faculty ratings of major economics departments by citations the predominant ranking criterion for judging the comparative quality of economics departments has been the faculty publication record in a set of major journals in this tradition is a recent article which generates rankings based on volume of pages published in twenty four top journals during 1974 78 philip graves et al 1982 separate rankings are calculated for total and per capita contributions and credit is accorded to the institution at which the author is employed at the time of publication 2

does economic recession reduce material use empirical evidence based on 157 economies worldwide abstract the research on economic recession has been more focused on the interactions between macroeconomic and financial variables however whether material use has been affected during the recession period has remained under explored in order to fill up this gap this study investigates the relationship between material use and economic recession as well as other socio economic drivers by using the material flow analysis and the system generalized method of moments for 157 economies worldwide during 1980 2011 results show that economic recession poses significant and negative impact on domestic material consumption at 1 level illustrating its role as a determinant factor on material mitigation by dividing the research sample into extractive and non extractive economies as well as high mid and low income groups we again confirmed the significant negative correlations as expected no significant sign is found between recession and physical trade balance besides other drivers such as population gross domestic production gdp per capita and technological variables also exert marked effects at different situations this research work provides an empirical study on how recession and other factors affect material use at various scenarios which have essential implications for understanding material flow dynamics in different economic cycles

habit formation interdependent preferences and demographic effects in the almost ideal demand system the authors model myopic habit formation interdependence of preferences among consumers and demographic effects as taste shifters in a micro consumer demand model of the almost ideal demand variety the model is estimated for dutch micro data the authors investigate the dynamic properties of the model and find that it behaves very differently from models without interdependence of preferences the implications for micro macro modeling are discussed copyright 1991 by royal economic society

meta analysis in model implementation choice sets and the valuation of air quality improvements this research illustrates how the methods developed for meta analysis can serve to document and summarize voluminous information derived from repeated sensitivity analyses our application is to the sensitivity of welfare estimates derived from discrete choice models to assumptions about the choice set these assumptions affect welfare estimates through both the estimated parameters of the model and conditional on the parameters the substitution among alternatives in our specific application the evaluation is in terms of estimated benefits of air quality improvements in los angeles based on discrete choices of neighborhood and housing copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

binary choice models with social network under heterogeneous rational expectations abstract this paper extends brock and durlauf s 2001a 2001b binary choice complete network or group interaction model with homogeneous rational expectations to a general network model with heterogeneous rational expectations in our model individuals will form expectations regarding peers behaviors taking into account their characteristics endogenous contextual and correlated effects are all identifiable conditions for unique equilibrium are established for a complete network with heterogeneous rational expectations multiple equilibria can be characterized by an aggregate scalar index the empirical results on adolescents smoking behaviors show significant endogenous and contextual effects even after controlling for school grade random effects and school fixed effects

social interactions in small groups most models of endogenous social interactions implicitly assume that individuals are interacting directly or indirectly with a very large innite group of others these models generally feature multiple equilibria when the marginal impact of peers exceeds some strictly positive critical value this paper shows that this result depends critically on the assumption that the size of the peer group is large and analyzes the properties of an alternative model in which the peer groups are small nite i nd that when peer groups are small multiple equilibria exist for any positive degree of peer influence a brief application to the variation in youth smoking rates by ethnicity demonstrates the potential interaction of group size and strength of peer eect in generating a wide range of equilibrium behavior

a multinomial choice model of neighborhood effects this paper provides a model of individual decisionmaking in the presence of neighborhood effects by neighborhood effects we refer to interdependencies between individual decisions and the decisions and characteristics of others within a common neighborhood as such neighborhood effects are forms of social interactions in fact the terms would seem to be interchangeable in many contexts within economics there has developed an increasing recognition that neighborhood effects play a possibly major role in explaining a range of individual behaviors rich empirical and theoretical literatures have developed a failing of much of this work is the absence of strong connections between theory and empirics this paper addresses this limitation by providing a model of multinomial choice with neighborhood effects the model represents a generalization of the binary choice model of william brock and steven durlauf 2001a b the model is econometrically implementable and so has the potential of allowing for structural estimation of neighborhood effects section i outlines a basic choice model with neighborhood effects section ii specializes the structure using a multinomial logit framework section iii considers econometric implementation section iv discusses some limitations of the framework and proposes some research directions proofs of all theorems may be found in brock and durlauf 2001c

trend of subjects published in economics journals 1969 2007 i introduction a fundamental question for any academic discipline is what subjects are people researching this question can be asked in several ways which subjects are economists publishing which subjects are economists reading which subjects have the most impact on the literature which subjects are represented in well respected general subject journals how many specialty journals are dedicated to each subject answers to these questions are useful for strategic planning publication strategy and curriculum design through the identification of shifting focus within the economics discipline for instance the research record of an economist who publishes in a widely published subject field that is little published in leading general subject journals should be evaluated differently from an economist whose fields have the opposite properties a liberal arts college that desires to make more of an impact on the literature may find that the subjects that need to be taught at the undergraduate level are in conflict with the subjects that are being published in top journals a subject area with a small percentage of articles published that has had a strong impact when adjusted for citations may be fertile ground for research although the study of economic research has a long history subject area focus has been little studied morin 1966 examined the sales of chamberlin s theory of monopolistic competition schumpeter s theory of economic development samuelson s foundations of economic analysis friedman s essays in positive economics and becket s economics of discrimination to examine the changes in economics from 1933 to 1964 figuring that most copies of these books were being read by researchers he posited that the changes in the sales of these books indicate shifts in interests within economics fusfeld 1956 examined the departments and types of institutions which were represented by papers at the 1950 1954 american economic association meetings he did not rank these departments but viewed the narrow group of represented schools as a flaw in the program selection niemi 1975 created rankings of the top 100 economics departments and the top southern economics departments according to the number of publications and the number of pages published in a group of 24 journals smith and gold 1976 adjusted niemi for the number of faculty members in each department graves marchand and thompson 1982 built on the work by niemi as well as smith and gold by updating their statistics and providing a trend analysis to examine rankings through time scott and mitias 1996 provided updated rankings by pages published using two different sets of economics journals and created a list of the top 50 economists by pages published davis and papanek 1984 first proposed using citations for ranking economics departments laband 1986 ranked departments based upon the productivity of the graduates of the program using both pages published and citations bodenhorn 1997 ranked liberal arts colleges by citations medoff 1989 ranked individual economists based upon citations and ranks schools based upon the number of top economists employed there although these analyses provide important insights into the productivity of economists and provide a benchmark for hiring and promotion to tenure few have discussed the distribution of subject areas within journals harden liano and chan 2006 calculated the percentage of real estate economics articles published mccain 1991 used article subjects in her cocitation analysis durden and ellis 1991 listed the most oft cited articles in the aer broken down by subject area kim morse and zingales 2006 examined all the articles from 1970 to 2005 that received more than 500 citations they used the econlit database to identify the journal of economic literature jel codes associated with each article

estimating ethnic preferences using ethnic housing quotas in singapore there are many policies around the world aimed at integrating groups gender ethnic national in education employment immigration and housing in the case of housing since prices may not internalize externalities in residential location choices we need to know preferences for welfare analysis this paper estimates people s taste for living with own ethnic groups ethnic preferences using unique policy variation from the ethnic housing quotas in singapore my approach combines policy induced variation commonly used in reduced form settings with a non parametric identi cation strategy in a structural demand estimation framework a la berry levinsohn and pakes 1995 i nd that all groups have strong preferences to live with at least some other

trends in rankings of economics departments in the u s an update economics departments in the u s are ranked based on 1 the number of pages published in thirty six economics journals 2 publications in five of the top journals 3 output per faculty member and 4 an index of the concentration of research in a department evidence shows that the top twenty departments have generally retained their positions since the 1970s but rather large changes have occurred in departments ranked from 240 to 100 an economists hall of fame is developed listing the top fifty individual producers of research in the thirty six journal set and the top five journals

the internationalization of small and medium sized firms this paper contributes to the existing research by integrating the notions of organizational learning and entrepreneurial orientation into the body of international entrepreneurship our primary framework combines learning theory and the new venture theory of internationalization to study the extent to which small and medium sized companies engage in international activities we found that the firms international learning effort and entrepreneurial orientation are positively associated with internationalization intent whereas domestic learning effort is negatively related with internationalization intent overall our results suggest 1 that intensive knowledge renewal and exploitation regarding foreign markets and the internationalization process itself may increase internationalization by affecting the perceptions of opportunities offered by further international expansion and 2 that firms with an entrepreneurial mindset may be more likely to develop a long term substantial presence in the international arena compared to firms that are more reactive or conservative

network effects in public transit use evidence from a spatially autoregressive mode choice model for new york this article empirically tests for positive network effects in transit use by applying a spatial autoregressive logit mode choice model with 1997 98 work trip data from new york city positive network effects exist when people prefer to use transit together with other people as a result of social spill over although these network preferences should differ for each person because of statistical restrictions in the model individual network preferences cannot be obtained however it is possible to derive econometrically a measure of aggregate network preference this paper can be seen in the wider context of other recent work focusing on the analysis of spatial dependencies and network effects in travel

peers at work we study peer effects in the workplace specifically we investigate whether how and why the productivity of a worker depends on the productivity of coworkers in the same team using high frequency data on worker productivity from a large supermarket chain we find strong evidence of positive productiv ity spillovers from the introduction of highly productive personnel into a shift worker effort is positively related to the productivity of workers who see him but not workers who do not see him additionally workers respond more to the presence of coworkers with whom they frequently interact we conclude that social pressure can partially internalize free riding externalities that are built into many workplaces jel j24 l81 m54

peer effects and social networks in education this paper studies whether structural properties of friendship networks affect individual outcomes in education we first develop a model that shows that at the nash equilibrium the outcome of each individual embedded in a network is proportional to her katz bonacich centrality measure this measure takes into account both direct and indirect friends of each individual but puts less weight to her distant friends we then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed dataset of adolescent friendship networks we show that after controlling for observable individual characteristics and unobservable network specific factors the individual s position in a network as measured by her katz bonacich centrality is a key determinant of her level of activity a standard deviation increase in the katz bonacich centrality increases the pupil school performance by more than 7 percent of one standard deviation

crime and social interactions the high variance of crime rates across time and space is one of the oldest puzzles in the social sciences this variance appears too high to be explained by changes in the exogenous costs and benefits of crime we present a model where social interactions create enough covariance across individuals to explain the high cross city variance of crime rates this model provides an index of social interactions which suggests that the amount of social interactions is highest in petty crimes moderate in more serious crimes and almost negligible in murder and rape

do neighborhoods affect hours worked evidence from longitudinal data using a confidential version of the nlsy79 we estimate large effects of neighborhood social characteristics and job proximity on labor market activity a variety of neighborhood social characteristics are associated with less market work social characteristics have nonlinear effects with the greatest impact in the worst neighborhoods social characteristics are also more important for less educated workers exploiting the panel aspects of our data we find that estimates that do not account for neighborhood selection on the basis of time invariant and time varying unobserved individual characteristics substantially overstate the social effects of neighborhoods but understate the effects of job access

a survey of jel codes what do they mean and are they used consistently the use and prevalence of jel code categorization is wide in the field of economics but what do jel code classifications actually tell us and are they used with consistency by academics in the field utilizing a data set of articles published in the american economic review from 1990 to 2008 we investigate whether there is heterogeneity in jel codes assignments between authors and editors we find that there is a secondary goal of this paper is to survey overall thematic trends in jel code usage over the past four and a half decades one result is that jel category m business economics in particular appears to be thematically and spatially distinct from much of the rest of the published literature in the top general interest journals in the field

the high price of dematerialization a dynamic panel data analysis of material use and economic recession abstract dematerialization at the national level occurs almost exclusively during periods of economic recession or low growth while recession is not a sustainable strategy to curb environmental impact such periods may offer important insights on the possibilities of reducing material use economic recession research has focused on the interactions between macroeconomic and financial variables with little systematic research dedicated to uncovering how resource use develops during periods of recession using a dynamic panel model we investigate whether and to what extent material use in a sample of 150 economies between 1970 and 2010 was affected by recession and low growth recession occurred most frequently and in more than two thirds of all countries during the 1980s and the 1990s in the 2000s more than half of the recessions occurred during the financial crisis of 2008 periods of recession were significantly and negatively correlated with material use they tended to coincide with dematerialization material use decreased in recession years but the significant correlations with growth in material use became weaker as growth rates increased construction minerals and metals used to build stocks of manufactured capital reacted more strongly to economic fluctuations than the throughput dominated flows of biomass and fossil fuels we conclude that the systematic link between recession and dematerialization can become policy relevant if the mechanisms causing reductions in material use during these periods are identified

discrete choice with social interactions this paper provides an analysis of aggregate behavioural outcomes when individual utility exhibits social interaction effects we study generalized logistic models of individual choice which incorporate terms reflecting the desire of individuals to conform to the behaviour of others in an environment of noncooperative decisionmaking laws of large numbers are generated in such environments multiplicity of equilibria in these models which are equivalent to the existence of multiple self consistent means for average choice behaviour will exist when the social interactions exceed a particular threshold local stability of these multiple equilibria is also studied the properties of the noncooperative economy are contrasted with the properties of an economy in which a social planner determines the set of individual choices finally a likelihood function based on the theoretical model is given and conditions for the econometric identifiability of the model are established

optimal pricing for a multinomial logit choice model with network effects we consider a seller s problem of determining revenue maximizing prices for an assortment of products that exhibit network effects customers make purchase decisions according to a multinomial logit choice model modified to incorporate network effects so that the utility each individual customer gains from purchasing a particular product depends on the market s total consumption of that product in the setting of homogeneous products we show that if the network effect is comparatively weak then the optimal pricing decision of the seller is to set identical prices for all products however if the network effect is strong then the optimal pricing decision is to set the price of one product low and to set the prices of all other products to a single high value this boosts the sales of the single low price product in comparison to the sales of all other products we also obtain comparative statics results that describe how optimal prices and sales levels vary with a parameter that determines the strengt

binary choice under social interactions an empirical study with and without subjective data on expectations this paper examines two methods of modeling binary choice with social interactions models assuming homogeneous rational expectations and models using subjective data on expectations exploiting a unique survey conducted during the 1996 us presidential election that was designed to study voting behavior under social context we find that in various model specifications using subjective expectations consistently improves models goodness of fit and that subjective expectations are not rational as formulated by brock and durlauf specifically members characteristics are individually important in forming expectations we also include correlated effect in the rational expectation model this extension provides a remedy to the selection issues that often arise in social interaction models copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

risk aversion time preferences and out migration experimental evidence from ghana and indonesia abstract it has long been hypothesized that migrants and non migrants differ in their individual risk and time preferences due to a lack of reliable data on migrants preferences empirical evidence however is scarce therefore this paper has sought to advance research on preferences and migration decisions by using original household survey data from two developing countries that are both characterized by a longstanding tradition in regional migration in coastal communities in ghana and indonesia individual risk and time preferences have not only been elicited through survey questions but also through experimental tasks with real and relatively large monetary payoffs there is evidence that out migrants from both study regions are significantly less risk averse and have a lower time preference than non migrants overall the results indicate that the considered individual preferences are as important as employment status education or networks which have mainly been the focus of migration theories

ethnic capital and intergenerational mobility this paper analyzes the extent to which ethnic skill differentials are transmitted across generations i assume that ethnicity acts as an externality in the human capital accumulation process the skills of the next generation depend on parental inputs and on the quality of the ethnic environment in which parents make their investments or ethnic capital the empirical evidence reveals that the skills of today s generation depend not only on the skills of their parents but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parent s generation

games of social interactions with local and global externalities abstract in this paper we present a result on the existence of pure strategies nash equilibrium which covers a large class of games with local and global social interactions the result highlights common features of well known games analyzed in the literature

something to talk about social spillovers in movie consumption we exploit the randomness of weather and the relationship between weather and moviegoing to quantify social spillovers in movie consumption instrumenting for early viewership with plausibly exogenous weather shocks captured in lasso chosen instruments we find that shocks to opening weekend viewership are doubled over the following five weekends our estimated momentum arises almost exclusively at the local level and we find no evidence that it varies with either ex post movie quality or the precision of ex ante information about movie quality suggesting that the observed momentum is driven in part by a preference for shared experience and not only by social learning

a discrete choice model with social interactions with an application to high school teen behavior we develop an empirical discrete choice interaction model with a finite number of agents we characterize its equilibrium properties in particular the correspondence between interaction strength number of agents and the set of equilibria and propose to estimate the model by means of simulation methods in an empirical application we analyze the individual behavior of high school teenagers in almost 500 school classes from 70 schools in our baseline model endogenous social interaction effects are strong for behavior closely related to school truancy somewhat weaker for behavior partly related to school smoking cell phone ownership and moped ownership and absent for behavior far away from school asking parents permission for purchases intra gender interactions are generally much stronger than cross gender interactions in a model with school specific fixed effects social interaction effects are insignificant with the exception of intra gender interactions for truancy copyright c 2007 john wiley sons ltd

does selling state silver generate private gold neighbourhood impacts of state house sales this paper utilises two politically determined natural experiments affecting state provided social housing to examine the impact that housing tenure status has on neighbourhood outcomes from 1990 new zealand s national government sold a substantial number of state houses either to existing tenants home buys or to other purchasers vacant sales from 1999 the labour government ended home buys reduced vacant sales and increased acquisitions while vacant sales had no material effects on local outcomes a higher prevalence of home buys led to increased local house price appreciation despite demographic trends that would otherwise have led to falling relative house prices in those communities

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

social networks neighborhood effects and credit access evidence from rural guatemala we measure the extent to which social networks determine sources of credit from a survey of 465 households in western guatemala we estimate correlated contextual and endogenous effects of networks at the neighborhood church and village levels finding that church networks display endogenous effects in credit access we calculate an elasticity of social imitation esi indicating if the percentage of people accessing microfinance in a church network doubles the probability of an individual household accessing microfinance increases by 14 1 percent a magnitude similar to our estimated esis for televisions and cell phones within church and neighbor networks

on the internationalization process of firms a critical analysis even though international marketing has been challenged because of theoretical and methodological shortcomings very few researchers have actually attempted to analyze the weaknesses based on principles of theory evaluation in this article the author examines two types of models addressing the individual firm s internationalization process a theory evaluation is performed based on the explanation and the falsification criteria in order to improve the internationalization models some measures are proposed

a social interaction model with ordered choices abstract we introduce a social interaction model with ordered choices we provide a micro foundation for the econometric model based on an incomplete information network game and characterize the sufficient condition for the existence of a unique equilibrium of the game we discuss the identification of the model and propose to estimate the model by the nfxp and npl algorithms we conduct monte carlo simulations to investigate the finite sample performance of these two estimation methods

globalization of smaller firms field notes on processes smaller firms have played a pivotal role in the present decade of globalization reduced barriers to international trade and investment coupled with the advances in information technology have accorded opportunities for smaller firms employing fewer than 500 persons to emerge as multinational the focus of this exploratory paper is on the how of their globalization or internationalization information from field studies of seven firms three dutch and four american obtained by means of personal interviews with senior managers constitutes the primary qualitative data considering the convenient choice of the firms and the subjective nature of the recall data the paper without claiming to draw any inferences offers three initial propositions for further refinement expansion and empirical testing