joseph schumpeter lecture ideology i develop a model of ideologies as collectively sustained yet individually rational distortions in beliefs concerning the proper scope of governments versus markets in processing and interpreting signals of the efficacy of public and market provision of education health insurance pensions etc individuals optimally trade off the value of remaining hopeful about their future prospects or their children s versus the costs of misinformed decisions because these future outcomes also depend on whether other citizens respond to unpleasant facts with realism or denial endogenous social cognitions emerge thus an equilibrium in which people acknowledge the limitations of interventionism coexists with one in which they remain obstinately blind to them embracing a statist ideology and voting for an excessively large government conversely an equilibrium associated with appropriate public responses to market failures coexists with one dominated by a laissez faire ideology and blind faith in the invisible hand with public sector capital this interplay of beliefs and institutions leads to history dependent dynamics the model also explains why societies find it desirable to set up constitutional protections for dissenting views even when ex post everyone would prefer to ignore unwelcome news jel h11 d72 d83 p16 z1

organizational design decision rights and incentive contracts where should decision rights be lodged in organizations michael c jensen and william h meckling 1992 argue that moving a decision away from the inherently best informed party involves costs in communication and garbling but may lodge it with someone who has better incentives to make good decisions generally however we expect that incentives are part of the organizational design why not just provide incentives to those with the best information so that they make the right decisions one reason is that the available incentive instruments must serve multiple purposes and designing them to induce better decisions worsens performance against other organizational objectives our experience suggests that this is a common situation in actual organizations the means available to affect one sort of behavior or decision inevitably affect the incentives governing other choices then the design of incentive schemes and the allocation of decision rights become interlinked this paper looks at this idea in the specific context of a principal s problem of inducing agents to provide unobservable effort while also motivating the efficient selection of investments each of these problems has been extensively studied in isolation on inducing effort see e g bengt holmstrom 1979 and holmstrom and paul milgrom 1991 on decisions see e g eugene f fama and jensen 1983 milgrom and roberts 1990a b philippe aghion and jean tirole 1997 matthias dewatripont and tirole 1999 we thus know that motivating effort is done best by rewarding agents on precise measures of their effort not necessarily on the total value created in the firm at the same time it is clear that getting the right investment choices may require that the decision makers rewards be tied to total value created the difficulty is that the available measures do not allow doing both the only available performance measures are aggregates whose component pieces cannot be disentangled while contracts must be written in advance of learning about investment possibilities including many contingencies in the contracts ex ante is impossible and ongoing renegotiation in every ex post eventuality is prohibitively costly more formally we assume that it is not possible to contract on investment projects nor can the principal bargain with the agents over the adoption of these projects once they are identified instead returns to projects are reflected in the performance measures available for use in the effort incentive contracting then the incentives for effort and for decisions are inextricably tied together in this framework we explore the interactions among the design of jobs and assignment of individuals to tasks the shape and intensity of effort incentives and the allocation of authority over project selection we argue that it may indeed be optimal to assign decisions rights to someone other than the best informed party an authority based hierarchy then emerges endogenously with some agents being given the right to make organizational decisions over projects that others discovered moreover as in herbert simon 1951 those in authority will make the decisions in a self interested way simon emphasized that this discussants michael riordan columbia university bengt holmstrom massachusetts institute of technology w bentley macleod university of southern california

the japanese saving rate despite much work economists have not been able to quantitatively account for the differences in the japanese and u s saving rates after world war ii in this paper we show that the use of actual japanese total factor productivity growth rates in a standard growth model generates saving rates that are reasonably similar to the japanese data between 1956 and 2000 jel e21 e22 o41 o47

alfred marshall lecture social capital as good culture to explain the extremely long term persistence more than 500 years of positive historical experiences of cooperation putnam 1993 we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others we show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively conservative priors as a result societies can be trapped in a low trust equilibrium in this context a temporary shock to the return to trusting can have a permanent effect on the level of trust we validate the model by testing its predictions on the world values survey data and the german socio economic panel we also present some anecdotal evidence that these priors are reflected in novels that originate in different parts of the country jel 04 016 043 p16

why aren t developed countries saving abstract national saving rates differ enormously across developed countries but these differences obscure a common trend namely a dramatic decline over time france and italy for example saved over 23 and 19 of national income in 1970 but only 9 and 4 respectively in 2008 japan saved almost 33 in 1970 but only 7 in 2008 and the u s saved around 11 in 1970 but only 1 in 2008 what explains these international and intertemporal differences is it demographics government spending productivity growth or preferences for the u s and france whose saving behavior we study preferences appear to be an important factor american and french societies are placing increasing weight on the welfare of those currently alive particularly contemporaneous older generations government spending also appears to be one of the reasons why france is saving at much lower rates these conclusions emerge from estimating two models in which society makes consumption and labor supply decisions in light of uncertainty over future government spending productivity and social preferences the two models differ in terms of the nature of preference uncertainty and the extent to which current society can control future societies spending and labor supply decisions

ideology and the growth of government abstract we analyze the impact of ideology on the size of government in a simple model the government sets redistribution and provision of public services according to the preferences of the median voter ideology is defined in terms of preferences for public services and the impact of ideology on the size of government is shown to increase with mean income this idea is tested using measures of ideology based on party manifestos we show that the interaction of ideology and mean income has a major role in explaining the increase and divergence in government size observed across oecd countries

why do parents socialize their children to behave pro socially an information based theory we present a model of intergenerational transmission of pro social values in which parents have information about relevant characteristics of society that is not directly available to their children dierently from existing models of cultural transmission of values such as bisin and verdier 2001 and tabellini 2008 we assume that parents are exclusively concerned with their children s material welfare if parents coordinate their educational choices a child would look at her system of values to predict the values of her contemporaries with whom she may interact a parent may thus choose to instil prosocial values into his child in order to signal to her that others can generally be trusted this implies that parents may optimally decide to endow their children with values that stand in contrast with maximization of material welfare even if their children s material welfare is all they care about jel codes d64 d82 h41 z13

budget deficits and national saving are politicians exogenous during the thirty five year period following world war ii the federal budget deficit averaged less than one percent of net national product never once exceeding five percent for the five year period from 1982 86 the budget deficit never once fell below five percent of net national product there have been some modest cutbacks recently and the deficit is likely to fall to about four percent of net national product in 1988 further declines are now projected in the congressional budget office 1988 baseline forecast of the implications of present policies but both 1988 presidential candidates suggested many more policies that would increase than decrease the deficit these numbers indicate that after years of relative abstinence the united states has experimented with persistent budget deficits on a rather massive scale in the 1980s economists have generally been quite critical of this fiscal policy though there are at least three respectable minority views arguing that federal deficits are not so bad and quite possibly better than likely corrective measures the rationale for economists general opposition comes from those who hold what is called the neoclassical view of deficits according to this view if the united states should be treated as a closed economy persistent deficits will raise interest rates and lower investment if the united states should be treated as a small open economy persistent deficits will leave real interest rates and investment unchanged but the drop in national saving would be financed by higher foreign borrowing accomplished through a rise in the dollar and a drop in net exports either way net national saving falls and consumption rises at the expense of some combination of investment and net exports as a result living standards are higher in the present but lower in the future compared to what they would be in a world of no deficits

authority versus persuasion this paper studies a principal s trade off between using persuasion versus using interpersonal authority to get the agent to do the right thing from the principal s perspective when the principal and agent openly disagree on the right course of action it shows that persuasion and authority are complements at low levels of effectiveness but substitutes at high levels furthermore the principal will rely more on persuasion when agent motivation is more important for the execution of the project when the agent has strong intrinsic or extrinsic incentives and for a wide range of settings when the principal is more confident about the right course of action this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a theory of political transitions we develop a theory of political transitions inspired by the experiences of western europe and latin america nondemocratic societies are controlled by a rich elite the initially disenfranchised poor can contest power by threatening revolution especially when the opportunity cost is low for example during recessions the threat of revolution may force the elite to democratize democracy may not consolidate because it is redistributive and so gives the elite an incentive to mount a coup highly unequal societies are less likely to consolidate democracy and may end up oscillating between regimes and suffer substantial fiscal volatility

a theory of collective reputations with applications to the persistence of corruption and to firm quality the paper is a first attempt at modelling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations a member s current incentives are affected by his past behaviour and because his track record is observed only with noise by the group s past behaviour as well the paper thus studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature it shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt last the paper applies the theory to analyse when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality 1 collective reputations collective reputations play an important role in economics and the social sciences countries ethnic racial or religious groups are known to be hard working honest corrupt hospitable or belligerent some firms enjoy substantial rents from their reputations for producing high quality products some departments are reported to treat their faculty or students fairly the paper is a first attempt at modelling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations a member s current incentives are affected by her past behaviour and because her track record is observed only with noise by the group s past behaviour as well the paper studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations in a model in which current generations are progressively replaced by new ones and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature see section 2 for a detailed comparison with the literature it shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt last the paper applies the theory to analyse when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality let us spell out the building blocks of our theory in more detail a a group s reputation is only as good as that of its members each member is characterized by individual traits such as talent diligence or honesty past individual behaviour conveys information about these traits and generates individual reputations

a bayesian approach to optimal monetary policy with parameter and model uncertainty abstract this paper undertakes a bayesian analysis of optimal monetary policy for the u k we estimate a suite of monetary policy models that include both forward and backward looking representations as well as large and small scale models we find an optimal simple taylor type rule that accounts for both model and parameter uncertainty for the most part backward looking models are highly fault tolerant with respect to policies optimized for forward looking representations while forward looking models have low fault tolerance with respect to policies optimized for backward looking representations in addition backward looking models often have lower posterior probabilities than forward looking models bayesian policies therefore have characteristics suitable for inflation and output stabilization in forward looking models

learning and optimal monetary policy to conduct policy efficiently central banks must use available data to infer or learn the relevant structural relationships in the economy however because a central bank s policy affects economic outcomes the chosen policy may help or hinder its efforts to learn this paper examines whether real time learning allows a central bank to learn the economy s underlying structure and studies the impact that learning has on the performance of optimal policies under a variety of learning environments our main results are as follows first when monetary policy is formulated as an optimal discretionary targeting rule we find that the rational expectations equilibrium and the optimal policy are real time learnable this result is robust to a range of assumptions concerning private sector learning behavior second when policy is set with discretion learning can lead to outcomes that are better than if the model parameters are known finally if the private sector is learning then unannounced changes to the policy regime particularly changes to the inflation target can raise policy loss considerably

unequal societies income distribution and the social contract this paper develops a theory of inequality and the social contract aiming to explain how countries with similar economic and political fundamentals can sustain such different systems of social insurance fiscal redistribution and education finance as those of the united states and western europe with imperfect credit and insurance markets some redistributive policies can improve ex ante welfare and this implies that their political support tends to decrease with inequality conversely with credit constraints lower redistribution translates into more persistent inequality hence the potential for multiple steady states with mutually reinforcing high inequality and low redistribution or vice versa

expectations and the stability problem for optimal monetary policies eine auf den fundamentaldaten beruhende regelbindung der geldpolitik ohne selbstverpflichtung die bei vollkommen rationalen erwartungen der privaten akteure optimal ware ist instabil wenn diese akteure de facto den ublichen regeln des adaptiven lernens folgen dieses problem lasst sich dadurch beheben dass die erwartungen privater akteure berucksichtigt und in geeigneter weise in die optimale geldpolitik einbezogen werden diese eindeutige schlusfolgerung gilt auch dann wenn sich der geldpolitische entscheidungstrager und die privaten akteure in einem simultanen lernprozess befinden unsere ergebnisse zeigen wie wichtig es ist die geldpolitik angemessen zu gestalten und dabei nicht nur die fundamentaldaten sondern auch direkt die beobachteten erwartungen privater haushalte und unternehmen zu berucksichtigen

good bye lenin or not the effect of communism on people s preferences preferences for redistribution as well as the generosities of welfare states differ significantly across countries in this paper we test whether there exists a feedback process of the economic regime on individual preferences we exploit the experiment of german separation and reunification to establish exogeneity of the economic system from 1945 to 1990 east germans lived under a communist regime with heavy state intervention and extensive redistribution we find that after german reunification east germans are more in favor of redistribution and state intervention than west germans even after controlling for economic incentives this effect is especially strong for older cohorts who lived under communism for a longer time period we further find that east germans preferences converge towards those of west germans we calculate that it will take one to two generations for preferences to converge completely

opinions as incentives we study costs and benefits of differences of opinion between an adviser and a decision maker even when they share the same underlying preferences over decisions a difference of opinion about payoff relevant information leads to strategic information acquisition and transmission a decision maker faces a fundamental trade off a greater difference of opinion increases an adviser s incentives to acquire information but exacerbates the strategic disclosure of any information that is acquired nevertheless when choosing from a rich pool of opinion types it is optimal for a decision maker to select an adviser with some difference of opinion centralization of authority is essential to harness these incentive gains since delegation to the adviser can discourage effort

people s opium religion and economic attitudes since max weber there has been an active debate on the impact of religion on people s economic attitudes much of the existing evidence however is based on cross country studies in which this impact is confounded by differences in other institutional factors we use the worldvalues surveys to id entify the relationship between intensity of religious beliefs and economic attitudes controlling for country fixed effects we study several economic attitudes towardcooperation the government working women legal rules thriftiness andthe market economy we also distinguish across religious denominations differentiating on whether a religion is dominant in a country we find that on average religious beliefs are associated with good economic attitudes where good is defined as conducive to higher per capita income andgrowth yet religious people tendto be more racist andless favorable with respect to working women these effects differ across religious denominations overall we find that christian religions are more positively associatedwith attitudes conducive to economic growth r 2003 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classification a1 e0 n4 z1

the evolution of ideology fairness and redistribution ideas about what is fair influence preferences for redistribution we study the dynamic evolution of different economies in which redistributive policies perception of fairness inequality and growth are jointly determined we show how including beliefs about fairness can keep two otherwise identical countries on different development paths for a very long time we show how different initial conditions regarding how fair is the same level of inequality can lead to two permanently different steady states we also explore how bequest taxation can be an efficient way of redistributing wealth to correct unfair past accumulation of inequality

social mobility and redistributive politics just like economists voters have conflicting views about redistributive taxation because they estimate its incentive costs differently we model rational agents as trying to learn from their dynastic income mobility experience the relative importance of effort and predetermined factors in the generation of income inequality and therefore the magnitude of these incentive costs in the long run left wing dynasties believing less in individual effort and voting for more redistribution coexist with right wing dynasties this allows us to explain why individual mobility experience and not only current income matters for political attiitudes and how persistent differences in perceptions about social mobility can generate persistent differences in redistribution across countries

sales talk cancellation terms and the role of consumer protection this paper analyses contract cancellation and product return policies in mar kets in which sellers advise customers about the suitability of their oering when customers are fully rational it is optimal for sellers to oer the right to cancel or return on favorable terms a generous return policy makes the seller s cheap talk at the point of sale credible this observation provides a possible explanation for the excess refund puzzle and also has implications for the management of customer reviews when customers are credulous instead sellers have an incentive to set unfavorable terms to exploit the in ated beliefs they induce in their customers the imposition of a minimum statutory standard even if it is not binding can improve welfare and consumer surplus when at least some customers are credulous in con trast competition policy reduces contractual ine ciencies with rational customers but it is not eective with credulous customers

robust control of forward looking models abstract this paper shows how to formulate and compute robust ramsey aka stackelberg plans for linear models with forward looking private agents the leader and the followers share a common approximating model and both have preferences for robust decision rules because both doubt the model since their preferences differ the leader s and followers decision rules are fragile to different misspecifications of the approximating model we define a stackelberg equilibrium with robust decision makers in which the leader and follower have different worst case models despite sharing a common approximating model to compute a stackelberg equilibrium we formulate a bellman equation that is associated with an artificial single agent robust control problem the artificial bellman equation contains a description of implementability constraints that include euler equations that describe the worst case analysis of the followers as an example the paper analyzes a model of a monopoly facing a competitive fringe

optimal monetary policy and model selection in a real time learning environment abstract we investigate how real time parameter learning optimal policies and the volatility of exogenous shocks affect the policymakers ability to distinguish across competing models of the economy the detection speed of model misspecification depends only on the relative volatility of supply and demand shocks

the advertising mix for a search good we extend the persuasion game to bring it squarely into the economics of advertising we model advertising as exciting consumer interest into learning more about the product and determine a firm s equilibrium choice of advertising content over quality information price information and horizontal match information equilibrium is unique whenever advertising is necessary the outcome is a separating equilibrium with quality unravelling lower quality firms need to provide more information for a given quality level as a function of consumer visit costs first quality information is disclosed then price information and then horizontal product information are added to the advertising mix some suggestive evidence is provided from airline ads in newspapers this paper was accepted by j miguel villas boas marketing

a strategic altruism model in which ricardian equivalence does not hold this article demonstrates that ricardian equivalence does not necessarily hold in models with altruistic transfers once one takes into account the strategic behavior of recipients as well as donors to influence the final allocation of consumption in altruistic settings potential recipients can threaten to refuse transfers the authors apply the extended nash bargaining solution to the problem of an altruistic parent and a possible altruistic child they show that when the government redistributes between the parent and child it changes their endowments and the equilibrium threats and thus the final allocation of consumption copyright 1990 by royal economic society

belief in a just world and redistributive politics international surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate at the same time social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate individuals recurrent struggle with cognitive dissonance as they seek to maintain and pass on to their children a view of the world where effort ultimately pays off and everyone gets their just deserts this paper offers a model that helps explain i why most people feel such a need to believe in a just world ii why this need and therefore the prevalence of the belief varies considerably across countries iii the implications of this phenomenon for international differences in political ideology levels of redistribution labor supply aggregate income and popular perceptions of the poor the model shows in particular how complementarities arise endogenously between individuals desired beliefs or ideological choices resulting in two equilibria a first american equilibrium is characterized by a high prevalence of just world beliefs among the population and relatively laissez faire policies the other european equilibrium is characterized by more pessimism about the role of effort in economic outcomes and a more extensive welfare state more generally the paper develops a theory of collective beliefs and motivated cognitions including those concerning money consumption and happiness as well as religion

partisan bias in inflation expectations we examine partisan bias in inflation expectations our dataset includes inflation expectations of the new york fed s survey of consumer expectations over the period june 2013 to june 2018 the results show that inflation expectations were 0 46 points higher in republican dominated than in democratic dominated us states when barack obama was us president compared to inflation expectations in democratic dominated states inflation expectations in republican dominated states declined by 0 73 points when donald trump became president we employ the blinder oaxaca decomposition method to disentangle the extent to which political ideology and other individual characteristics predict inflation expectations around 25 of the total difference between inflation expectations in democratic dominated versus republican dominated states is based on how partisans respond to changes in the white house s occupant partisan bias the results also corroborate the belief that voters misperceptions of economic conditions decline when the president belongs to the party that voters support

lifecycle consumption plans social learning and external habits experimental evidence abstract we report results from a laboratory experiment exploring the extent to which individuals can solve a deterministic intertemporal lifecycle consumption optimization problem and the effect of revealing social information on past average consumption amounts as all individuals have identical induced preferences and lifetime incomes such social information could be useful in solving for the optimal consumption path instead we find that the provision of social information on past average levels of consumption results in a greater deviation of consumption from both the unconditional and the conditionally optimal paths we find some improvement in consumption planning relative to the conditional optimum when social concerns external habits are explicitly incorporated into subject s period utility functions as in external habit formation preference specifications our results on the effects of social information on consumption behavior may help to explain the phenomenon of over consumption and under saving that has been observed in many developed countries in recent decades as social information on the behavior of others has become more readily available

heterogeneity in capital and skills in a neoclassical stochastic growth model does a heterogeneous agents version of a neoclassical model with labor leisure choice replicate the distributions of consumption and working hours observed in the cross sectional data does incorporating heterogeneity enhance the aggregate performance of the representative agent model we address these questions in a complete market model economy with two sources of heterogeneity initial endowments and non acquired skills we find positive answers to both questions

the importance of legitimacy within organizations there are typically limits to leaders legitimacy this article explores how organizations are structured in the face of such constraints the concept of legitimacy is formalized in the context of a single agent moral hazard model the principal can give the agent monetary incentives in addition he can give the agent an order the agent finds it costly to disobey orders provided they are legitimate we find that it may be optimal for the principal to take costly actions to bolster legitimacy we argue that many organizational phenomena can be understood as attempts to bolster legitimacy examples include rejection of overqualified workers bureaucracy merger decisions and above market clearing wages

a passion for voting we model expressive voting as a dynamic game with informed and ignorant voters a voter has selective memory for actions and he is aware of it we find a unique symmetric equilibrium with ignorant voting public signal in favor of one particular alternative creates the bandwagon and underdog effects when the signal is sufficiently strong the majority outcome is biased this is a possible reason for persistence of public policies

social mobility and the demand for redistribution the poum hypothesis this paper examines the often stated idea that the poor do not support high levels of redistribution because of the hope that they or their offspring may make it up the income ladder this prospect of upward mobility poum hypothesis is shown to be fully compatible with rational expectations and fundamentally linked to concavity in the mobility process a steady state majority could even be simultaneously poorer than average in terms of current income and richer than average in terms of expected future incomes a e rst empirical assessment suggests on the other hand that in recent u s data the poum effect is probably dominated by the demand for social insurance in the future everyone will be world famous for e fteen minutes andy warhol 1968

the political economy of hatred this paper develops a model of the interaction between the supply of hate creating stories from politicians and the willingness of voters to listen to hatred hatred is fostered with stories of an out group s crimes but the impact of these stories comes from repetition not truth hate creating stories are supplied by politicians when such actions help to discredit opponents whose policies benefit an out group egalitarians foment hatred against rich minorities opponents of redistribution build hatred against poor minorities hatred relies on people accepting rather than investigating hate creating stories hatred declines when there is private incentive to learn the truth increased economic interactions with a minority group may provide that incentive this framework is used to illuminate the evolution of anti black hatred in the united states south episodes of anti semitism in europe and the recent surge of anti americanism in the arab world

psychological expected utility theory and anticipatory feelings we extend expected utility theory to situations in which agents experience feelings of anticipation prior to the resolution of uncertainty we show how these anticipatory feelings may result in time inconsistency we provide an example from portfolio theory to illustrate the potential impact of anticipation on asset prices

ideology and the size of us state government this paper theorizes that the impact of ideology on the size of us state governments increases with state income this idea is tested using state level ideology data derived from the voting behavior of state congressional representatives empirically the interaction of ideology and mean income is a key determinant of state government size at 1960s levels of income the impact of ideology is negligible at 1997 levels of income a one standard deviation move towards the left of the ideology spectrum increases state government size by about half a standard deviation estimated income elasticities differentiated by state and time are found to be increasing with ideology and diminishing with income as predicted by the theory

overconfidence in political behavior this paper studies theoretically and empirically the role of overconfidence in political behavior our model of overconfidence in beliefs predicts that overconfidence leads to ideological extremeness increased voter turnout and stronger partisan identification the model also makes nuanced predictions about the patterns of ideology in society these predictions are tested using unique data that measure the overconfidence and standard political characteristics of a nationwide sample of over 3 000 adults our numerous predictions find strong support in these data in particular we document that overconfidence is a substantively and statistically important predictor of ideological extremeness voter turnout and partisan identification jel c83 d03 d72 d83

doubts and dogmatism in conflict behavior we consider a conflict under incomplete information where two opponents fight to impose their preferred policy before the conflict one opponent the agent trusts the information received by his principal under some conditions the principal induces hawkish attitudes in the agent the agent never doubts the optimality of his preferred policy conflicts are violent and bad decisions are sometimes made under other conditions the agent believes that his opponent may be right even when all evidence indicates that the policy preferred by the opponent is certainly suboptimal in this case the agent adopts dovish attitudes and conflicts are less violent

preferences for redistribution in the land of opportunities this paper explores how individual preferences for redistribution depend on future income prospects in addition to estimating the impact of individuals socioeconomic background and of their subjective perceptions of future mobility we employ panel data to construct dobjectivet measures of expected gains and losses from redistribution for different categories of individuals we find that such measures have considerable explanatory power and perform better than dgeneral mobilityt indexes we also find that preferences for redistribution respond to individual beliefs on what determines one s position in the social ladder ceteris paribus people who believe that the american society offers equal opportunities are more averse to redistribution d 2004 published by elsevier b v

movers and shakers most projects in most walks of life require the participation of multiple parties while it is difficult to unite individuals in a common endeavor some people who we call movers and shakers seem able to do it the paper specifically examines moving and shaking of an investment project whose return depends both on its quality and the total capital invested in it we analyze a model with two types of agents managers and investors managers and investors initially form social connections managers then bid to buy control of the project and the winning bidder puts effort into making investors aware of it finally a subset of aware investors are given the chance to invest and they decide whether to do so after receiving private signals of the project s quality we first show that connections are valuable since they make it easier for a manager to move and shake the project i e obtain capital from investors when we endogenize the network we find that while managers are identical ex ante a single manager emerges as most connected he consequently earns a rent in extensions we move away from the assumption of ex ante identical managers to highlight forces that lead one manager or another to become a mover and shaker our theory sheds light on a range of topics including entrepreneurship venture capital and anchor investments

parental altruism and inter vivos transfers theory and evidence this paper uses psid data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism specifically the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one dollar reduction in that child s income results in the parents increasing their transfer to the child by one dollar this restriction on parental and child transfer income derivatives is derived for the standard altruism model augmented to include uncertainty and liquidity constraints these additional elements pin down the timing of inter vivos transfers the method used to estimate income transfer derivatives takes into account unobserved heterogeneity across families in the degree of altruism the findings strongly reject the altruism hypothesis redistributing one dollar from a recipient child to donor parents leads to less than a 13 cent increase in the parents transfer to the child far less than the one dollar increas

liquidity constraints with endogenous income i introduction the existence of liquidity constraints remains a significant issue within intertemporal models of household choice as hayashi 1985b cox and jappelli 1993 and other studies detail the notion that consumers may be unable to borrow all they desire to finance current consumption carries important implications pertaining to ricardian equivalence as well as the dynamic effects of government spending versus tax policies liquidity constraints have also been advanced as a primary reason for empirical rejections of the permanent income life cycle hypothesis as discussed in zeldes 1989 testing for the existence of debt constraints with micro data has generated mixed results 1 hall and mishkin 1982 mariger 1987 zeldes 1989 hayashi 1985a and duca and rosenthal 1994 argue for the significance of liquidity constraints jappelli 1990 and duca and rosenthal 1994 contend that a nontrivial segment of the population faces credit rationing based upon information from the survey of current finances on the other hand the findings of altonji and siow 1987 runkle 1991 mariger and shaw 1993 and attanasio and weber 1995 provide little evidence of liquidity constraints this article investigates liquidity constraints with endogenous income it centers around the household s intertemporal model with nonseparable consumption and leisure following the methodology of zeldes 1989 and runkle 1991 the formulation allows for an individual household at a point in time to either face binding or nonbinding liquidity constraints our model extends this work by considering labor supply within the family s choice set as recommended by hayashi 1985a and attanasio and weber 1995 it includes endogenous wage income in the minimum wealth constraint these features allow for consideration of work related decisions within household utility maximization under liquidity constraints for example a family may choose increased labor supply to remove themselves from a debt constraint or to enable them to apply for a larger loan this behavior may take the form of increased overtime finding a second job or having the spouse enter the labor market the model works toward remedying several difficulties associated with empirical testing for liquidity constraints following alessie melenberg and weber 1988 we derive from the euler equations an estimable equation for employed households the equation holds for both liquidity constrained families as well as households that do not face a binding debt constraint this result addresses a well known problem involved with the standard consumption based utility formulation as discussed by hayashi 1985b and others the inability to directly estimate the euler equation s for liquidity constrained households consequently work such as hayashi 1985a zeldes 1989 and runkle 1991 use an a priori criterion to split the sample into suspected liquidity constrained and non liquidity constrained groups their tests are based upon parameter estimates from the group not considered to be debt constrained given estimated structural parameters from the consumption leisure model we can obtain estimates related to the individual lagrange multipliers pertaining to the minimum wealth constraint these estimated data series enable us to test directly for the presence of credit constraints within the general population primarily due to the difficulty in estimating the lagrange multipliers indirect means have generally been used to test for debt constraints over a sample of households hall and mishkin 1982 base their inferences on the excess sensitivity of consumption forecast errors to income innovations mariger and shaw 1993 raise doubts regarding their findings showing that such tests of the permanent income life cycle hypothesis can be biased toward rejection zeldes 1989 and fissel and jappelli 1990 criticize the general method since it assumes a constant proportion of liquidity constrained households

anticipation and the valuation of delayed consumption this paper presents a model of intertemporal choice that incorporates savoring and dread i e utility from anticipat ion of delayed consumption the model explains why an individual with positive time preference may delay desirable outcomes or get unpleas ant outcomes over with quickly contrary to the prediction of convent ional formulations of intertemporal choice implications of savoring and dread for savings behavior empirical estimation of discount rate s and public policy efforts to combat myopic behavior are explored the model provides an explanation for common violations of the indepe ndence axiom as applied to intertemporal choice copyright 1987 by royal economic society

self confidence and personal motivation the maintenance and enhancement of self esteem has always been identified as a fundamental human impulse philosophers writers educators and of course psychologists have all emphasized the crucial role played by self image in motivation affect and social interactions the aim of this chapter is to bring these concerns into the realm of economic analysis and show that this has important implications for how agents process information and make decisions conversely the tools of economic modelling can help shed light on a number of apparently irrational behaviours documented by psychologists

social preferences self interest and the demand for redistribution preferences for redistribution may be influenced by values and beliefs about distributive justice as well as by self interest people may prefer more redistribution to the poor if they believe that poverty is caused by circumstances beyond individual control therefore beliefs about the causes of income may affect demand for redistribution alternatively the effect of these beliefs on redistributive preferences may be spurious if they are correlated with income and self interest is not properly controlled for they may also measure incentive cost concerns using social survey data i find that self interest cannot explain the effect of these beliefs on redistributive preferences 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

strategic ignorance as a self disciplining device we analyse the decision of an agent with time inconsistent preferences to consume a good that exerts an externality on future welfare the extent of the externality is initially unknown but may be learned via a costless sampling procedure we show that when the agent cannot commit to future consumption and learning decisions incomplete learning may occur on a markov perfect equilibrium path of the resulting intra personal game in such a case each agent s incarnation stops learning for some values of the posterior distribution of beliefs and acts under self restricted information this conduct is interpreted as strategic ignorance all equilibria featuring this property strictly pareto dominate the complete learning equilibrium for any posterior distribution of beliefs

learning by doing and the value of optimal experimentation abstract recent research on learning by doing has provided the limit properties of beliefs and actions for a class of learning problems in which experimentation is an important aspect of optimal decision making however under these conditions the optimal policy cannot be derived analytically because bayesian learning about unknown parameters introduces a nonlinearity in the dynamic optimization problem this paper utilizes numerical methods to characterize the optimal policy function for a learning by doing problem that is general enough for practical economic applications the optimal policy is found to incorporate a substantial degree of experimentation under a wide range of initial beliefs about the unknown parameters dynamic simulations indicate that optimal experimentation dramatically improves the speed of learning and the stream of future payoffs furthermore these simulations reveal that a policy which separates control and estimation and does not incorporate experimentation frequently induces a long lasting bias in the control and target variables while these sequences tend to converge steadily under the optimal policy they frequently exhibit non stationary behavior when estimation and control are treated separately

stochastic fiscal policy and the swedish business cycle in this paper we show that fluctuations in distortive taxes can account for some of the key features of the swedish post war business cycle the empirical fit of a simple stochastic growth model is significantly improved when it is amended to include imperfectly predictable fluctuations in payroll taxes consumption taxes and government consumption indeed using the simulated method of moments smm we find that for large sets of conventional moments models with stochastic fiscal policy cannot be statistically rejected whereas a model without it is always rejected

presidential address institutions and culture how and why does distant political and economic history shape the functioning of current institutions this paper argues that individual values and convictions about the scope of application of norms of good conduct provide the missing link evidence from a variety of sources points to two main findings first individual values consistent with generalized as opposed to limited morality are widespread in societies that were ruled by non despotic political institutions in the distant past second well functioning institutions are often observed in countries or regions where individual values are consistent with generalized morality and under different identifying assumptions this suggests a causal effect from values to institutional outcomes the paper ends with a discussion of the implications for future research jel a10 d7 e00

tax contracts and elections in this paper we examine the impact of tax contracts as a novel institution on elections policies and welfare we consider a political game in which three parties compete to form the government and voters may behave strategically parties have policy preferences about the level of public good provision and benefit from perks when in office a government raises taxes for both purposes we show that tax contracts yield moderate policies and lead to lower perks by avoiding the formation of grand coalitions in order to win government moreover in polarized societies they unambiguously improve the welfare of the median voter

preponderance of evidence abstract this paper investigates the incentive properties of the standard of proof for a finding of negligence when evidence about injurers behavior is imperfect we show that a more likely than not decision rule provides maximal incentives for potential tort feasors to exert care an injurer is then held liable whenever inadequate care appears more likely than due care and not liable otherwise our analysis provides a deterrence rationale for the exclusionary rules of evidence found in common law and the preponderance of evidence standard of proof

regulating a monopolist with unknown costs we consider the problem of how to regulate a monopolistic firm whose costs are unknown to the regulator the regulator s objective is to maximize a linear social welfare function of the consumers surplus and the firm s profit in the optimal regulatory policy prices and subsidies are designed as functions of the firm s cost report so that expected social welfare is maximized subject to the constraints that the firm has nonnegative profit and has no incentive to misrepresent its costs we explicitly derive the optimal policy and analyze its properties in their classic papers dupuit 2 and hotelling 5 considered pricing policies for a bridge that had a fixed cost of construction and zero marginal cost they demonstrated that the pricing policy that maximizes consumer well being is to set price equal to marginal cost and to provide a subsidy to the supplier equal to the fixed cost so that a firm would be willing to provide the bridge this first best solution is based on a number of informational assumptions first the demand function is assumed to be known to both the regulator and to the firm while the assumption of complete information may be too strong the assumption that information about demand is as available to the regulator as it is to the firm does not seem unnatural a second informational assumption is that the regulator has complete information about the cost of the firm or at least has the same information about cost as does the firm this assumption is unlikely to be met in reality since the firm would be expected to have better information about costs than would the regulator as weitzman has stated an essential feature of the regulatory environment i am trying to describe is uncertainty about the exact specification of each firm s cost function in most cases even the managers and engineers most closely associated with production will be unable to precisely specify beforehand the cheapest way to generate various hypothetical output levels because they are yet removed from the production process the regulators are likely to be vaguer still about a firm s cost function 12 p 684 as this observation suggests it is natural to expect that a firm would have better information regarding its costs than would a regulator the purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal regulatory policy for the case in which the regulator does not know the costs of the firm one strategy that a regulator could use in the absence of full information about costs is to give the firm the title to the total social surplus and to delegate the pricing decision to the firm in pursuing its own interests which would then be to maximize the total social surplus the firm would adopt the same marginal cost pricing strategy that the regulator would have imposed if the regulator had

relying on the information of interested parties we investigate the conventional wisdom that competition among interested parties attempting to influence a decisionmaker by providing verifiable information elicits all relevant information we find that if the decisionmaker is strategically sophisticated and well informed about the relevant variables and about the preferences of the interested party or parties competition may be unnecessary to achieve this result if the decisionmaker is unsophisticated or not well informed competition is not generally sufficient if the interested parties interests are sufficiently opposed however or if the decisionmaker is seeking to advance the parties welfare then competition can reduce or even eliminate the decisionmaker s need for prior knowledge about the relevant variables and for strategic sophistication in other settings only the combination of competition among information providers and a sophisticated skepticism is sufficient to allow effective decisionmaking