Publications
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In this paper we present a principled view that grounds the need for whistleblowing protection, often missing in the literature. They argue that whistleblowers have a right to protection because of their role in ensuring accountability against wrongdoings that go unnoticed due to unrestrained practices of secrecy. This right derives from the crucial role of whistleblowing in exposing right limitations, in absence of procedures of redress, and information of public interest. Given this role, absence of procedures of protection and fair hearing of disclosure claims puts unfair burdens on whistleblowers so much as to, in some instances, preclude the very possibility of disclosure. In this regard, a cognizance of their role in ensuring protection of rights and structure of accountability demands a system of protection extended to human rights defendants. We argue that the European Union should stand up for the legal protection of whistle-blowers and encourage their contribution towards more transparent institutions and economic transactions.
Economists ceased at some point to discuss the “self” of the “economic agent.” Moralists criticized them for this. Yet attention had been paid to the “self” from the start of modern economics with Adam Smith “self-love.” Granted, the contemporary mathematized mainstream in economics ignores the “self,” its representations, and its realization through economic life. Economic philosophers, however, bring it to the fore and debate identity issues, the flesh and “reality” of agents beyond an axiomatic skeleton. Inspired by Ancient thought and heterodox individualistic currents (like the Austrian school), the inquiry as to what “self-realization” may, or may not mean in the economists’ realm and in economic life is essential to ethical and methodological issues so as to make sense of how to realize the self from an economic viewpoint (and far from popular folk psychology).
Asymptotic and bootstrap inference methods for inequality indices are for the most part unreliable due to the complex empirical features of the underlying distributions. In this paper, we introduce a Fieller-type method for the Theil Index and assess its finite-sample properties by a Monte Carlo simulation study. The fact that almost all inequality indices can be written as a ratio of functions of moments and that a Fieller-type method does not suffer from weak identification as the denominator approaches zero, makes it an appealing alternative to the available inference methods. Our simulation results exhibit several cases where a Fieller-type method improves coverage. This occurs in particular when the Data Generating Process (DGP) follows a finite mixture of distributions, which reflects irregularities arising from low observations (close to zero) as opposed to large (right-tail) observations. Designs that forgo the interconnected effects of both boundaries provide possibly misleading finite-sample evidence. This suggests a useful prescription for simulation studies in this literature.
