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Uniqueness and Symmetry in Bargaining Theories of Justice
Philos Stud DOI 10.1007/s11098-013-0121-y Uniqueness and symmetry in bargaining theories of justice John Thrasher Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract For contractarians, justice is the result of a rational bargain. The goal is to show that the rules of justice are consistent with rationality. The two most important bargaining theories of justice are David Gauthier’s and those that use the Nash’s bargaining solution. I argue that both of these approaches are fatally undermined by their reliance on a symmetry condition. Symmetry is a substantive constraint, not an implication of rationality. I argue that using symmetry to generate uniqueness undermines the goal of bargaining theories of justice. Keywords David Gauthier Á John Nash Á John Harsanyi Á Thomas Schelling Á Bargaining Á Symmetry Throughout the last century and into this one, many philosophers modeled justice as a bargaining problem between rational agents. Even those who did not explicitly use a bargaining problem as their model, most notably Rawls, incorporated many of the concepts and techniques from bargaining theories into their understanding of what a theory of justice should look like. This allowed them to use the powerful tools of game theory to justify their various theories of distributive justice. The debates between partisans of different theories of distributive justice has tended to be over the respective benefits of each particular bargaining solution and whether or not the solution to the bargaining problem matches our pre-theoretical intuitions about justice. There is, however, a more serious problem that has effectively been ignored since economists originally J. -
Implementation Theory*
Chapter 5 IMPLEMENTATION THEORY* ERIC MASKIN Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA TOMAS SJOSTROM Department of Economics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA Contents Abstract 238 Keywords 238 1. Introduction 239 2. Definitions 245 3. Nash implementation 247 3.1. Definitions 248 3.2. Monotonicity and no veto power 248 3.3. Necessary and sufficient conditions 250 3.4. Weak implementation 254 3.5. Strategy-proofness and rich domains of preferences 254 3.6. Unrestricted domain of strict preferences 256 3.7. Economic environments 257 3.8. Two agent implementation 259 4. Implementation with complete information: further topics 260 4.1. Refinements of Nash equilibrium 260 4.2. Virtual implementation 264 4.3. Mixed strategies 265 4.4. Extensive form mechanisms 267 4.5. Renegotiation 269 4.6. The planner as a player 275 5. Bayesian implementation 276 5.1. Definitions 276 5.2. Closure 277 5.3. Incentive compatibility 278 5.4. Bayesian monotonicity 279 * We are grateful to Sandeep Baliga, Luis Corch6n, Matt Jackson, Byungchae Rhee, Ariel Rubinstein, Ilya Segal, Hannu Vartiainen, Masahiro Watabe, and two referees, for helpful comments. Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, Volume 1, Edited by K.J Arrow, A.K. Sen and K. Suzumura ( 2002 Elsevier Science B. V All rights reserved 238 E. Maskin and T: Sj'str6m 5.5. Non-parametric, robust and fault tolerant implementation 281 6. Concluding remarks 281 References 282 Abstract The implementation problem is the problem of designing a mechanism (game form) such that the equilibrium outcomes satisfy a criterion of social optimality embodied in a social choice rule. -
How Large Are the Social Returns to Education? Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES HOW LARGE ARE THE SOCIAL RETURNS TO EDUCATION? EVIDENCE FROM COMPULSORY SCHOOLING LAWS Daron Acemoglu Joshua Angrist Working Paper 7444 http://www.nber.org/papers/w7444 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 December 1999 We thank Chris Mazingo and Xuanhui Ng for excellent research assistance. Paul Beaudry, Bill Evans, Bob Hall, Larry Katz, Enrico Moretti, Jim Poterba, Robert Shimer, and seminar participants at the 1999 NBER Summer Institute, University College London, the University of Maryland, and the University of Toronto provided helpful comments. Special thanks to Stefanie Schmidt for helpful advice on compulsory schooling data. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Bureau of Economic Research. © 1999 by Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. How Large are the Social Returns to Education? Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist NBER Working Paper No. 7444 December 1999 JEL No. I20, J31, J24, D62, O15 ABSTRACT Average schooling in US states is highly correlated with state wage levels, even after controlling for the direct effect of schooling on individual wages. We use an instrumental variables strategy to determine whether this relationship is driven by social returns to education. The instrumentals for average schooling are derived from information on the child labor laws and compulsory attendance laws that affected men in our Census samples, while quarter of birth is used as an instrument for individual schooling. -
Instrumental Variables Methods in Experimental Criminological Research: What, Why and How
Journal of Experimental Criminology (2006) 2: 23–44 # Springer 2006 DOI: 10.1007/s11292-005-5126-x Research article Instrumental variables methods in experimental criminological research: what, why and how JOSHUA D. ANGRIST* MIT Department of Economics, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142-1347, USA NBER, USA: E-mail: [email protected] Abstract. Quantitative criminology focuses on straightforward causal questions that are ideally addressed with randomized experiments. In practice, however, traditional randomized trials are difficult to implement in the untidy world of criminal justice. Even when randomized trials are implemented, not everyone is treated as intended and some control subjects may obtain experimental services. Treatments may also be more complicated than a simple yes/no coding can capture. This paper argues that the instrumental variables methods (IV) used by economists to solve omitted variables bias problems in observational studies also solve the major statistical problems that arise in imperfect criminological experiments. In general, IV methods estimate causal effects on subjects who comply with a randomly assigned treatment. The use of IV in criminology is illustrated through a re-analysis of the Minneapolis domestic violence experiment. The results point to substantial selection bias in estimates using treatment delivered as the causal variable, and IV estimation generates deterrent effects of arrest that are about one-third larger than the corresponding intention-to-treat effects. Key words: causal effects, domestic violence, local average treatment effects, non-compliance, two- stage least squares Background I’m not a criminologist, but I`ve long admired criminology from afar. As an applied economist who puts the task of convincingly answering causal questions at the top of my agenda, I’ve been impressed with the no-nonsense outcome-oriented approach taken by many quantitative criminologists. -
Robert Fogel Interview
RF Winter 07v43-sig3-INT 2/28/07 11:13 AM Page 44 INTERVIEW Robert Fogel In the early 1960s, few economic historians engaged RF: I understand that your initial academic interests in rigorous quantitative work. Robert Fogel and the were in the physical sciences. How did you become “Cliometric Revolution” he led changed that. Fogel interested in economics, especially economic history? began to use large and often unique datasets to test Fogel: I became interested in the physical sciences while some long-held conclusions — work that produced attending Stuyvesant High School, which was exceptional in some surprising and controversial results. For that area. I learned a lot of physics, a lot of chemistry. I had instance, it was long believed that the railroads had excellent courses in calculus. So that opened the world of fundamentally changed the American economy. science to me. I was most interested in physical chemistry and thought I would major in that in college, but my father said Fogel asked what the economy would have looked that it wasn’t very practical and persuaded me to go into like in their absence and argued that, while important, electrical engineering. I found a lot of those classes boring the effect of rail service had been greatly overstated. because they covered material I already had in high school, so it wasn’t very interesting and my attention started to drift elsewhere. In 1945 and 1946, there was a lot of talk about Fogel then turned to one of the biggest issues in all whether we were re-entering the Great Depression and the of American history — antebellum slavery. -
MIT Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow Professors Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak
MIT Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow Professors Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak Position Overview We are seeking a motivated, independent, and organized Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow to support efforts to evaluate and improve education programs and policies in the U.S. Research Fellows receive a two-year full-time appointment with the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII), a research lab based at the MIT Department of Economics and the National Bureau of Economic Research. SEII’s current research projects involve studies of the impact of education policies and programs in states like Massachusetts and cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York City, Indianapolis, and Denver. Principal Duties and Responsibilities Fellows will work closely with SEII Directors Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak, as well as our collaborators at universities across the country, including Harvard University. Specific responsibilities include: o constructing data sets and preparing data for analysis o conducting analysis in Stata, R, and Matlab to answer research questions o presenting results and engaging in discussion in weekly team meetings o editing papers for publication The fellowship will be a full-time position located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An employment term of two years is expected. This position is intended to act as a pathway to graduate school for candidates who plan to apply to an Economics or related Ph.D. program in the future. Previous fellows have gone to top-tier Economics Ph.D. programs, such as UC-Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford. Start date is flexible, with a strong preference for candidates who can begin on or before June 1, 2020. -
Gary Becker and the Art of Economics by Aloysius Siow, Professor of Economics, University of Toronto May 24, 2014
Gary Becker and the Art of Economics by Aloysius Siow, Professor of Economics, University of Toronto May 24, 2014. Gary Becker, an American economist, died on May 3, 2014, at the age of 83. His major contribution was the systematic application of economics to the analysis of social issues. He used economics to study discrimination, criminal behavior, human capital, marriage, fertility and other social issues. Becker won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992. He also won the John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the best American economist under 40, in 1967; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor award by the US president to a civilian, in 2007. Becker's father, Louis William Becker, migrated from Montreal to the United States at age sixteen and moved several times before settling down in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Becker's mother was Anna Siskind. He was born in Pottsville in 1930. At age five, Gary and his family moved to Brooklyn. He graduated from James Madison High School and went to Princeton University for college. He did his PhD at the University of Chicago where he met Milton Friedman who would have an enormous influence on his intellectual development. After he obtained his PhD, Becker spent a few years as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and then moved to Columbia University. In 1970, Becker returned to the University of Chicago where he remained as a professor until his death. While impressive, a list of what he wrote on does not explain why he is so intellectually influential. His mentor, Friedman, always said that "There is no such thing as a free lunch" and applied it widely in market environments. -
Can Successful Schools Replicate? Scaling up Boston's Charter School
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES CAN SUCCESSFUL SCHOOLS REPLICATE? SCALING UP BOSTON’S CHARTER SCHOOL SECTOR Sarah Cohodes Elizabeth Setren Christopher R. Walters Working Paper 25796 http://www.nber.org/papers/w25796 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 May 2019 Special thanks go to Carrie Conaway, Cliff Chuang, the staff of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and Boston’s charter schools for data and assistance. We also thank Josh Angrist, Bob Gibbons, Caroline Hoxby, Parag Pathak, Derek Neal, Eric Taylor and seminar participants at the NBER Education Program Meetings, Columbia Teachers College Economics of Education workshop, the Association for Education Finance and Policy Conference, the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness Conference, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, MIT Organizational Economics Lunch, MIT Labor Lunch, and University of Michigan Causal Inference for Education Research Seminar for helpful comments. We are grateful to the school leaders who shared their experiences expanding their charter networks: Shane Dunn, Jon Clark, Will Austin, Anna Hall, and Dana Lehman. Setren was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education had the right to review this paper prior to circulation in order to determine no individual’s data was disclosed. The authors obtained Institutional Review Board (IRB) approvals for this project from NBER and Teachers College Columbia University. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. -
Field Experiments in Development Economics1 Esther Duflo Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Field Experiments in Development Economics1 Esther Duflo Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Department of Economics and Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab) BREAD, CEPR, NBER January 2006 Prepared for the World Congress of the Econometric Society Abstract There is a long tradition in development economics of collecting original data to test specific hypotheses. Over the last 10 years, this tradition has merged with an expertise in setting up randomized field experiments, resulting in an increasingly large number of studies where an original experiment has been set up to test economic theories and hypotheses. This paper extracts some substantive and methodological lessons from such studies in three domains: incentives, social learning, and time-inconsistent preferences. The paper argues that we need both to continue testing existing theories and to start thinking of how the theories may be adapted to make sense of the field experiment results, many of which are starting to challenge them. This new framework could then guide a new round of experiments. 1 I would like to thank Richard Blundell, Joshua Angrist, Orazio Attanasio, Abhijit Banerjee, Tim Besley, Michael Kremer, Sendhil Mullainathan and Rohini Pande for comments on this paper and/or having been instrumental in shaping my views on these issues. I thank Neel Mukherjee and Kudzai Takavarasha for carefully reading and editing a previous draft. 1 There is a long tradition in development economics of collecting original data in order to test a specific economic hypothesis or to study a particular setting or institution. This is perhaps due to a conjunction of the lack of readily available high-quality, large-scale data sets commonly available in industrialized countries and the low cost of data collection in developing countries, though development economists also like to think that it has something to do with the mindset of many of them. -
Uva-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Evaluating the effect of tax deductions on training Oosterbeek, H.; Leuven, E. DOI 10.1086/381257 Publication date 2004 Published in Journal of labor economics Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Oosterbeek, H., & Leuven, E. (2004). Evaluating the effect of tax deductions on training. Journal of labor economics, 22, 461-488. https://doi.org/10.1086/381257 General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:26 Sep 2021 Evaluating the Effect of Tax Deductions on Training Edwin Leuven, University of Amsterdam and Tinbergen Institute Hessel Oosterbeek, University of Amsterdam and Tinbergen Institute Dutch employers can claim an extra tax deduction when they train employees older than age 40. -
Capabilities, Human Flourishing and the Health Gap Amartya Sen
Capabilities, Human Flourishing and the Health Gap Amartya Sen Lecture HDCA Conference Tokyo 2016 Amartya Sen’s insights have been important to my work in at least four ways: providing intellectual justification for my empirical findings that health can be an “outcome” of social and economic processes; providing insight into the debate on relative or absolute inequality; emphasising the central place of freedoms or agency in human well-being; and alerting me to the importance of the question of “inequality of what”. This last is shameful to admit for someone, me, who had been pursuing research on inequalities in health for two decades before I met Sen in person and in his writings. Could I really be obsessed with health inequalities without recognising that there was more than one way to think about inequality? In this Amartya Sen lecture, I will start by sketching briefly how these seminal ideas of Sen influence what I do. More accurately, I should say how Sen’s ideas influence how I think about what I do. For, as just stated, I had been doing it for some time before I encountered Sen’s fundamental contributions – I am a doctor and medical scientist, after all. In particular, my research on health inequalities has focussed on the social gradient in health, its generalisability, how to understand its causes and what to do about it. I have pursued this research since 1976 when I began work on the first Whitehall study(1), and to think about health inequalities more generally (2). Although I had not used the term, “social determinants of health” until later(3), my research on health inequalities fitted that description, along with the research on health of migrants.(4, 5) I will then illustrate the approach in more detail, drawing on my book, The Health Gap. -
MATCHING with RENEGOTIATION 1. Introduction Deferred Acceptance
MATCHING WITH RENEGOTIATION AKIHIKO MATSUI AND MEGUMI MURAKAMI Abstract. The present paper studies the deferred acceptance algorithm (DA) with renegotiation. After DA assigns objects to players, the players may renegotiate. The final allocation is prescribed by a renegotiation mapping, of which value is a strong core given an allocation induced by DA. We say that DA is strategy-proof with renegotiation if for any true preference profile and any (poten- tially false) report, an optimal strategy for each player is to submit the true preference. We then have the first theorem: DA is not strategy-proof with renegotiation for any priority structure. The priority structure is said to be unreversed if there are two players who have higher priority than the others at any object, and the other players are aligned in the same order across objects. Then, the second theorem states that the DA rule is implemented in Nash equilibrium with renegotiation, or equivalently, any Nash equilibrium of DA with renegotiation induces the same allocation as the DA rule, if and only if the priority structure is unreversed. Keywords: deferred acceptance algorithm (DA), indivisible object, renegotiation mapping, strong core, strategy-proofness with renegotiation, Nash implementation with renegotiation, unreversed priority JEL Classification Numbers: C78, D47 1. Introduction Deferred acceptance algorithm (DA) has been studied since the seminal paper by Gale and Shapley (1962). A class of problems investigated therein includes college admissions and office assignments. In these problems, the centralized mechanism assigns objects to players based on their preferences over objects and priorities for the objects over the players. Two notable prop- erties of DA are stability and strategy-proofness (Gale & Shapley, 1962; Dubins & Freedman, 1981; Roth, 1982).