Economic Theory Commons^™

Household Task Delegation Among High-Fertility Forager-Horticulturalists Of Lowland Bolivia, Jonathan Stieglitz, Michael Gurven, Hillard Kaplan, Paul L. Hooper

ESI Publications

Human kin cooperation is universal, leading researchers to label humans as “cooperative breeders.” Despite widespread interest in human cooperation, there has been no systematic study of how household economic decision making occurs. We document age and sex profiles of task delegation by parents to children ages 4–18 among Bolivian forager-horticulturalists. We test for sex differences in the probability of delegation and examine whether tasks are more likely delegated as household labor demand increases. We also test whether food acquisition tasks are more likely delegated to higher producers.We find mixed support for the prediction that girls are more likely delegated domestic …

Review Of John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness, John Thrasher

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

A review of John Tomasi's Free Market Fairness, published by Princeton University Press.

China And Global Imbalances From A View Of Sectorial Reforms, Hiro Ito, Ulrich Volz

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper examines the impact of sectorial reforms on current account imbalances, with a special focus on China. In particular, we investigate to what extent reforms pertaining to the financial sector, social protection, and healthcare may contribute to a rebalancing of China’s persistent current account imbalances. Our forecasting results suggest that reforming the financial sector would be a significant contributor to the country’s rebalancing with an effect much larger than that of capital account liberalization. Strengthened provisions of social protection and publicly-funded healthcare are also found to contribute to a rebalancing of the Chinese economy.

Physical Activity And Modernization Among Bolivian Amerindians, Michael Gurven, Adrian V. Jaeggi, Hillard Kaplan, Daniel Cummings

ESI Publications

Background: Physical inactivity is a growing public health problem, and the fourth leading risk factor for global mortality. Conversely, indigenous populations living traditional lifestyles reportedly engage in vigorous daily activity that is protective against non-communicable diseases. Here we analyze physical activity patterns among the Tsimane, forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Bolivia with minimal heart disease and diabetes. We assess age patterns of adult activity among men and women, test whether modernization affects activity levels, and examine whether nascent obesity is associated with reduced activity.

Methods and Findings: A factorial method based on a large sample of behavioral observations was employed …

Adverse Selection And Incentives In An Early Retirement Program, Kenneth T. Whelan, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Kevin F. Hallock, Ronald L. Seeber

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

We evaluate potential determinants of enrollment in an early retirement incentive program for non-tenure-track employees of a large university. Using administrative record on the eligible population of employees not covered by collective bargaining agreements, historical employee count and layoff data by budget units, and public information on unit budgets, we find dips in per-employee finance in a budget unit during the application year and higher recent per employee layoffs were associated with increased probabilities of eligible employee program enrollment. Our results also suggest, on average, that employees whose salaries are lower than we would predict given their personal characteristics and …

Economic And Statistical Analysis Of Discrimination In Hiring, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Robert Smith

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Legal and administrative determinations of employers' compliance with "equal employment opportunity" (EEO) requirements often hinge on the Issue of the availability of protected class members to employers. That is, courts and affirmative action review agencies compare the hire rates of protected class members (the ratio of the number of protected class members hired to the number who applied or who were potentially available) to the comparable ratio for other applicants, in assessing whether an employer's hiring policies meet the standards required of them by equal opportunity regulations. The purpose of this paper is to review what economic theory suggests affects …

An Economic Analysis Of The Market For Law School Students, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

This study utilizes data from a number of sources to estimate how lawyers' starting salaries relate to their ability, the quality of law school they attended, and whether the law school was a private institution. Based upon this analysis, a benefit—cost analysis is conducted of the value of attending a high-quality private institution. Analyses are also done of how the financial attractiveness of law vis-a-vis other careers has changed in recent years and a conceptual framework discussed for law schools to use in allocating their financial aid resources.

Neoliberalism And The Law: How Historical Materialism Can Illuminate Recent Governmental And Judicial Decision Making, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

Neoliberalism can be understood as the deregulation of the economy from political control by deliberate action or inaction of the state. As such it is both constituted by the law and deeply affects it. I show how the methods of historical materialism can illuminate this phenomenon in all three branches of the the U.S. government. Considering the example the global financial crisis of 2007-08 that began with the housing bubble developing from trade in unregulated and overvalued mortgage backed securities, I show how the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which established a firewall between commercial and investment banking, allowed this …

Unemployment And Endogenous Reallocation Over The Business Cycle, Ludo Visschers, Carlos Carrillo-Tudela

Ludo Visschers

We build an analytically and computationally tractable stochastic equilibrium model of unemployment in heterogeneous labor markets. Facing search frictions within markets and reallocation frictions between markets, workers endogenously separate from employment and endogenously reallocate between markets, in response to changing aggregate and local conditions. Empirically, using the 1986-2008 SIPP panels, we document the occupational mobility patterns of the unemployed, finding notably that occupational change of unemployed workers is procyclical. The heterogeneous-market model yields highly volatile countercyclical unemployment, and is simultaneously consistent with procyclical reallocation, countercyclical separations and a negatively-sloped Beveridge curve. Moreover, the model exhibits unemployment duration dependence, which (when …

La Gestione Dei Diritti Delevisivi Sportivi: Is It All About Weltanschauung?, Valerio Cosimo Romano

Valerio Cosimo Romano

No abstract provided.

Persuasive Communication When The Sender's Incentives Are Uncertain, Paan Jindapon, Carlos Oyarzun

Carlos Oyarzun

We study persuasion in a modified Crawford-Sobel sender-receiver game in which the receiver makes a binary decision to accept or reject a good recommended by the sender. The good's quality and the sender's type (neutral or biased) are not observable to the receiver. These slight alterations yield a simple model with a unique equilibrium in which neutral senders fully separate. The neutral sender can only communicate low quality levels with precision and the biased sender adopts a mixed strategy that on average can successfully persuade the receiver to accept the good. This strategy is robust under competition between multiple senders. …

Learning And Risk Aversion, Carlos Oyarzun, Rajiv Sarin

Carlos Oyarzun

Abstract We study the manner in which learning shapes behavior towards risk when individuals are not assumed to know, or to have beliefs about, probability distributions. In any period, the behavior change induced by learning is assumed to depend on the action chosen and the payoff obtained. We characterize learning processes that, in expected value, increase the probability of choosing the safest (or riskiest) actions and provide sufficient conditions for them to converge, in the long run, to the choices of risk averse (or risk seeking) expected utility maximizers. We provide a learning theoretic motivation for long run risk choices, …

A Unifying Impossibility Theorem For Compact Metric Social Alternative Space, Priscilla Man, Shino Takayama

Priscilla Man

In a companion paper [Man, P. and Takayama, S., 2013 "A Unifying Impossibility Theorem", Economic Theory, forthcoming], we show that many classical impossibility theorems follow from three simple and intuitive axioms on the social choice correspondence when the set of social alternatives is finite. This supplementary note extends this result to the case where the set of social alternatives is a compact metric space.

A Spatial Approach To Energy Economics, Juan B. Moreno-Cruz, M Scott Taylor

Juan B. Moreno-Cruz

We develop a spatial model of energy exploitation where energy sources are differentiated by their geographic location and energy density. The spatial setting creates a scaling law that magnifies the importance of differences across energy sources. As a result, renewable sources twice as dense, provide eight times the supply; and all new non-renewable resource plays must first boom and then bust. For both renewable and non-renewable energy sources we link the size of exploitation zones and energy supplies to energy density, and provide empirical measures of key model attributes using data on solar, wind, biomass, and fossil fuel energy sources. …

Adaptive Learning In Finitely Repeated Games, Naoki Funai

Naoki Funai

This paper investigates the way in which adaptive players behave in the long-run in finitely repeated games. Each player assigns subjective payoff assessments to his own actions and chooses the action which has the highest assessment at each of his information sets. After receiving payoffs, players update their own assessments of chosen actions using the realized payoffs in an adaptive manner; we consider the updating rules of Watkins and Dayan (1992) and Sarin and Vahid (1999). When players experience random shocks on their assessments, players' behavior strategies converge to a unique agent quantal response equilibrium (McKelvey and Palfrey, 1998) if …

Faith, Science And Religion, Vernon L. Smith

ESI Publications

No abstract provided.

Sustainable What? An Overview And Assessment Of "Sustainable Development", Jeffrey K. Hass

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Occasionally an academic term becomes a meme in broader media and popular discourse. Among such terms are "stagflation", "globalization", and the concept that this chapter and volume addresses: "sustainable development". Like many other such terms, this concept implies an important subject and broad outlines of research programs and policy initiatives. Yet while provoking consideration of important and often uneasy issues, such a term can also mystify or deflects attention from other related issues. Given the clear evidence of global warming trends and the costs of environmental degradation, the eventuality of peak oil and increasing demand for increasingly scarce fossil fuels …

Teacher Qualifications And Student Achievement: A Panel Data Of Analysis, Trevor Collier

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

Recent academic research suggests that teacher quality plays an important role in student achievement: however, empirical research on the efficacy of policies requiring teachers to obtain certain degrees is inconclusive, particularly in elementary education. This paper models a panel data production function with fixed effects using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) to asses the relationship between different undergraduate and graduate majors and elementary student test scores. Specifcally, we aim to discern if there is a difference in teacher efficacy within the different education related majors (e.g. early childhood education and elementary education) and between education and non-education related majors.

The Gettysburg Economic Review, Volume 7, Spring 2013

Gettysburg Economic Review

No abstract provided.

On The Orthodox Nature Of Heterodox Income Distribution Theory, Ross A. Nichols

Gettysburg Economic Review

The goal of this paper is to show that orthodox and heterodox theories of personal income distribution developed in the mid-twentieth century are effectively identical, despite their claims to the contrary. While segmented labor market theory contends that neoclassical theories of personal income distribution, such as human capital theory, ignore the impact of social institutions on the labor market, human capital theory actually implicitly incorporates them. Social institutions are, therefore, just as important in the orthodox approach to personal income distribution. Yet, while this is the case, the heterodox perspective is valuable because of the stress it places on social …