Welfare Capitalism in Post-Industrial Times: Trilemma or Power Over Rents?

Informational Rents and Discretionary Industrial Assistance

The paper analyses the existence and efficiency of discretionary industrial assistance schemes under asymmetric information between an uninformed government and a uniform distribution of firms with differing productivities. Discretionary assistance allows the government to scrutinise projects in an effort to learn the type, which can reduce the ‘informational rents’ of automatic assistance, whe...

Ex post information rents in sequential screening

We study ex post information rents in sequential screening models where the agent receives private ex ante and ex post information. The principal has to pay ex post information rents for preventing the agent to coordinate lies about his ex ante and ex post information. When the agent’s ex ante information is discrete, these rents are positive, whereas they are zero in continuous models. Consequ...

Liberalization and Democratization: the Forum and the Hearth in the Era of Cosmopolitan Post-industrial Capitalism

The processes described under the misleading term “privatization” have been part of a major social restructuring in both the political and economic spheres. Most notably, widespread state failures have resulted in significant changes in the form and functions of the state. This reform encompasses not only the collapse of state socialism, but also crises and radical reforms in developed capitali...

Changing times for an old industrial city: Hard times, hedonism and corporate power in Newcastle's nightlife

Here, focusing on the experience of Newcastle, Chatterton and Hollands continue debates around culture, capital and the ‘creative’ city already initiated in this journal (see Chatterton, ‘Will the real creative city please stand up?’ in City 4(3) (2000), and Harcup in City 4(2) (2000), for example). Research on the form, origins, regulation and ownership of the city’s nightlife lead to an image...

Recasting Welfare Capitalism: Economic Adjustment in Contemporary France and Germany