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

ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty strong sustainability according to the common definition requires that different natural and economic capital stocks be maintained as physical quantities separately yet in a world of uncertainty this cannot be guaranteed to therefore define strong sustainability under uncertainty in an operational manner we propose to use the concept of viability viability means that the different components and functions of a dynamic stochastic system at any time remain in a domain where the future existence of these components and functions is guaranteed with sufficiently high probability we develop a unifying and general ecological economic concept of viability that encompasses the traditional ecological and economic notions of viability as special cases it provides an operational criterion of strong sustainability under a mild form of uncertainty and for medium spatial and temporal scales we illustrate this concept and demonstrate its usefulness by applying it to livestock grazing management in semi arid rangelands publication ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty available from https www researchgate net publication 46490456 ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty accessed apr 3 2017

on the salience of ethnic conflict ray acknowledges support from the national science foundation under grants 0421852 and 0617827 esteban is a member of barcelona economics xrea and is grateful for support from the generalitat de catalunya and the cicyt sej 2006 00369 this research is part of the polarization and conflict research project cit2 ct 2004 506084 funded by the european commission dg research sixth framework program

group loyalty and the taste for redistribution interpersonal preferences preferences that depend on the characteristics of others are typically hard to infer from observable individual behavior as an alternative approach this paper uses survey data to investigate interpersonal preferences i show that self reported attitudes toward welfare spending are determined not only by financial self interest but also by interpersonal preferences these interpersonal preferences are characterized by a negative exposure effect individuals decrease their support for welfare as the welfare recipiency rate in their community rises and racial group loyalty individuals increase their support for welfare spending as the share of local recipients from their own racial group rises these findings help to explain why levels of welfare benefits are relatively low in racially heterogeneous states

economics and policy preferences causal evidence of the impact of economic conditions on support for redistribution and other ballot proposals abstract using california ballot proposition returns and exogenous shifts to labor demand we provide the first large scale causal evidence of the impact of economic conditions on policy preferences consistent with economic theory we find that positive economic shocks decrease support for redistributive policies more notably we find evidence of a need for cognitive consistency in voting behavior as economic shocks have a smaller significant impact on voting on noneconomic ballot issues while we also demonstrate that positive shocks decrease turnout we present evidence that our results reflect changes in the electorate s preferences and not simply to its composition

coarse thinking and persuasion we present a model of uninformative persuasion in which individuals think coarsely they group situations into categories and apply the same model of inference to all situations within a category coarse thinking exhibits two features that persuaders take advantage of i transference whereby individuals transfer the informational content of a given message from situations in a category where it is useful to those where it is not and ii framing whereby objectively useless information influences individuals choice of category the model sheds light on uninformative advertising and product branding as well as on some otherwise anomalous evidence on mutual fund advertising

resilience in the dynamics of economy environment systems the ecological concept of resilience has begun to inform analysis of change in economy environment systems the linkages between resilience and the stability of dynamical systems are discussed along with its role in understanding of the evolution of such systems particular linkages discussed include those between resilience biodiversity and the sustainability of alternative states recent developments in modelling the resilience of joint economy environment systems suggest the advantages of analysing change in the system as a markov process the transition probabilities between states offering a natural measure of the resilience of the system in such states it is argued that this emergent property of the collaboration between ecology and economics has far reaching implications for the way we think about model and manage the environmental sustainability of economic development

on the joint determination of biological and economic systems abstract scarce natural resources and our choices to protect or develop them make ecological and economic systems jointly determined human choices affect nature nature affects human choices this essay considers whether a dynamic model that integrates details of an economic system and an ecosystem with explicit feedback links between them yields significantly different results than does ignoring these links we focus on the case of exotic invaders that put native species at risk in yellowstone national park the results suggest that integration does matter in each scenario cutthroat trout populations differ in both magnitude and survival rates depending on whether feedback is allowed between the two systems

race and charitable church activity i introduction faith based organizations provide social services for more than 70 million americans annually johnson tompkins and webb 2002 of the more than 350 000 congregations in the country more than 85 support some type of social service activity solomon 2003 biddle 1992 estimates that each year congregations spend 24 billion dollars on philanthropic activities these actions have gained new relevance for policymakers as the availability of public funding for charitable church activity has dramatically increased in the past decade starting with the charitable choice provision of the 1996 welfare reform law and continuing with the creation of centers for faith based and community initiatives located in 11 different federal agencies policymakers have instituted a devolution of federal funds intended to provide community services in 2005 more than 2 1 billion dollars in government grants were awarded to religious organizations by federal agencies office of the press secretary 2006 1 some observers fear that this policy trend will encourage racial discrimination by congregations leonard 2002 as bartkowski and regis 2003 write congregational definitions of legitimate social problems that members care about are in actuality influenced by various considerations among them racialized perceptions of welfare recipients past studies by economists have postulated but not substantiated that churchgoers warrant special consideration as individuals whose actions are sensitive to community demographics e g alesina and la ferrara 2000 gruber 2005 alternately some policymakers have championed faith based organizations because they are not likely to display sensitivity to community demographics when providing services as president bush stated in a speech in 2002 faith based charities work daily miracles because above all they recognize the dignity of every citizen and the possibilities of every life office of the press secretary 2002 john diiulio the former director of the white house office of faith based and community initiatives argued for charitable choice by saying government at all levels blatantly denies the equal protection of the laws to low income urban african american and latino children and families who depend disproportionately on faith based organizations for both basic life necessities and the delivery of specific social welfare benefits diiulio 2002 there is also noneconomic research consistent with this view e g billiet 1995 johnson 1977 the goal of this article was to examine whether congregations are affected by the racial composition of the local community when deciding whether and how much charitable activity to provide exploring this relationship is valuable not only because it addresses a key policy debate but also because it contributes to existing economic work on diversity and redistribution much prior work on socioeconomic conditions and tastes for redistribution relies on hypothetical questions asked to respondents in the general social survey or in gallop polls examples include alesina and la ferrara 2005b luttmer 2001 fong 2001 this article examines how a community s racial composition affects actual charitable expenditures studying actual charitable activities will be valuable if individuals stated preferences are different from their actual preferences or if stated preferences are sensitive to the wording of a question as is the case in alesina and la ferrara 2005b to investigate the effect of race on charitable church activity we compare how racially homogeneous congregations respond to the community s racial composition relative to other congregations several factors support this approach first members of homogeneous congregations have ostensibly taken race into account when selecting a congregation to attend consequently these congregations may be especially likely to display sensitivity to a community s racial composition when providing charitable services

party formation and minority ideological positions we develop a model where voters differ in their exogenous income and in their ideological views with racism as an illustration electoral competition takes place between an endogenous number of parties which propose platforms consisting of both an ideological and an economic dimension our objective is to explain the emergence of minority ideological positions and to understand the role played by political parties in this emergence we first show that in a pure citizen candidate model where parties are absent the only equilibrium consists of the majority ideological position we then show that allowance for the formation of political parties generates equilibria with minority ideological positions

the control of politicians in divided societies the politics of fear autocrats in many developing countries have extracted enormous personal rents from power in addition they have imposed inefficient policies including pervasive patronage spending i present a model in which the presence of ethnic identities and the absence of institutionalized succession processes allow the ruler to elicit support from a sizeable share of the population despite large reductions in welfare the fear of falling under an equally inefficient and venal ruler that favours another group is enough to discipline supporters the model predicts extensive use of patronage ethnic bias in taxation and spending patterns and unveils a new mechanism through which economic frictions translate into increased rent extraction by the leader these predictions are consistent with the experiences of bad governance ethnic bias wasteful policies and kleptocracy in post colonial africa

terrorism and attitudes towards minorities the effect of the theo van gogh murder on house prices in amsterdam abstract does fundamentalist islamic terrorism have an effect on the general attitudes towards muslim minorities we use the murder of theo van gogh as an event study to address this question specifically we use the hedonic market model and test for an effect on listed house prices in neighborhoods where more than 25 of the people belong to an ethnic minority from a muslim country type i relative to the other neighborhoods house prices in type i neighborhoods decreased in 10 months by about 3 with a widening gap over time our results are robust to several adjustments including using synthetic control groups finally we find evidence that segregation increased people belonging to the muslim minority were more likely to buy and less likely to sell a house in a type i neighborhood after the murder than before

news consumption and media bias bias in the market for news is well documented recent research in economics explains the phenomenon by assuming that consumers want to read watch news that is consistent with their tastes or prior beliefs rather than the truth the present paper builds on this idea but recognizes that i besides biased consumers there are also conscientious consumers whose sole interest is in discovering the truth and ii consistent with reality media bias is constrained by the truth these two factors were expected to limit media bias in a competitive setting our results reveal the opposite we find that media bias may increase when there are more conscientious consumers however this increased media bias does not necessarily hurt conscientious consumers who may be able to recover more information from multiple media outlets the more the outlets are biased we discuss the practical implications of these findings for media positioning media pricing media planning and the targeting of advertising

human capital and the productivity of suicide bombers the authors empirical analysis suggests that older and more educated suicide bombers are being assigned by their terror organization to more important targets they find that more educated and older suicide bombers are less likely to fail in their mission and are more likely to cause increased casualties when they attack

ethnic diversity and human capital development in india a disaggregated analysis at the state and district levels abstractthis study contributes to the development literature by providing a new perspective on understanding factors that influence human capital development in india we examine the effects of eth

racial harassment ethnic concentration and economic conditions in this paper we analyse the association between the spatial concentration of ethnic minorities and racial harassment ethnic concentration relates to racial harassment through at least three channels hostility in the attitudes of majority individuals that finds expression in harassment behaviour the probability that minority individuals meet majority individuals and the cost of expressing hostility aggressively thus harassment cannot simply be modelled as a stronger form of hostility using unique data for britain we show that in areas of higher local ethnic concentration experience of harassment is lower even though hostility on the side of the majority population is not

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

shrouded attributes consumer myopia and information suppression in competitive markets bayesian consumers infer that hidden add on prices e g the cost of ink for a printer are likely to be high prices if consumers are bayesian firms will not shroud information in equilibrium however shrouding may occur in an economy with some myopic or unaware consumers such shrouding creates an inefficiency which firms may have an incentive to eliminate by educating their competitors customers however if add ons have close substitutes a curse of debiasing arises and firms will not be able to profitably debias consumers by unshrouding add ons in equilibrium two kinds of exploitation coexist optimizing firms exploit myopic consumers through marketing schemes that shroud high priced add ons in turn sophisticated consumers exploit these marketing schemes it is not possible to profitably drive away the business of sophisticates it is also not possible to profitably lure either myopes or sophisticates to nonexploitative firms we show that informational shrouding flourishes even in highly competitive markets even in markets with costless advertising and even when the shrouding generates allocational inefficiencies

ecosystems externalities and economies this paper incorporates an ecosystem model into a model of a simple economy the decisionmaking agents in the ecosystem are individual organisms aggregated to the species level a species may provide utility directly to humans or it may provide utility indirectly because it is used either as a raw material in goods fabrication or as sustenance for other species we describe a comparative static equilibrium of the ecosystem where species demands for other species are equal to the supplies of those other species and energy is conserved the ecosystem is then embedded in the economy so that the effects of human intervention can be traced through both the ecosystem and the economy human intervention creates ecosystem externalities such that ecosystem equilibria are shifted and the new equilibria affect the utility or the production processes of other humans this framework allows us to describe in principle which ecosystem services can be efficiently usurped by humans which waste flows can be efficiently allowed into ecosystems and which ecosystem organisms and physical attributes can be efficiently maintained

hatred and profits under the hood of the ku klux klan in this article we analyze the 1920s ku klux klan those who joined it and its social and political impact by combining a wide range of archival data sources with data from the 1920 and 1930 u s censuses we find that individuals who joined the klan in some cities were more educated and more likely to hold professional jobs than the typical american surprisingly we find little evidence that the klan had an effect on black or foreign born residential mobility or vote totals rather than a terrorist organization the 1920s klan is best described as social organization with a very successful multilevel marketing structure fueled by an army of highly incentivized sales agents selling hatred religious intolerance and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand jel codes d71 d72 r23 n32 copyright 2012 oxford university press

leadership and conflict we model the choice of leaders of groups within society where leaders influence both the mode of interaction between groups either peaceful compromise or costly conflict and the outcome of these interactions group members may choose leaders strategically instrumentally or they may choose leaders expressively we characterize the equilibria of the instrumental choice model and also argue that leadership elections may overemphasise the role of expressive considerations in the choice of leader and that this may result in increased conflict between groups

parental altruism and child lead exposure inferences from the demand for chelation therapy we use parents decisions to treat their children s body burdens of lead to infer parental ex ante willingness to pay for reduced burdens willingness to pay is estimated with a data set containing 256 observations the data were originally gathered to assess the impact of children s body lead burdens upon their intellectual and behavioral development our results indicate that parental ex ante willingness to pay for a 1 percent reduction in child body lead burden exceeds the estimated ex post savings in medical treatment and compensatory education costs caused by the same reduction

can a common currency foster a shared social identity across different nations the case of the euro fostering the emergence of a european identity was one of the declared goals of the euro adoption now years after the physical introduction of the common currency we investigate whether there has been an effect on a shared european identity we use two different datasets in order to assess the impact of the euro adoption on the fostering of a self declared european identity we find that the effect of the euro is statistically insignificant we interpret this result as suggesting that the euro did not have the desired positive effect on feelings of european identity this result holds important implications for european policy makers it also sheds new light on the formation of social identities

cycles of conflict an economic model abstract we propose a model of cycles of conflict and distrust overlapping generations of agents from two groups sequentially play coordination games under incomplete information about whether the other side consists of bad types who always take bad actions good actions may be misperceived as bad and information about past actions is limited conflict spirals start as a result of misperceptions but also contain the seeds of their own dissolution bayesian agents eventually conclude that the spiral likely started by mistake and is thus uninformative of the opposing group s type the agents then experiment with a good action restarting the cycle jel d72 d74 d83 z13

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

economics and identity this paper considers how identity a person s sense of self affects economic outcomes we incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior in the utility function we propose identity is associated with different social categories and how people in these categories should behave we then construct a simple game theoretic model showing how identity can affect individual interactions the paper adapts these models to gender discrimination in the workplace the economics of poverty and social exclusion and the household division of labor in each case the inclusion of identity substantively changes conclusions of previous economic analysis

segregation and the quality of government in a cross section of countries we provide a new compilation of data on ethnic linguistic and religious composition at the subnational level for a large number of countries using these data we measure segregation of groups within the country to overcome the endogeneity problem that arises because of mobility and endogenous in ternal borders we construct an instrument for segregation we find that more ethnically and lin guistically segregated countries i e those where groups live more spatially separately have a lower quality of government there is no relationship between religious segregation and governance trust is an important channel of influence it is lower in more segregated countries jel hi 1 h77 j15 017 z12 z13 racial and religious conflicts are often associated with poor politicoeconomic performance especially in developing countries economists have recently turned their attention to ethnolinguistic fractionalization as an explanation of differences in the pace of development starting with an influential paper by william easterly and ross levine 1997 since then many others have shown that fractionalization is negatively correlated with a host of policy outcomes and the quality of government 1 however many ethnically diverse countries the united states for instance are quite successful what makes different countries more or less capable of handling

the market for news we investigate the market for news under two assumptions that readers hold beliefs which they like to see confirmed and that newspapers can slant stories toward these beliefs we show that on the topics where readers share common beliefs one should not expect accuracy even from competitive media competition results in lower prices but common slanting toward reader biases on topics where reader beliefs diverge such as politically divisive issues however newspapers segment the market and slant toward extreme positions yet in the aggregate a reader with access to all news sources could get an unbiased perspective generally speaking reader heterogeneity is more important for accuracy in media than competition per se

modeling the effects of trade on women at work and at home abstract foreign trade affects women s wages and jobs their household work and their leisure this paper develops a model which covers not only all the sectors of the market economy but also social reproduction and leisure activities for women and men separately the model which in other respects is a standard cge computable general equilibrium model is applied to a simplified set of data for bangladesh its use is illustrated by simulating the gendered effects of changes in trade policies and capital flows

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

the role of freedom growth and religion in the taste for revolution a fundamental question about the determinants of civil conflict is the relative importance of political freedoms versus economic development this paper takes a new approach to provide an answer by using micro data based on surveys of revolutionary tastes of 130 000 people living in 61 nations between 1981 and 1997 controlling for personal characteristics country and year fixed effects more freedom and economic growth both reduce revolutionary support losing one level of freedom equivalent to a shift from the us to turkey increases support for revolt by 4 percentage points to reduce support by the same amount requires adding 14 percentage points onto the gdp growth rate being muslim in a free country has no effect on the probability of supporting revolt compared to a non religious person however being muslim in a country that is not free increases it by 13 percentage points being christian in a free country decreases the chance of supporting revolt by 4 percentage points compared to a non religious person and in a not free country by 1 percentage point

valuing the impact of large scale ecological change in a market the effect of climate change this paper establishes a methodology for valuing the impact of large scale ecological changes in a market given the large capital stocks inherent in most ecological systems the dynamic nature of most ecological change and the dynamic response of markets it is critical to build dynamic models to capture the resulting effects this paper demonstrates how to construct such a model using the impacts of climate change on u s timber markets as an example across a wide range of scenarios and models warming is predicted to expand timber supplies and thus benefit u s timber markets copyright 1998 by american economic association

viewpoint male female wage differentials how can that be abstract the paper outlines the main empirical procedures that are used to document the male female wage differential and the extent to which it reflects discrimination it then discusses the evidence on male female wage differentials their existence the extent to which they reflect discrimination their changes over time and the factors that influence the gap particular attention is paid to more recent studies that control for a wider range of conventionally unobserved factors theoretical perspectives are then outlined focusing on the issue of how discriminatory wage differentials can survive given the forces of competition the impacts of policy initiatives are also discussed

globalization and gender wage inequality in china summary this paper uses an enterprise population level dataset to investigate the link between globalization and gender inequality in the chinese labor market we find that foreign and exporting firms employ more female workers than domestic nonexporters foreign participation and export orientation within the same region and industry significantly encourage female employment and reduce the gender wage gap furthermore we show that while a large gender wage gap exists for foreign and exporting firms it mainly reflects the difference in gender productivity gender wage discrimination is observed only among private nonexporting firms overall our results highlight the importance of globalization in encouraging female employment and reducing gender discrimination

why are rich countries more politically cohesive we document empirically that rich countries are more politically cohesive than poorer countries in order to explain this regularity we provide a model where political cohesion is linked to the emergence of a fully functioning market economy without market exchange the welfare of inherently selfish individuals will be mutually independent whoever has greater bargaining power will be willing to make decisions that enhance the productivity of their supporters at the expense of other groups in society if the gains from specialization are sufficiently large however a market economy will emerge from being essentially non cohesive under self sufficiency the political decision making process becomes cohesive in the market economy because the welfare of individuals will be mutually interdependent as a result of the exchange of goods