who wants and gets flexibility changing work hours preferences and life events using panel data for 2001 2005 from the household income and labour dynamics in australia hilda survey the authors examine workers desires for and achievement of work hour flexibility they estimate a dynamic model that controls for preferences in previous years and tests for the effects of life events on both desired employment and desired work hours many life events such as motherhood and retirement are found to have predictable effects parallel regressions are estimated for actual employment and the number of hours usually worked and the results are compared to those for preferences the dynamics of usual hours often mirror those for preferences suggesting that labor markets function effectively for many employees however mismatches are associated with three life events motherhood widowhood for men and job loss the results also suggest that many men and women would extend employment under phased retirement programs although only for a brief period

models of thinking learning and teaching in games noncooperative game theory combines strategic thinking best response and mutual consistency of beliefs and choices equilibrium hundreds of experiments show that in actual behavior these three forces are limited even when subjects are highly motivated and analytically skilled camerer 2003 the challenge is to create models that are as general precise and parsimonious as equilibrium but which also use cognitive details to explain experimental evidence more accurately and to predict new regularities this paper describes three exemplar models of behavior in one shot games thinking learning over time and how repeated partner matching affects behavior teaching see camerer et al 2002b

the impact of public research contracts on scientific productivity we analyse a competitive research oriented public programme established in spain the ramon y cajal programme intended to offer contracts in public research centres to high quality researchers we

the impact of national research funds a regression discontinuity approach to the chilean fondecyt this paper analyzes the role of national research funds in promoting scientific production in emerging economies the study focuses on the impact of the chilean national science and technology research fund fondecyt the analysis uses data drawn from international sources of bibliometric information combined with the administrative records of the program s executing unit to measure the program s impact we implement a regression discontinuity rd design on principal researchers who applied for funding between 1988 and 1997 considering as outcomes both quantity publications up to 2002 and quality citations up to 2005 of their scientific production our results show significant and positive impact in terms of publications but no impact in terms of quality of scientific production in the proximity of the program s threshold ranking

information aggregation rationality and the condorcet jury theorem the condorcet jury theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the better of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred most extant proofs of this theorem implicitly make the behavioral assumption that individuals vote sincerely in the collective decision making a seemingly innocuous assumption given that individuals are taken to possess a common preference for selecting the better alternative however in the model analyzed here we find that sincere behavior by all individuals is not rational even when individuals have such a common preference in particular sincere voting does not constitute a nash equilibrium a satisfactory rational choice foundation for the claim that majorities invariably do better than individuals therefore has yet to be derived

sex preferences marital dissolution and the economic status of women author s bedard kelly deschenes olivier abstract the rise in the divorce rate over the past 40 years is one of the fundamental changes in american society a seemingly ever increasing number of women and children spend some fraction of their life in single female headed households leading many to be concerned about the economic circumstances of these women their and children estimating the cause to effect relationship between marital dissolution and female economic status is complicated because the same factors that increase marital instability may also affect the economic status and labor market behavior of women we propose an instrumental variables solution to this problem based on the sex of the firstborn child this strategy exploits the fact that the sex of the firstborn child is random and the fact that marriages are less likely to survive following the birth of girls as opposed to boys our iv estimates cast doubt on the contention that marital instability causes large declines in woman s economic status once the negative selection into divorce is accounted for we find that women who have experienced marital dissolution have considerably higher levels of personal income and annual wages than women who remain married at the same time we find little evidence of differential poverty rates and equivalized household incomes among ever divorced women and never divorced women we further show that the higher wages of ever divorced women mostly reflect increased labor supply intensity hours and weeks of work of woman who experienced marital dissolution

explaining voter turnout patterns an information theory voting research is rich in empirical regularities yet a parsimonious theory of voter turnout that can match the facts has proven to be elusive this paper argues that voter turnout patterns can be explained by extending the traditional rational voter model to include limited information a model is presented in which utility maximizing consumers receive higher payoffs from voting the more confident they are of their vote choice the model provides an explanation for the most important cross sectional voter turnout patterns in addition it suggests a novel explanation for the post 1960 decline in u s participation

a group rule utilitarian approach to voter turnout theory and evidence this paper explores a group rule utilitarian approach to understanding voter turnout inspired by the theoretical work of john c harsanyi 1980 and timothy j feddersen and alvaro sandroni 2002 it develops a model based on this approach and studies its performance in explaining turnout in texas liquor referenda the results are encouraging the comparative static predictions of the model are broadly consistent with the data and a structurally estimated version of the model yields reasonable coefficient estimates and fits the data well the structurally estimated model also outperforms a simple expressive voting model

responsibility or autonomy children and the probability of self employment in the usa this paper studies the effect of children on the likelihood of self employment having children can change preferences that are central to the decision whether to be self employed on the one hand individuals preference for autonomy and flexibility increases when having children which increases the willingness to be self employed on the other hand having children entails a responsibility over someone else which increases individual risk aversion and decreases the willingness to be self employed using a pooled cross section of 26 years from the general social survey instrumental variable estimates indicate that in the usa having children under the age of 18 in the household decreases the likelihood of being self employed by 11 i e the responsibility effect dominates this effect is considerable as a child decreases the probability of self employment more than the increase associated with being raised by a self employed father one of the main determinants of self employment

voter participation and strategic uncertainty the paradox of not voting is examined in a model where voters have uncertainty about the preferences and costs of other voters in game theoretic models of voter participation under complete information equilibrium outcomes can have substantial turnout even when voting costs are relatively high in contrast when uncertainty about preferences and costs is present only voters with negligible or negative net voting costs participate when the electorate is large

sequential voting with abstention abstract dekel and piccione 2000 sequential voting procedures in symmetric binary elections j polit economy 108 34 55 have proven that information cascades do not necessarily affect the properties of information aggregation in sequential elections under standard conditions any symmetric equilibrium of a simultaneous voting mechanism is also an equilibrium of the correspondent sequential mechanism we show that when voters can abstain these results are sensitive to the introduction of an arbitrarily small cost of voting the set of equilibria in the two mechanisms are generally disjoint and the informative properties of the equilibrium sets can be ranked if an appropriate q rule is chosen when the cost of voting is small the unique symmetric equilibrium of the simultaneous voting mechanism dominates all equilibria of the sequential mechanism

revisiting games of incomplete information with analogy based expectations this paper studies the effects of analogy based expectations in static two player games of incomplete information players are assumed to be boundedly rational in the way they forecast their opponent s state contingent strategy they bundle states into analogy classes and play best responses to their opponent s average strategy in those analogy classes we provide general properties of analogy based expectation equilibria and apply the model to a variety of well known games we characterize conditions on the analogy partitions for successful coordination in coordination games under incomplete information rubinstein a 1989 the electronic mail game strategic behavior under almost common knowledge amer econ rev 79 385 391 we show how analogy grouping of the receiver may facilitate information transmission in crawford and sobel s cheap talk games crawford v p sobel j 1982 strategic information transmission econometrica 50 1431 1451 and we show how analogy grouping may give rise to betting in zero sum betting games such as those studied to illustrate the no trade theorem

the impact of research grant funding on scientific productivity in this paper we estimate the impact of receiving an nih grant on subsequent publications and citations our sample consists of all applications unsuccessful as well as successful to the nih from 1980 to 2000 for standard research grants r01s both ols and iv estimates show that receipt of an nih research grant worth roughly 1 7 million leads to only one additional publication over the next five years which corresponds to a 7 percent increase the limited impact of nih grants is consistent with a model in which the market for research funding is competitive so that the loss of an nih grant simply causes researchers to shift to another source of funding

abstention in elections with asymmetric information and diverse preferences we analyze a model of a two candidate election with costless voting in which voters have asymmetric information and diverse preferences we demonstrate that a strictly positive fraction of the electorate will abstain and that nevertheless elections effectively aggregate voters private information using examples we show that more informed voters are more likely to vote than their less informed counterparts increasing the fraction of the electorate that is informed however may lead to higher levels of abstention we conclude by showing that a biased distribution of information can lead to a biased voting population but does not lead to biased outcomes

the swing voter s curse in the laboratory this paper reports the first laboratory study of the swing voter s curse and provides insights on the larger theoretical and empirical literature on pivotal voter models our experiment controls for different information levels of voters as well as the size of the electorate the distribution of preferences and other theoretically relevant parameters the design varies the share of partisan voters and the prior belief about a payoff relevant state of the world our results support the equilibrium predictions of the feddersen pesendorfer model and clearly reject the notion that voters in the laboratory use naive decision theoretic strategies the voters act as if they are aware of the swing voter s curse and adjust their behavior to compensate while the compensation is not complete and there is some heterogeneity in individual behavior we find that aggregate outcomes such as efficiency turnout and margin of victory closely track the theoretical predictions

abstention in daylight strategic calculus of voting in the european parliament as in large elections substantialabstention is frequently observed inlegislative assemblies this paper analyzesroll call votes from the third and fourthlegislatures 1989 1999 of the europeanparliament to test predictions from threetypes of theories of abstention 1 decision theoretic approach of rationalchoice theory 2 game theoretic approachof rational choice theory and 3 theswing voter s curse theory the resultsindicate that closeness significantlydecreases the rate of abstention thefindings also show that an increase in theprobability of being in the majorityincreases turnout overall findings aresupportive of the decision theoreticapproach of rational choice theory butnot of the game theoretic approach toabstention or the swing voter s cursetheory

choosing not to choose on the link between information and abstention abstract we use a dataset that allows us to circumvent a number of estimation difficulties that have plagued previous studies of the relationship between information and abstention our results show that information is a major determinant of abstention

labor supply and marital separation panel data are used to estimate the effect of marital separation on labor supply female labor supply increases substantially and male labor supply declines marginally lending support to the theory of specialization within the household the most interesting finding is that women began to increase their labor supply well before the actualsplit occurs suggesting either that shocks to labor supply change divorce probabilities or that women with a higher likelihood of divorcework more this argument is pursued by constructing and estimating a simultaneous model of labor supply and divorce risk copyright 1986 by american economic association

the swing voter s curse the authors analyze two candidate elections in which some voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters they demonstrate the existence of a swing voter s curse less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless the swing voter s curse leads to the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another copyright 1996 by american economic association

rat race redux adverse selection in the determination of work hours in law firms this paper describes an organizational setting in which professional employees are required to work inefficiently long hours the focus of the authors investigation is large law firms the income sharing that characterizes legal partnerships creates incentives to promote associates who have a propensity to work very hard law firms use indicators of this propensity especially an associate s record of billable hours in promotion decisions reliance upon work hours as an indicator leads to a rat race equilibrium in which associates work too many hours the authors find evidence in support of this conclusion with data they collected from two large law firms copyright 1996 by american economic association