Law Commons^™

Assessing Post-Ada Employment: Some Econometric Evidence And Policy Considerations, Christopher L. Griffin Jr., John J. Donohue Iii, Michael Ashley Stein, Sascha Becker

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the relationship between the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) and the relative labor market outcomes for people with disabilities. Using individual-level longitudinal data from 1981 to 1996 derived from the previously unexploited Panel Study of Income Dynamics (“PSID”), we examine the possible effect of the ADA on (1) annual weeks worked; (2) annual earnings; and (3) hourly wages for a sample of 7120 unique male household heads between the ages of 21 and 65 as well as a subset of 1437 individuals appearing every year from 1981 to 1996. Our analysis of the larger sample suggests the …

Harsanyi 2.0, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

How should we make interpersonal comparisons of well-being levels and differences? One branch of welfare economics eschews such comparisons, which are seen as impossible or unknowable; normative evaluation is based upon criteria such as Pareto or Kaldor-Hicks efficiency that require no interpersonal comparability. A different branch of welfare economics, for example optimal tax theory, uses “social welfare functions” (SWFs) to compare social states and governmental policies. Interpersonally comparable utility numbers provide the input for SWFs. But this scholarly tradition has never adequately explained the basis for these numbers.

John Harsanyi, in his work on so-called “extended preferences,” advanced a fruitful …

The Creativity Effect, Christopher Buccafusco, Christopher Jon Sprigman

Faculty Scholarship

This Article reports the first experiment to demonstrate the existence of a valua­tion anomaly associated with the creation of new works. To date, a wealth of social science research has shown that the least amount of money that owners of goods are willing to accept to part with their possessions is often far greater than the amount that purchasers would be willing to pay to obtain them. This phenomenon, known as the endowment effect, may create substantial inefficiencies in many markets. Our experi­ment demonstrates the existence of a related "creativity effect." We show that creators of works value their creations …

Designing Incentives For Inexpert Human Raters, Daniel L. Chen, John J. Horton, Aaron D. Shaw

Faculty Scholarship

The emergence of online labor markets makes it far easier to use individual human raters to evaluate materials for data collection and analysis in the social sciences. In this paper, we report the results of an experiment - conducted in an online labor market - that measured the effectiveness of a collection of social and financial incentive schemes for motivating workers to conduct a qualitative, content analysis task. Overall, workers performed better than chance, but results varied considerably depending on task difficulty. We find that treatment conditions which asked workers to prospectively think about the responses of their peers - …