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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
(Wp 2024-01) Douglass North, New Institutional Economics, And Complexity Theory, John B. Davis, Mauro Boianovsky
(Wp 2024-01) Douglass North, New Institutional Economics, And Complexity Theory, John B. Davis, Mauro Boianovsky
Economics Working Papers
Douglass North was central to the emergence of New Institutional Economics. Less well known are his later writings where he became interested in complexity theory. He attended the second economics complexity conference at the Santa Fe Institute in 1996 on how the economy functions as a complex adaptive system, and in his 2005 Understanding the Process of Economic Change incorporated this thinking into his argument that market systems depend on how institutions evolve. North also emphasized in the 2005 book the role belief played in evolutionary processes, and drew on cognitive science, especially the famous ‘scaffolding’ idea of cognitive scientist …
Shutdown Policies And Worldwide Conflict, Nicolas Berman, Mathieu Couttenier, Nathalie Monnet, Rohit Ticku
Shutdown Policies And Worldwide Conflict, Nicolas Berman, Mathieu Couttenier, Nathalie Monnet, Rohit Ticku
ESI Working Papers
We provide real-time evidence on the impact of Covid-19 restrictions policies on conflicts globally. We use daily information on conflict events and government policy responses to limit the spread of coronavirus to study how conflict levels vary following shutdown and lockdown policies. We use the staggered implementation of restriction policies across countries to identify their effect on conflict incidence and intensity. Our results show that imposing a nation-wide shutdown reduces the likelihood of daily conflict by around 9 percentage points. The reduction is driven by a drop in the incidence of battles, protests and violence against civilians. Across actors the …
Prenatal Stress And Birth Weight: Evidence From The Egyptian Revolution, Ronia A. Hawash
Prenatal Stress And Birth Weight: Evidence From The Egyptian Revolution, Ronia A. Hawash
Scholarship and Professional Work - Business
The Egyptian Revolution that ignited in January 2011 resulted in intense violent conflict between protestors and former regime allies. This generated a significant amount of fear and stress among people who lived in proximity to such events. We use this exogenous shock as a natural experiment to test the causal relationship between prenatal stress and birth weight. Governorate-level fatalities resulting from this conflict will be used as an exogenous indicator for prenatal stress. Using fixed effects and difference-in-difference analysis, results show that higher prenatal stress resulting from political conflict during the first and second trimesters of pregnancy has a …
Violence, Access, And Competition In The Market For Protection, Adam Smith
Violence, Access, And Competition In The Market For Protection, Adam Smith
Economics Department Faculty Publications & Research
We conduct a laboratory experiment to examine the performance of a market for protection. As the central feature of our treatment comparisons, we vary the access that “peasants” have to violence-empowered “elites”. The focus of the experiment is to observe how elites price and operate their protective services to peasants, and to observe the degree to which elites engage in wealth-destroying violence in competition amongst each other for wealth generating peasants. We find that greater access to peasants strikingly increases violence among the elites, but with limited access the elites markedly extract more tribute from the peasants. Our findings are …
Cognitive Systems For Revenge And Forgiveness, Michael E. Mccullough, Robert Kurzban, Benjamin A. Tabak
Cognitive Systems For Revenge And Forgiveness, Michael E. Mccullough, Robert Kurzban, Benjamin A. Tabak
ESI Publications
Minimizing the costs that others impose upon oneself and upon those in whom one has a fitness stake, such as kin and allies, is a key adaptive problem for many organisms. Our ancestors regularly faced such adaptive problems (including homicide, bodily harm, theft, mate poaching, cuckoldry, reputational damage, sexual aggression, and the infliction of these costs on one's offspring, mates, coalition partners, or friends). One solution to this problem is to impose retaliatory costs on an aggressor so that the aggressor and other observers will lower their estimates of the net benefits to be gained from exploiting the retaliator in …
Does Violent Crime Cause Individuals To Join Gangs?, Colin Hottman
Does Violent Crime Cause Individuals To Join Gangs?, Colin Hottman
Economics Honors Projects
This paper examines the hypothesis that violent crime causes gang membership. I construct a theoretical model of the individual’s decision to join a gang based on the protection that gang membership provides from violent crime. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort and a probit specification, I test three different measures of the threat of violent crime: a dummy variable for experiencing gun violence, a dummy variable for being the victim of repeated bullying, and a dummy variable for being the victim of a violent crime. In my regressions, I find support for the hypothesis that …
Spatial Inequality In Chile, Claudio A. Agostini, Philip H. Brown
Spatial Inequality In Chile, Claudio A. Agostini, Philip H. Brown
Working Papers in Economics
Despite success in reducing poverty over the last twenty years, inequality in Chile has remained virtually unchanged, making Chile one of the least equal countries in the world. High levels of inequality have been shown to hamper further reductions in poverty as well as economic growth and local inequality has been shown to affect such outcomes as violence and health. The study of inequality at the local level is thus crucial for understanding the economic well-being of a country. Local measures of inequality have been difficult to obtain, but recent theoretical advances have enabled the combination of survey and census …
How Much Does Violence Tax Trade?, S. Brock Blomberg, Gregory Hess
How Much Does Violence Tax Trade?, S. Brock Blomberg, Gregory Hess
CMC Faculty Publications and Research
We investigate the empirical effect of violence, as compared to other trade impediments, on trade flows. Our analysis is based on a panel data set with annual observations on 177 countries from 1968 to 1999, which brings together information from the Rose data set, the iterate data set for terrorist events, and data sets of external and internal conflict. We explore these data with traditional and theoretical gravity models. We calculate that, for a given country year, the presence of terrorism together with internal and external conflict is equivalent to as much as a 30% tariff on trade. This is …