerge. These new approaches call for an abandonment of some of the foundational components of MRP.

Purpose – In this chapter, we address the ambiguous nature of parental consent requirement decisions for the purpose of conducting minimal risk research of at-risk youth.

Methodology/approach – We evaluate current guidelines, which are used to determine the appropriateness of parental consent waivers, review related literature, and offer a case study to understand some of the resulting dilemmas that arise when seeking approval and researching youth in potentially abusive and neglectful situations.

Findings – We offer the researcher, practitioner, ethics committee, and policy maker new strategies to aid in the determination and application of parental consent waivers for minimal risk research participation among at-risk youth populations.

Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.

The fundamental problem of designing a wide scope general revenue tax can be reduced to the selection of the base used for administering the tax. Our current personal income tax is a hybrid version of a tax assessed on the basis of a tax unit's annual income receipts. An alternative to an income‐based tax that has received much theoretical treatment but little actual application is an expenditure‐based tax. An expenditure tax (also called a consumption tax or cash flow tax in the context of this paper) differs from an income tax in that it exempts net saving and investment from the tax base. Though the details of a consumption tax design are discussed more fully elsewhere in this paper, the tax base of an expenditure tax is roughly determined by subtracting net savings from gross receipts (including wages, tips, salaries, income from investments, interests, etc.). Withdrawals from savings constitute dissavings and are appropriately included in net savings. The cash flow tax, with wealth transfers deductible to the donor and included in the tax base of the recipient, would be a tax on an individual's standard of living. Similar to the present income tax standard deduction, some universal credit or exemption for a small level of consumption could be allowed.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the rule recently published by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission that establishes a timetable for the mandatory clearing of interest rate and credit default swaps through a clearinghouse.

The paper discusses the structure of cleared trades in swaps, the classes of interest rate and credit default swaps that are subject to mandatory clearing under the CFTC's new rule and the affirmative and negative specifications for each class, the phased approach adopted by the CFTC for the mandatory clearing compliance schedule, and the end‐user and inter‐affiliate exemptions from the mandatory clearing requirement.

“Centralized clearing,” a process in which bilaterally negotiated trades of derivatives have to be given up to a centralized clearinghouse, is a cornerstone of the new global regulatory system for derivatives. Its proponents argue that centralized clearing will help to mitigate systemic risk by helping counterparties identify and net positions. The paper outlines the clearing rules in the USA for interest rate and credit default swaps.

The paper provides expert guidance from experienced financial services lawyers.

Can we broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought to include positionalities articulated by grassroots movements? Following Keynes’s famous remark from General Theory that ‘practical men […] are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,’ we might be wont to dismiss such a push from below. While it is sometimes true that grassroots movements channel preexisting economic thought, I wish to argue that grassroots economic thought can also precede developments subsequently elaborated by economists. This paper considers such a case: by women at the intersection of the women’s liberation movement and the claimants’ unions movement in 1970s Britain. Oral historical and archival work on these working-class women and on achievements such as their succeeding to establish unconditional basic income as an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement forms the springboard for my reconstruction of the grassroots feminist economic thought underpinning the women’s basic income demand. I hope to demonstrate, firstly, how this was a prefiguration of ideas later developed by feminist economists and philosophers; secondly, how unique it was for its time and a consequence of the intersectionality of class, gender, race, and dis/ability. Thirdly, I should like to suggest that bringing into the fold this particular grassroots feminist economic thought on basic income would widen the mainstream understanding and historiography of the idea of basic income. Lastly, I hope to make the point that, within the history of economic thought, grassroots economic thought ought to be heeded far more than it currently is.