uk government expenditure and electoral security in the 1980s a non linear analysis the present analysis examines the interaction between uk government expenditure behaviour in the 1980s and the incumbent s relative electoral security using a non linear switching model we also suggest a simple technique for identifying the respective regimes which may vary over the relevant period

education and income attraction an online dating field experiment abstractprior studies have found a robust correlation in the education of dating and married couples however there is little evidence to suggest that such correlations are causal that is for the sake of relationship public goods such as the pleasures of the enlightened conversations that only a common high level of education might support being empirical studies they cannot rule out couples matching on other characteristics like income height or health which are correlated with education from driving results we contribute to this literature by randomly assigning high and low education and income levels to 388 artificial male and female profiles on a large online dating website in china we then counted thousands of visits clicks on abbreviated profiles which included education and income information from search engine results we found that men s visits to female profiles were unaffected by the profile s assigned education level while women s visits to male profiles increase with the prof

toward a theory of sustainable entrepreneurship reducing environmental degradation through entrepreneurial action this article explains how entrepreneurship can help resolve the environmental problems of global socio economic systems environmental economics concludes that environmental degradation results from the failure of markets whereas the entrepreneurship literature argues that opportunities are inherent in market failure a synthesis of these literatures suggests that environmentally relevant market failures represent opportunities for achieving profitability while simultaneously reducing environmentally degrading economic behaviors it also implies conceptualizations of sustainable and environmental entrepreneurship which detail how entrepreneurs seize the opportunities that are inherent in environmentally relevant market failures finally the article examines the ability of the proposed theoretical framework to transcend its environmental context and provide insight into expanding the domain of the study of entrepreneurship

beauty and the labor market the authors examine the impact of looks on earnings using interviewers ratings of respondents physical appearance plain people earn less than average looking people who earn less than the good looking the plainness penalty is 5 to 10 percent slightly larger than the beauty premium effects for men are at least as great as for women unattractive women have lower labor force participation rates and marry men with less human capital better looking people sort into occupations where beauty may be more productive but the impact of individuals looks is mostly independent of occupation suggesting the existence of pure employer discrimination copyright 1994 by american economic association

production externalities and long run equilibria bargaining and pigovian taxation this paper analyzes bargaining and pigovian taxation solutions to inefficiencies from production externalities with free entry the coase theorem fails in a decentralized context but remains valid if the property rights holder can act like a command economy planner a less powerful price taking rights holder s objective function is nonconcave causing an inefficient bargaining outcome bargaining complicates pigovian taxes with a nonlinear tax scheme required to sustain the optimum polluting firms pay a franchise tax whose revenue is given lump sum to consumers and face a marginal charge only on excess output which thus raises no revenue in equilibrium

the welfare analytics of transaction costs externalities and institutional choice a natural result of the economist s participation in externality literature has been a strong emphasis upon market and price guided policies available theoretical foundations are insufficient for supporting this ideology absent is a conceptual framework which integrates institutional options and their attendant resource costs with what we know of resource and technology constraints this paper addresses this omission by incorporating an explicit role for transaction costs into traditional welfare diagrammatics

pride and prejudice using ethnic sounding names and inter ethnic marriages to identify labour market discrimination labour markets discriminate against workers with particular ethnic sounding names we use non random sorting into interethnic marriage and salient differences between sephardic and ashkenazi surnames to evaluate the causal impact of sephardic affiliation on wages using the 1995 israeli census we estimate the effect of a sephardic sounding surname on wages we first compare the wages of israeli jewish males born to sephardic fathers and ashkenazi mothers sa who are more likely to carry a sephardic surname with the wages of israeli jewish males born to ashkenazi fathers and sephardic mothers as we find that israeli labor markets discriminate based on perceived ethnicity sa workers earn significantly less than their as counterparts we then exploit the custom of women to adopt their husbands surnames to disentangle actual ethnicity from the ethnicity perceived by the market consistent with ethnic discrimination based on surnames we find that it is father in law s ethnicity rather than father s ethnicity that shapes female wage rates finally we find that labor markets discriminate based on surname only when those names provide additional information about ethnicity when ethnicity can be discerned from skin tone surnames do not provide additional explanatory power with respect to wages

competing by restricting choice the case of search platforms we show that a two sided matching platform can successfully compete by limiting the number of choices it offers to its customers while charging higher prices than platforms with unrestricted choice we develop a stylized model of online dating where agents with different outside options match based on how much they like each other starting from these microfoundations we derive the strength and direction of indirect network effects and show that increasing the number of potential matches has a positive effect due to larger choice but also a negative effect due to competition between agents on the same side agents resolve the trade off between these competing effects differently depending on their outside options for agents with high outside options the choice effect is stronger than the competition effect leading them to prefer an unrestricted choice platform the opposite is the case for agents with low outside options who then have higher willingness to pay for a platform restricting choice as

unraveling reduces mobility in a labor market gastroenterology with and without a centralized match the entry level market for american gastroenterologists was organized by a centralized clearinghouse from 1986 to 1996 before and since it has been conducted via a decentralized market in which appointment dates have unraveled to well over a year before the start of employment we find that both before and after the years in which the centralized clearinghouse was used gastroenterologists are less mobile and more likely to be employed at the same hospital in which they were internal medicine residents than when the clearinghouse was in use this suggests that the clearinghouse not only coordinates the timing of appointments but also increases the scope of the market compared to a decentralized market with early appointments

matching value and market design in online advertising networks an empirical analysis advertising networks have recently played an increasingly important role in the online advertising market critical to the success of an advertising network are two mechanisms an allocation mechanism that efficiently matches advertisers with publishers and a pricing scheme that maximally extracts surplus from the matches in this paper we quantify the value and investigate the determinants of a successful advertiser publisher match using data from taobao s advertising network a counterfactual experiment reveals that the platform s profit under a decentralized allocation mechanism is close to the profit level when the platform centrally assigns the matching under perfect platform knowledge of matching values in another counterfactual experiment we explore the effect of platform technology and revenue model on the strategic choice of the pricing schemes of list price versus generalized second price gsp auction pricing we find that platforms that profit from the advertiser side may have less incenti

identity trust and altruism an experiment on preferences and microfinance lending abstract we conduct laboratory and online experiment treatments to study willingness to lend potential crowd out of philanthropic motivation by financial returns and preference over borrowers in micro finance lending we distinguish between perceptions of transaction related factors such as neediness and trustworthiness and identity related factors such as ethnicity and gender by looking at both channels together we are able to assess the extent to which identity related differences in lending can be attributed to differences in how transaction related factors are perceived among people with similar and different identities we find that 1 both financial return and philanthropic motivation affect the amount lent with little evidence that the former crowds out the latter 2 lenders prefer borrowers with whom they share gender and ethnic similarity even after controlling for perceived riskiness and neediness and 3 lenders are willing to trade greater risk in order to help more needy borrowers but at a rate sensitive to their own degree of financial exposure lack of crowding out homophily effects in some subgroups and robustness to decision order are found in additional treatments with three subject pools including one of non student participants

economy of specialization and diseconomy of externalities abstract suppose the production of x by agent i causes an externality to the production of y by agent j a prerequisite for the existence of an externality problem is that i and j are not far apart and are separate agents but an externality corrective government policy may make j integrate with i or move away and start producing both x and y the above reactions by j essentially change the institutional structure and division of labor and alter the boundary which differentiates what is internal and what is external previous analysis has neglected this aspect for which this paper provides a pioneering analysis

targeted search with horizontal differentiation in the marriage market abstract we develop a search matching model in the marriage market with heterogeneous men a continuum of types and heterogeneous women a finite number of types the model has two distinguishing features first men and women are also horizontally differentiated second the search is targeted each type of woman constitutes a distinctive submarket and men are able to choose beforehand in which submarkets to participate but the search is random within each submarket we show that there is always a unique equilibrium in which men are endogenously segmented into different submarkets and that the equilibrium matching pattern is weakly positive assortative we then explore how the equilibrium marriage pattern changes horizontally and vertically as some exogenous shocks occur in particular we show that an internet induced increase in search efficiency would make the marriage pattern overall more assortative while an increase in the dispersion of the horizontal match fitness could make the marriage pattern overall less assortative

entrepreneurship and the internalization of externalities in an idealized setting for the operation of markets it becomes artificial and redundant to interpret the production trade process itself as involving the internalization of potentially relevant externalities nonetheless it may be useful to think of the ordinary operation of the market in these terms when we want to move beyond the economists idealized construction to settings where externalities defined in the orthodox sense may exist in such settings trade becomes only one among several institutional arrangements for internalizing externalities in this paper we suggest that for the particular types of economic interaction consequent upon the inauguration of entrepreneurial ventures the internalization embodied in a well functioning legal structure may be superior to either trade or overt political arrangements our purpose is to compare alternative means of internalizing potential externalities in terms of the effects on the activity of entrepreneurs and through such activity on the pace of economic development consider the two party example made familiar by r h coase in his now classic paper on social cost at an elementary level of analysis the interaction between the cattle rancher and the wheat farmer is not different from that between any two ordinary traders indeed this point was the fundamental one in coase s argument to the extent that the externality is pareto relevant exchange will tend to take place hence internalizing the effect and guaranteeing an efficient outcome 2 although much of his discussion was posed in terms of liability for damages the implicit model for coase s analysis is one that assumes all property rights

beauty productivity and discrimination lawyers looks and lucre we propose models with an ascriptive characteristic generating earnings differentials and causing sectoral sorting allowing us to distinguish among sources producing such differentials we use longitudinal data on a large sample of graduates from one law school and measure beauty by rating matriculation photographs 1 betterlooking attorneys who graduated in the 1970s earned more than others after 5 years of practice an effect that grew with experience 2 attorneys in the private sector are better looking than those in the public sector differences that rise with age these results support theories of dynamic sorting and customer behavior

marriage and class here we consider a matching model where agents are heterogeneous and utilities nontransferable we utilize this framework to study how equilibrium sorting takes place in marriage markets we impose conditions that guarantee the existence of a steady state equilibrium and then characterize it several examples are developed to illustrate the richness of equilibria the model reveals an interesting sorting externality that can support multiple steady state equilibria even with constant returns to matching excerpt

who marries whom and why this paper proposes and estimates a static transferable utility model of the marriage market the model generates a nonparametric marriage matching function with spillover effects it rationalizes the standard interpretation of marriage rate regressions and points out its limitations the model was used to estimate u s marital behavior in 1971 72 and 1981 82 the marriage matching function estimates show that the gains to marriage for young adults fell substantially over the decade unlike contradictory marriage rate regression results the marriage matching function estimates showed that the legalization of abortion had a significant quantitative impact on the fall in the gains to marriage for young men and women

face value information and signaling in an illegal market author affiliation trevon d logan the ohio state university and nber 410 arps hall 1945 north high street columbus oh 43210 usa e mail logan 155 osu edu corresponding author manisha shah dagger university of california los angeles and nber 3250 public affairs building los angeles ca 91195 e mail manishashah ucla edu acknowledgment we would like to thank george akerlof rodney j andrews raj arunachalam andrea a cann lisa d cook brahima coulibaly scott cunningham angus deaton avinash dixit claudia d goldin karla hoff joseph kaboski simon loertscher joseph m newhard christina paxson john pepper ruth peterson patricia reagan seth sanders ebonya washington nathan woodfork three anonymous referees and numerous seminar participants who provided helpful suggestions the usual disclaimer applies 1 introductionformal enforcement is often seen as the cornerstone of contract design while information can overcome the problems of asymmetric information akerlof 1970 spence 1973 principals are unlikely to engage agents unless the information conveyed is credible and verifiable while the use of formal institutions such as courts is rare relative to the volume of transactions the standard argument is that the presence of formal institutions gives contracts their authority in schelling s 1960 classic terminology the power to sue and be sued gives parties the ability to make credible enforceable commitments a prerequisite to most transactions without means of redress the information that principals and agents share would a priori have little value numerous studies have documented how informal networks long term relationships and reputations overcome problems of asymmetric information indeed researchers have developed large literatures that look at limited contractibility hart 1995 tirole 1999 and situations in which formal enforcement is costly greif 1993 to consider the additional mechanisms that must be in place if existing institutions are lacking or unable to mediate disputes however the literature has not developed an empirical answer to whether the value of information without formal enforcement approaches its value when formal enforcement is present in this article we ask two questions i are formal enforcement mechanisms necessary for the information that principals and agents share to have value ii if not then what is the value of information in an environment without formal enforcement ideally we would like to analyze an illegal market to answer these questions illegal markets rule out the possibility that market function or variation in the information environment is due to the presence of formal enforcement similarly in an illegal market the information that principals and agents convey to one another may not be credible or verifiable and misrepresentation is not likely to be punished the problem is that most illegal markets have coarse information environments it is therefore challenging to obtain information on prices quantities and consumer and producer behavior making empirical answers to these questions especially difficult we overcome these problems by analyzing an illegal market with a rich information structure the online market for male sex work we begin with a general description of this seldom studied market we then document the ways in which the clients of male sex workers informally police the market by informing other clients of deceptive sex workers and by reviewing sex workers on independent client owned web sites the informal policing in the market raises the cost of misrepresentation for would be fraudulent escorts and rewards the truthful self disclosure of honest escorts encouraging truthful self disclosure we further exploit this institutional knowledge to identify the specific information clients treat as signals of escort quality

bibliography of james m buchanan s publications 1949 1986 1 prices income and public policy with c l allen and m r colberg new york mcgraw hill 1954 second edition 1959 2 public principles of public debt homewood richard d irwin 1958 3 the public finances homewood richard d irwin 1960 second edition 1965 translated into spanish as hacienda publica 1968 third edition 1970 translated into japanese 1972 fourth edition with marilyn flowers 1975 fifth edition with marilyn flowers 1980 sixth edition with marilyn flowers 1986 4 fiscal theory and political economy chapel hill university of north carolina press 1960 translated into turkish 1965 translated into japanese 1972 5 the calculus of consent logical foundations of constitutional democracy with gordon tullock ann arbor university of michigan press 1962 paperback edition 1965 translated into japanese 1979 translated into spanish 1980 6 public finance in democratic process chapel hill university of north carolina press 1966 translated into japanese 1971 translated into spanish 1973 7 demand and supply of public goods chicago rand mcnally 1968 translated into italian 1968 translated into japanese 1974 8 cost and choice an inquiry in economic theory chicago markham publishing co october 1969 out of print reprinted by university of chicago press midway reprint 1979 9 academia in anarchy an economic diagnosis with nicos devletoglou basic books 1970 english edition 1971 10 theory of public choice political applications of economics edited with robert tollison university of michigan press 1972 11 lse essays on cost edited with g f thirlby london wiedenfeld and nicholson 1973 12 the limits of liberty between anarchy and leviathan chicago university of chicago press 1975 translated into japanese 1977 translated into italian 1979 translated into german 1984 13 democracy in deficit the political legacy of lord keynes with richard e wagner new york academic press 1978 translated into japanese 1979 translated into korean 1981 14 freedom in constitutional contract perspective of a political economist college station texas a m university press 1978 15 whatshould economistsdo indianapolis indiana liberty press 1979

hard to get the scarcity of women and the competition for high income men in urban china reports of the difficulties of elite women in finding suitable mates have been increasing despite the growing availability and value of men in china we rationalize this leftover women phenomenon within the directed competitive search framework which uniquely allows for equilibrium crowding out within this framework we show that the leftover women phenomenon can be the result of women s aversion to men who have a lower income than themselves hereafter alm and the long predicted complementarity between women s non market traits in particular beauty and male earnings for high income h women even when high income h men are more plentiful and richer the direct effect of the greater number of desirable men can be overwhelmed by the indirect effect of competitive entry by low income l women particularly the beautiful we test for these competitive search effects using online dating field experimental census and household survey data consistent with the competitive entry of l women when sex ratio and h men s income increase the search intensity of beautiful l women for h men increases in response to this competitive entry plain h women who are constrained by their alm to search predominantly for h men also increase the search intensity however only their marriage probability decreases our evidence is consistent with intra female competitive search for spouses who can cover the labor market opportunity cost of marriage and childbirth which increases with a woman s income

personality traits and the marriage market which and how many attributes are relevant for the sorting of agents in a matching market this paper addresses these questions by constructing indices of mutual attractiveness that aggregate information about agents attributes the first k indices for agents on each side of the market provide the best approximation of the matching surplus by a k dimensional model the methodology is applied on a unique dutch household survey containing information about education height body mass index health attitude toward risk and personality traits of spouses

structural estimation of marriage models a structural approach is used to examine who matches with whom a two sided matching model that allows for marital sorting in response to marriage market flexibility and agents preferences is utilized estimation is based on imbedding the numerical solution of a matching model within a maximum likelihood procedure results indicate that wage is more desirable than education in predicting marriageability for white men education is more desirable for black men the marriage market for white men is more flexible both marriage market flexibility and the chance of being classified correctly using agents wage and education decrease with age for white men

matching and sorting in online dating using data on user attributes and interactions from an online dating site we estimate mate preferences and use the gale shapley algorithm to predict sta ble matches the predicted matches are similar to the actual matches achieved by the dating site and the actual matches are approximately efficient outof sample predictions of offline matches i e marriages exhibit assortative mating patterns similar to those observed in actual marriages thus mate pref erences without resort to search frictions can generate sorting in marriages however we underpredict some of the correlation patterns search frictions may play a role in explaining the discrepancy

multi trait matching and gender differentials in intergenerational mobility we describe a model of multi trait matching and inheritance in which individuals attractiveness in the marriage market depends on their market and non market characteristics gender differences in social mobility can arise if market characteristics are relatively more important in determining marriage outcomes for men than they are for women and if they are more persistent across generations than non market characteristics a reduction in gender based discrimination in the labor market increases homogamy in the marriage market and lowers social mobility for both genders

assortative matching under asymmetric information evidence from malawi asymmetric information is a key feature of the marriage market in hiv endemic settings hiv risk is an important partner attribute that may influence marriage timing and partner selection we use a sample of married women in rural malawi to validate a model of positive assortative matching under asymmetric information several correlations support this framework suggesting that hiv risk contributes to adverse selection in the marriage market in this setting

voting as a lottery supermajorities have their advantage as well as their disadvantage they provide an hedge against being in the minority but they make being in the majority less likely we characterize this trade oand compute the most preferred majority threshold the relevant parameters are voting power risk aversion and pessimism people who feel powerful prefer low thresholds high thresholds are preferred by risk averters or by those who are pessimistic about being in the majority further we study constitutional agreements on the voting rule members of the constituent assembly are heterogeneous in the parameters above we show that weak and minority members succeed in pushing forward on high and protective rules

smart dating in speed dating how a simple search model can explain matching decisions abstract how do people in a romantic matching situation choose a potential partner we study this question in a new model of matching under search frictions which we estimate using data from an existing speed dating experiment we find that attraction is mostly in the eye of the beholder and that the attraction between two potential partners has a tendency to be mutual these results are supported by a direct measure of subjective attraction we also simulate the estimated model and it predicts rejection patterns matching rates and sorting outcomes that fit the data very well our results are consistent with the hypothesis that people in a dating environment act strategically and have at least an implicit understanding of the nature of the frictions and of the strategic equilibrium

exclusive nightclubs and lonely hearts columns non monotone participation in optional intermediation in many decentralised markets the traders who benefi tm ost from an exchange do not employ intermediaries even though they could easily afford them at the same time employing intermediaries is not worthwhile for traders who benefit little from trade together these decisions amount to non monotone participation choices in intermediation only traders of middle type employ intermediaries while the rest the high and the low types prefer to search for a trading partner directly we provide a theoretical foundation for this hitherto unexplained phenomenon we build a dynamic matching model where a trader s equilibrium bargaining share is a convex increasing function of her type we also show that this is indeed a necessary condition for the existence of non monotone equilibria

gender based price discrimination in matching markets this paper develops a new model to analyze price discrimination in matching markets where agents have private information about their respective qualities on the basis of signals car clothing club membership etc purchased from profit maximizing firms men and women form beliefs about each other s qualities the matching must then be stable in the following sense there cannot be a man and woman who are unmatched and who both believe they would be better off if they were matched with one another the model enables an analysis of the impact of third degree or gender based price discrimination on welfare when third degree price discrimination is not feasible the cost of eliciting private information is higher but a monopoly intermediary may have stronger incentives to implement an efficient allocation i show that gender based price discrimination is more likely to have a positive impact the more symmetric the matching environment is

acting wife marriage market incentives and labor market investments do single women avoid career enhancing actions because these actions signal undesirable traits like ambition to the marriage market while married and unmarried female mba students perform similarly when their performance is unobserved by classmates on exams and problem sets unmarried women have lower participation grades in a field experiment single female students reported lower desired salaries and willingness to travel and work long hours on a real stakes placement questionnaire when they expected their classmates to see their preferences other groups responses were unaffected by peer observability a second experiment indicates the effects are driven by observability by single male peers