B12 - History of Economic Thought: Classical (includes Adam Smith)Return

In this paper, we contribute to the literature focusing on ethics in banking from both theoretical and empirical point of view. We argue that the recent business of the global banking industry is not sustainable and we believe that ethical banking may represent one of the alternative models. In the empirical section, we investigate how ethics in the banking business models affects their financial performance. We identified 69 ethical banks and compared them with conventional banks using Bankscope data of more than 80,000 bank-year observations for the 2003-2013 period. We apply the Within-Between estimation method to bank financial indicators of Return on Assets, Return on Equity and their respective volatilities. We conclude that ethical banks report significantly lower volatility in Return on Equity than their conventional counterparts. In addition, the hypothesis that ethical banks would have higher profitability than their peers is not rejected.

The model of Homo economicus has often been criticized as unrealistic. In particular, it has been found lacking for allegedly assuming that people are selish, an assumption which is contradicted by both introspection and empirical evidence. The aim of this paper is to show that never in the history of the economic discipline has selishness constituted the core of the Homo economicus model. In fact, the standard economic model of behaviour which has been used by economists for more than a hundred years is reticent about the motives of behaviour. Critics thus do not criticize Homo economicus but a straw man - Homo stramineus. Three possible reasons for confusing Homo economicus with Homo stramineus are identiied: malicious intent, ignorance and an attempt to avoid the tautological model of behaviour.

This paper demonstrates that increasing returns to scale can be sustained when agents care about praiseworthiness of their conduct. Unlike the desire to attain approbation from external sources, the notion of praiseworthiness seems to have been neglected by contemporary economic literature. Yet the relevance of praiseworthiness as an internal motivational force was stressed by a number of classical economists. We construct an endogenous growth model in which agents derive utility not only from their consumption but also from praiseworthiness of their action. In such a setting, the motivation by praiseworthiness is able to generate positive and accelerating growth of output per labourer in steady state. The main implication of our model is that the existence of increasing returns depends critically on presence of sufficient approbation attributed to creativity. Furthermore, the presence or the absence of these rewards may be susceptible to explain the cross-sectional differences in growth rates, growth miracles and growth disasters.