Sociological Perspectives

Robbing Peter

06/01/14

How exactly do people make ends meet? While there are a few formal studies of "payment hierachies" courtesy of the big data organizations, there is little ethnographic work. A new contribution in this regard is "Robbing Peter to Pay Paul":  Economic and Cultural Explanations for How Lower-Income Families Manage Debt by Laura M.

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Faith-Based Markets

05/16/14

Paul Krugman has a column today about the blind, fundamentalist faith in efficient markets.  This is a phenomenon that Stephen Lubben and I have been discussing recently (did Krugman just preempt our paper idea?), as we've both encountered it in the financial regulatory policy debate: 

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Sousa on Bankruptcy Stigma

03/18/14

If you are looking for trite and oversimplified assertions about bankruptcy stigma, then stay away from the latest issue of the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. In those pages, Professor Michael Sousa from the University of Denver has a wonderful paper reporting on his interviews with consumer bankruptcy debtors in Colorado. You can find a preprint version of the paper on SSRN.

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A Lawyer and Partner, and Also Bankrupt...for reasons that have nothing to do with being a non-equity partner...

01/25/14

It's all the rage these days to beat up on law school as a bad investment and to moan about the economic travails of the legal profession.  There are some reasonable critiques that can be leveled at the shape of legal education and its costs and there are clearly important changes going on in the economics of the legal profession.  But in a NY Times column, James Stewart has tried to connect these imp

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