Looking forward to seeing your ideas enable new research.
Me, too. That said, I think the research areas probably need to expand beyond political economy, and even with political economy, they need to pursue other paths, perhaps towards new “indices.”
One area for research is the law, which is where my strength resides (and I’ve been researching the history of the law as it relates to many CasP issues for over a decade). Markets and Finance would not exist, but for the law.
Another area, which you’ve mentioned previously, is accounting. I’ve actually started looking at the history of depreciation and amortization and accounting, generally, mostly trying to track down how/why the term “capital assets” came into usage (it certainly predates Smith, who gets a lot of blame from you and others).
A third area is modern finance. Someone or something was behind the investment in developing (100% wrong but widely used theories such as) CAPM, for example. I’ve actually spent a lot of time over the last decade studying this, as well, but a lot of the work y’all have done in CasP leads me to believe Finance discovered some connection between cost of capital, return on capital and GDP growth that changed everything, resulting in what we’ve seen in the world economy beginning probably as early as the 1960s.
“Research” in these first three areas does not necessarily look like what CasP normally does. Something that is closer to CasP’s home is attempting to understand the causal connection, if any, between (1) interest rates for corporate debt, (2) corporate profits (and growth rates) and (3) GDP growth. (The answer could be in CAPM itself, as the “risk free rate” is the benchmark against which all other interest rates are set.) While free resources like FRED have a lot of the data, they are unlikely to have all that is necessary to study this issue. I am currently developing some ideas on what research can be done by me in this area using the resources I have, and will post those up in the Research section of the forum. Maybe others will know better resources. Again, while I can do some basic data analysis, I am not a data analyst by any stretch.
P.S. I don’t know how familiar you are with the so-called Coase Theorem, but taken to its logical conclusion, it destroys our understanding of private property and would replace it with something else that vastly increases capital’s power. Basically, the Coase Theorem argues that the owner of any particular property ought to be he who can best exploit it economically, as that ensures the greatest utility for society as a whole. What is scary is that the Coase Theorem and other economic ideas such as Pareto Efficiency are central to the Law and Economics movement and have already begun reshaping the law in ways that always further advantage capital over everyone else.