estimates of the returns to quality and coauthorship in economic academia salaries of academic economists are studied to determine if individuals receive differential returns to publishing articles of varying quality and to coauthored versus single authored articles estimates based on detailed data and a flexible nonlinear least squares procedure indicate that substantial returns to quality exist and that an individual s return from a coauthored paper with n authors is approximately 1 n times that of a single authored paper

patterns of co authorship among economics departments in the usa given the steady increase in co authored papers in economics journals this paper reports a study of the patterns of co authorship between us universities and colleges a majority of institutions produce more co authored than single authored papers contacts with researchers from the same institution are still an important source of co authored papers even though slightly decreasing in frequency the determinants of co authorship outside the own institution are tested in a gravity model and it is found that distance and other geographical variables do not matter however the quality of co authors institutions measured by rankings of institutions has a significant impact on the number of co authored papers in top economics journals

mechanism design with possibilistic beliefs abstract we study mechanism design in non bayesian settings of incomplete information when the designer has no information about the players and the players have arbitrary heterogeneous first order and possibilistic beliefs about their opponents payoff types using such beliefs in auctions of a single good we define a revenue benchmark at least as high as the second highest valuation and sometimes much higher prove that it is not meaningfully achievable via traditional notions of implementation and prove that it is achievable via a notion of implementation based only on mutual belief of rationality

professional achievements and gender differences among academic economists i introduction while the academic labor market for economists attracts a good deal of attention among its participants work on the differences in remuneration for economic research and other professional characteristics between men and women in academic institutions has been limited this paper tests for gender differences using data on grants and grant applications from the national science foundation ault rutman and stevenson 1979 addressing issues of academic placement found that the highest rated institution at which an academic economist will be employed is the institution of first employment willis and pieper 1991 found that women who received doctorates in economics in the 1970s had a somewhat higher rate of placement at doctoral degree granting institutions than men but that there was no difference in the rank of the institutions for these placements lower tier institutions must offer promotions to attract candidates moore et al 1983 reported that the rank of the department at which one earned the doctorate is critically important in determining initial academic placement hamermesh johnson and weisbrod 1982 found that for those at prestigious departments increases in citations lead to salary increases but that the department s rank was not inversely related to salary in his review of work by sociologists youn 1988 reported that the prestige of an academic institution was positively related to the research productivity of its scientists there are two competing hypotheses that might explain this result better departments select better scientists achievement model or better departments foster greater productivity ascription model empirical efforts to distinguish between these hypotheses have been mixed the research on salary differentials in academia has generally found that there are significant gender differences that widen during the careers of men and women 1 barbezat 1991 the most recent evidence suggests that salary differentials in the academic community may have diminished somewhat since the 1960s but still remain weiler 1990 separated the influence of the department s rank on salary by treating it in a separate equation and found that standard formulations underestimate the degree of salary discrimination although important salary is not the only measure of achievement in academe promotion to a higher rank employment in key departments and the production of well placed articles all help determine an economist s influence in the profession but despite the dramatic increase in the percentage of women receiving the ph d during the past two decades the number of senior women at graduate institutions is still very low 2 to what extent does gender bias exist in economics departments as measured not only by salary but also by other achievements such as the likelihood of achieving a senior position or being employed by a top department is there a difference in the experiences of the younger cohorts compared to their more senior counterparts this paper attempts to answer these important questions by 1 taking into account the endogeneity of the variables that are usually treated as exogenous in models of salary determination and thereby broadening the characteristics that traditionally reflect discrimination and 2 using a new detailed data base developed from the national science foundation the results of this more complete model in which salary as well as other measures of professional achievement are explained show significant differences between men and women at the more senior level at the assistant professor level although the signs of the gender coefficients are consistent with a discrimination hypothesis the results are not statistically significant ii the model single equations using the techniques developed by oaxaca 1973 and blinder 1973 have long been used to estimate gender salary differentials in academia with productivity measures such as books and articles published administrative experience etc

obsolescence of knowledge and career publication profiles some evidence of differences among fields in costs of interrupted careers in recent years women have received about 45 percent of all baccalaureate degrees but only approximately 20 percent of all ph d s does this imply that academic careers as compared with careers of the wider market for college graduates are less conducive to dual career family objectives evidence suggesting the relative tradeoff of these objectives is shown by the fact that over the last thirty years the zero order correlation between average cohort fertility and the proportion of ph d recipients who are women is 0 939 a female recipient of a doctorate is twice as likely as a male recipient to have specialized in the humanities and only one third as likely to have specialized in a physical science field furthermore of those who receive a doctorate in physical science a male is 60 percent more likely than a female to pursue research as a primary work activity in the humanities on the other hand a woman is at least as likely as a man to have research as an initial postdoctoral work activity obviously many factors affect opportunities and resultant decisions to enter particular careers and to select specific occupational specialties this study considers only onethe rate of obsolescence or depreciation of knowledge as reflected in the age profile of cited works this measure of the obsolescence of knowledge refers to the rate of decay in the relative frequency at which citations are made to a particular vintage of research communications as the communications age in other words the usefulness of older published research papers as an input to current research depreciates over time the rate at which this depreciation occurs is interpreted as measuring the durability of a professor s accumulated stock of knowledge evidence presented in section ii indicates that the durability of knowledge varies considerably from discipline to discipline this information raises a number of questions concerning how the durability of knowledge influences career decisions one influence considered here is that of a temporary career interruption for example if a woman experiences a break in her academic career such as for the purpose of raising children she will incur an opportunity cost in the sense that her research knowledge will to some extent become obsolete consequently her accumulated stock of knowledge will decline relative to those professors who have continuous careers the relative cost imposed on a woman who pursues dual family career objectives is higher the less durable the jobrelated knowledge this difference in relative costs is expected to alter career incentives the results presented here suggest that women who pursue academic careers have responded to these incentives before discussing the evidence on female careers i consider a more general model in which a professor is assumed to have a continuous career profile this model which is more appropriately viewed as a male model of investment behavior is used to analyze how the durability of a professor s knowledge affects his research productivity over a career interestingly the evidence suggests that a professor s response to less durable knowledge is not to compact all learning early in his career but rather to smooth learning over the career perhaps the most assistant professor arizona state university i would like to thank an anonymous referee and many friends for helpful comments on earlier drafts i am especially indebted to finis welch for valuable suggestions throughout the development of this paper the views expressed are my own and i am responsible for any possible errors

does medical malpractice law improve health care quality we assess the potential for medical liability forces to deter medical errors and improve health care treatment quality identifying liability s influence by drawing on variations in the manner by which states formulate the negligence standard facing physicians using hospital discharge records from the national hospital discharge survey and clinically validated quality metrics inspired by the agency for health care research and quality we find evidence suggesting that treatment quality may improve upon reforms that expect physicians to adhere to higher quality clinical standards we do not find evidence however suggesting that treatment quality may deteriorate following reforms to liability standards that arguably condone the delivery of lower quality care similarly we do not find evidence of deterioration in health care quality following remedy focused liability reforms such as caps on non economic damages awards

an experimental study of serial and average cost pricing mechanisms abstract this paper reports the first experimental study of the serial and the average cost pricing mechanisms under five different treatments a complete information treatment and four treatments designed to simulate distributed systems with extremely limited information synchronous and asynchronous moves although the proportion of nash equilibrium play under both mechanisms is statistically indistinguishable under complete information the serial mechanism performs robustly better than the average cost pricing mechanism in distributed systems both in terms of the proportion of equilibrium play and system efficiency

determinants of scholarly productivity among male and female economists i introduction the purpose of this article is to test a model of the determinants of articles produced by male and female academics of particular interest is how article production is influenced by coauthorship institutional research orientation and gender several works have identified and demonstrated the trend toward coauthorship in economics and in other disciplines using data from the journal of economic literature heck and zaleski 1991 demonstrated that the incidence of coauthorship has increased from about 15 of total articles in 1969 to about 35 in 1989 durden and perri 1995 report that as of 1992 the proportion coauthored had grown to more than 38 hudson 1996 finds that by 1993 coauthorship rates in the journal of political economy and american economic review were 39 6 and 54 9 respectively as compared to rates of 6 and 8 in 1950 why do economists coauthor rational interest theory suggests that if scholars collaborate then there must be a utility enhancing result other things equal this could be in the form of higher salaries and increased probabilities of promotion greater access to funded research greater mobility in job markets and the like which might result if collaboration significantly increases the overall production of published papers studies by mcdowell and melvin 1983 barnett et al 1988 and piette and ross 1992 suggest that coauthorship among scholars may increase article production through the division of labor made necessary by increased complexity in the subject matter and by the need to saturate markets to increase the probability of getting papers accepted for publication laband and tollison 2000 find evidence that increasing rates of coauthorship result from the greater quantitative content of articles greater requirement for the use of sophisticated econometric techniques and the fact that cooperation is cheaper in time and other resources as compared to learning what is necessary to publish in another field or discipline hamermesh and oster 2002 discuss nonpecuniary purely consumption benefits such as the pleasure obtained from cooperation and suggest that higher levels of prestige among colleagues may also be relevant although many reasons for cooperation have been developed not much has been done to determine whether the rate of coauthorship among scholars actually affects total article production using cross section data hansen et al 1978 and graves et al 1982 estimate productivity models but coauthorship is not included in either study mcdowell and smith 1992 include a coauthorship variable but find that it neither increases nor decreases article production when articles are discounted by the number of authors hollis 2001 uses panel data to examine the relationship between coauthorship and research productivity he finds that coauthorship leads to better longer and more frequent publications when publications are discounted by the number of authors however coauthorship appears negatively related to research output mcdowell and smith s 1992 and hollis s 2001 results are very counterintuitive because a viable reason for coauthorship is to increase efficiency as shown in durden and perri 1995 durden and perri 1995 estimate a time series model finding that coauthorship is highly instrumental in determining article productivity as far as we know the only study by economists that specifically analyzes the effect of institutional research orientation on publishing output is that by graves et al 1982 using data from 240 schools they estimate total pages published per faculty member in the top 24 economics journals between 1974 78 using a series of independent variables to proxy influences that affect publication they find that secretaries per faculty member helps and teaching load hinders production the effects of ph d status teaching assistance and faculty student ratios are mixed depending on specification of the model

two to tango gender differences in the decisions to publish and coauthor i introduction there is a well developed mythology regarding the presence of old boy networks and their importance in explaining gender differences in labor market outcomes as articulated by saloner 1985 nonetheless aside from works such as simon and warner 1992 there is relatively little empirical evidence examining the impact of networks on market outcomes how these effects differ by gender and whether gender differences in network access change over time as women become more well represented in a profession the paucity of empirical evidence arises in part from the difficulty of measuring the presence of such networks prior work including that of saint paul 2001 and erickson and jacoby 2003 has found evidence that networks facilitate the adoption of team oriented work practices and information sharing that increase average worker productivity in management and professional jobs on the other hand studies such as that by marmaros and sacerdote 2002 have also found that women have less access to networks than their male counterparts in both private and public sector jobs which has been shown to yield gender differences in job placement and other labor market outcomes this article considers how gender differences in networks are manifested in a specific male dominated profession i e academic economists and in a specific work related outcome i e the decision to coauthor articles in which access to networks is likely to be important the analysis uses uniquely detailed individual and job level data for phd economists included in nearly four decades of american economic association aea membership to examine the role of networks on the joint decision to publish and coauthor the unique matching process of phd economists between academic and nonacademic jobs and within the hierarchy of academic departments along with the relative ease of observing joint research provide a rare opportunity to distinguish differential network access and measure joint production the results demonstrate the importance of networks in the production of research output and that new female entrants into a male dominated profession do not have equal access to these professional networks the results also provide evidence that women are able to plug into networks over time as the profession becomes more gender representative our study contributes to the literature on the role of networks in the labor market in several ways first the profession of academic economist is well suited to this study because it is made up of workers who produce a relatively homogenous output i e scholarly journal articles and that share a common set of job related tasks i e teaching research and service second the incidence of coauthorship is an observable outcome measure of network utilization a phenomenon inherently difficult to measure in the tradition of the business productivity literature as found in sabel 1993 third there is extensive evidence in the literature that journal publications are positively linked to academic salaries as found in siegfried and white 1973 and sauer 1988 that the propensity to coauthor is positively associated with publication output as in as found in durden and perri 1995 and maske et al 2003 that there are gender differences in tendencies to coauthor as shown by ferber and teiman 1980 and mcdowell and smith 1992 and that there are gender differences in professional outcomes such as publications salary and promotion as seen in mcdowell 1982 hansen et al 1978 formby et al 1993 and broder 1993 cumulatively these studies suggest that understanding the determinants of coauthorship is important for evaluating the sources and the extent of gender inequity in the profession prior work on coauthorship behavior has analyzed patterns over time and across disciplines several studies including hudson 1996 mcdowell and melvin 1983 and barnett et al

learning dynamics for mechanism design an experimental comparison of public goods mechanisms in a repeated interaction public goods economy incomplete information and dynamic behavior may affect the realized outcomes of mechanisms known to be efficient in a complete information oneshot game an experimental test of five public goods mechanisms indicates that subjects with private information appear to best respond to recent observations this provides predictions about which mechanisms will generate convergence to their efficient equilibrium allocations these predictions match the experimental result that globally stable efficient mechanisms realize the highest efficiency in practice the simplicity of the suggested best response model makes it useful in predicting stability of mechanisms not yet tested

independent private value auctions bidder behaviour in first second and third price auctions with varying numbers of bidders the symmetric equilibrium of third price auctions is characterized it makes a number of contrasting predictions relative to firms and second price auctions bids exceed private values the marginal effects on bids of an increase in private values is greater than one increasing numbers of bidders reduces bids and risk aversion requires bidding below the risk neutral nash equilibrium in the experiment bidders do not always satisfy the point predictions of the theory however the game theoretic models correctly anticipate at least directionally the important effects of the price rule changes copyright 1993 by royal economic society

exploring the scope of neurometrically informed mechanism design a basic goal in mechanism design is to construct mechanisms that simultaneously satisfy efficiency voluntary participation and dominant strategy incentive compatibility previous work has shown that this is impossible unless the agents and planner have sufficient information about each other and common knowledge these results have remained largely theoretical because the required information is generally not available in practical applications however recent work has shown that these limitations can be overcome in simple settings using neurometric technologies that provide noisy signals of subjects preferences that can be used in the mechanism design problem here we build on this work by carrying out two new experiments designed to test the extent to which these neurometrically informed mechanisms nims can be applied to more complicated and realistic environments we find robustness to large type and action space and to the degrees of loss and risk aversion observed in most of our sample

secure implementation experiments do strategy proof mechanisms really work strategy proofness requiring that truth telling is a dominant strategy is a standard concept used in social choice theory saijo et al 2003 argue that this concept has serious drawbacks in particular announcing one s true preference may not be a unique dominant strategy and almost all strategy proof mechanisms have a continuum of nash equilibria for only a subset of strategy proof mechanisms do the set of nash equilibria and the set of dominant strategy equilibria coincide for example this double coincidence occurs in the groves mechanism when preferences are single peaked we report experiments using two strategy proof mechanisms where one of them has a large number of nash equilibria but the other has a unique nash equilibrium we found clear differences in the rate of dominant strategy play between the two

a model and some evidence concerning the influence of discrimination on wages the observed wage gap between men and women is widely attributed to discrimination in the workplace yet within the context of the standard neoclassical framework discrimination is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition this paper presents a modified neoclassical model which supports equilibrium wage differentials and which has testable implications the paper also surmounts a difficulty that has plagued many earlier assessments separating prejudice from other explanations of the wage gap by directing attention away from wages to other implied effects of discrimination our model offers cleaner tests of the impact of prejudice in labor markets results of such tests are reported

5 information impact and allocation rules in auctions with affiliated private values a laboratory study in affiliated private value auctions each bidder has perfect information regarding his her own value for the object at auction but higher values of the item for one bidder make higher values for other bidders more likely we report on a series of experiments examining three key implications of these auctions i in a first price auction public information about rivals values increases expected revenue ii an english auction increases expected revenue compared to a first price auction and iii a second price auction is isomorphic to an english auction in examining these issues we compare predictions of some ad hoc bidding models with nash equilibrium predictions in the first price auction experiments nash equilibrium bidding theory organizes the data better than either of two ad hoc bidding models public information about others valuations does increase average revenue but the increase in revenue is smaller and less reliable than predicted under risk neutral nash equilibrium bidding lower average revenue might be attributed to risk aversion while the high variability is attributed to a sizable frequency of individual bidding errors relative to the theory bidding theory precisely organizes english auction outcomes after a brief initial learning period the dominant strategy equilibrium does not organize second price auctions nearly as well as market prices persistently exceed predicted prices the difference between english and second price outcomes is attributed to effects of different information flows inherent in the structure of the two institutions on eliminating bidding errors revenue impacts of these two institutions relative to a first price auction are examined in light of observed bidding patterns

the effect of gender sorting on propensity to coauthor implications for academic promotion a cohort sample of ph d economists indicates a significant propensity for researchers to select coauthors of the same sex this gender sorting contributes to lower article production for women further we find evidence of bias in academic promotion when single authored and coauthored articles carry the same weight in promotion and salary decisions the evidence explains in part why women academics wait longer for promotion and are not as likely to be promoted as men among the effects of gender sorting is self selection of women into larger departments where they are more likely to find colleagues of the same sex

when does learning in games generate convergence to nash equilibria the role of supermodularity in an experimental setting this study clarifies the conditions under which learning in games produces convergence to nash equilibria in practice previous work has identified theoretical conditions under which various stylized learning processes achieve convergence one technical condition is supermodularity which is closely related to the more familiar concept of strategic complementarities we experimentally investigate the role of supermodularity in achieving convergence through learning using a game from the literature on solutions to externalities we systematically vary a free parameter below close to at and beyond the threshold of supermodularity to assess its effects on convergence we find that supermodular and near supermodular games converge significantly better than those far below the threshold from a little below the threshold to the threshold the improvement is statistically insignificant within the class of supermodular games increasing the parameter far beyond the threshold does not significantly improve convergence simulation shows that while most experimental results persist in the long run some become more pronounced

scholarships citations and salaries economic rewards in economics while substantial attention has been paid to the determinants of academics earnings 5 7 8 14 15 this literature has by implication suggested that the mere fact of having spent more time in the profession and the publication of more scholarly articles and books are the major determinants of salary differences our purpose here is to introduce a new determinant the quality of one s scholarly research measured by the frequency of references to that work as an additional objective measure of productivity we expect that this proxy for the extent of a scholar s influence on the work of other researchers is rewarded by the market in addition to giving a more complete picture of the determination of salaries in academic labor markets our approach should be useful in establishing a better framework for the evaluation of issues of discrimination in such markets than has been presented before 2 9

unraveling the academic productivity of economists the opportunity costs of teaching and service this study investigates the relationships among research productivity teaching and service on the basis of individual specific information involving approximately 715 academic economists responding to an online survey these economists provided information regarding their teaching and service commitments as well as personal and institutional information the publication record of each respondent was then obtained from econlit together these data constitute a rich field for the systematic study of research productivity results of a tobit analysis reveal much about the nature of research productivity underscoring for instance the importance of gender coauthorship presen tations at conferences and peers who publish among the more important findings from this analysis is that both teaching and service commitments have a significantly negative impact on the research productivity of academic economists these relations hold across types of academic employer though to varying degrees taken together the results provide interesting insights into the roles of academic scholars teachers and colleagues

gender and promotion in the economics profession the authors use unique panel data on american economic association members to test for gender differences in promotion in a profession with a well defined promotion and job hierarchy and in which men and women exhibit similar labor market attachment the results suggest that over the period from the 1960s through the early 1980s female economists had lower levels of professional attainment and career advancement than did their male colleagues with similar attributes these gender differences remain in evidence despite controls for unobserved heterogeneity and self selection between academic and non academic jobs there is evidence however that promotion prospects for female economists significantly improved during the 1980s not only at all ranks but also within both ph d granting institutions and non ph d granting institutions in fact the results reveal no unexplained gender specific differences in promotion by the end of the 1980s

repeated insurance contracts and learning this article considers a repeated insurance model with incomplete information in which the insurer and the consumer both learn over time about the unknown risk category of the consumer care choices by young consumers affect the informational value of the accident history under an optimal scheme of long term insurance contracts young consumers will always be subsidized by old consumers and consumers who are reassessed as low risk types are always subsidizers i e reverse experience ratings we compare this optimal scheme with the set of contracts that would emerge in a competitive market if only short term contracting were possible these sequentially competitive contracts can lead to over investment in care by both young and old consumers relative to the optimum in contrast to the underinvestment problem associated with moral hazard in insurance

experience rating of unemployment insurance and the incidence of unemployment among workers who are laid off from their previous jobs more than 70 percent collect benefit payments from the unemployment insurance ui system these benefits are widely asserted to reduce the rate at which unemployed individuals find new jobs so that measured unemployment is increased by unemployment insurance a large body of empirical evidence now exists that shows this effect on the duration of unemployment spells 2 far less attention both in policy debate and in research has been paid to the fact that the unemployment insurance system encourages persons to become unemployed in this paper i focus on the empirical structure and the effects of these incentives the results show that unem

outside offers and the gender pay gap empirical evidence from the uk academic labour market using a unique data source on academic economist labour market experiences we explore gender pay and promotions in addition to earnings and productivity measures we have information on outside offers and perceptions of discrimination we find both a gender promotions gap and a within rank gender pay gap a driving factor may be outside offers men receive more outside offers than women of comparable characteristics and gain higher pay increases in response this may arise due to discrimination we find that perceptions of discrimination and also outside job applications correlate with an individual receiving earnings below that expected given their characteristics

pricing in microinsurance markets summary microinsurance markets have exhibited strong growth rates in recent years great parts of the industry are however challenged by fundamental issues of providing insurance products one of the most significant of which is pricing risk in this paper we provide a nontechnical analysis of insurance pricing problems and a review of the set of opportunities that can address some of the specific pricing constraints in microinsurance markets a key contribution of this paper is the investigation of conventional techniques as potential solutions for improving the pricing of insurance risk in microinsurance markets

tools or toys the impact of high technology on scholarly productivity i introduction and motivation in the past several decades investment that makes communication easier has increased rapidly in the united states and other developed economies since the mid 1980s a combination of technical change and deregulation has also reduced long distance telephone rates in the united states by 50 reported by allen 1995 pitney bowes 1997 reported that fax usage increased by 20 between 1996 and 1997 alone and electronic mail e mail unknown before 1985 is ubiquitous today popular discussion of a wide range of additional examples of rapidly declining prices and explosive growth of the use of telecommunications is provided by cairncross 1997 attempts to measure the impact on aggregate total factor and labor productivity of these supposedly productivity enhancing investments in broad reaching technical improvements such as computing machinery and communications equipment have not met with great success as in morrison 1997 but see greenan and mairesse 1996 1 an alternative to measuring effects on the broader economy is to measure the impact of generalized technical change on productivity in specific activities observed at the micro level an earlier literature including griliches 1958 and trajtenberg 1989 has clearly traced the effect of specific innovations in raising productivity in specific sectors of the economy this article expands on that tradition by trying to identify the effect of the recent broad revolution in communications on one activity scholarly publishing we propose studying scholarly publishing before and after technical change greatly lowered communication costs we examine in particular whether increasing ease of communication has altered scholars choices about their methods of production and whether those methods yielded changes in the productivity of scholarly activity that are consistent with increasing access to new communications technologies 2 in section ii we discuss a model of the production process in scholarly writing in relation to the cost of communications in section iii we describe the unique data set we assembled to examine the relation between technical change and scholarly productivity section iv presents the results of using these data to test the hypotheses that we develop and section v compares coauthored to solo authored studies and provides a suggestion for the increased prevalence of the former section vi offers a consistent explanation for most of the results ii a model of scholarly production the example that we use in this study of the impact of technology is the nature and outcomes of the choices of co workers by authors of scholarly publications in economics the importance of team research has been stressed by a number of authors studying the economics of innovation including dasgupta 1988 who also presents a research summary so that our specific example has broader implications for the study of technical change has the decline in the cost of communication altered scholars choices in a way consistent with these technologies increasing scholarly productivity in examining scholarly productivity we focus on research output in particular we view scholars as having three production choices 1 work solo s 2 work with close by coauthor s c or 3 work with distant coauthor s d in the model in this section the scholar is assumed to choose a production technology that maximizes his or her scholarly productivity measured as the quality of the article produced in section vi we a dopt an alternative characterization of a scholar s choices we assume that the scholar has a wide range of potential research activities to choose among and has perfect knowledge of the productivity p valued in dollars of all potential matches s c sub i member of c and d sub i member of d 3 each match generates one solo equivalent article per period

implementation via approval mechanisms abstract we focus on the single peaked domain and study the class of generalized approval mechanisms g a m s first players simultaneously select subsets of the outcome space and scores are assigned to each alternative and then a given quantile of the induced score distribution is implemented our main finding is that essentially for every nash implementable welfare optimum including the condorcet winner alternative there exists a gam that nash implements it importantly the gam that nash implements the condorcet winner alternative is the first simple simultaneous game with this feature in the literature

experiments with the pivot process for providing public goods interest in demand revealing mechanisms for providing public goods has both waned and then renewed over the past two decades the possibility of using such mechanisms in different venues than originally anticipated sparked the research reported here the specific motivation for this paper is to conduct a series of simple direct tests of one version of the class of mechanisms failure of demand revelation was much more expensive than we had expected even when compared to previous research with related mechanisms the reason for this remains an open question

gender and promotions evidence from academic economists in france the promotion system for french academic economists provides an interesting environment to examine the promotion gap between men and women promotions occur through national competitions for which we have information both on candidates and on those eligible to be candidates thus we can examine the two stages of the process application and success women are less likely to seek promotion and this accounts for up to 76 percent of the promotion gap being a woman also reduces the probability of promotion conditional on applying although the gender difference is not statistically significant our results highlight the importance of the decision to apply

life cycle productivity in academic research evidence from cumulative publication histories of academic economists casual observation suggests that the temporal pattern of productivity varies dramatically across individuals particularly in risky endeavors such as a research career in academia some individuals remain productive researchers throughout their career others who show early promise become deadwood before their time some authors produce papers like a well oiled machine while others publish at a highly erratic rate opposing this is a widely held view that there is a common life cycle component underlying individual productivity the aging process itself is thought to lead to the initial rise and eventual decline of creative productivity in addition human capital models typically imply that investment in skills will decline with age 7 both of these ideas suggest that output will be hump shaped over the life cycle econometric studies of life cycle productivity have addressed this with regressions which are quadratic functions of age or experience 1 5 the quadratic conveniently delivers the sought after hump shaped pattern in productivity there are conceptual problems with the quadratic however it implies a symmetric output path centered on its peak which is inappropriate if productivity peaks early in the career but remains significant thereafter in addition data on publishing productivity is heavily affected by the zeros problem the most common number of publications for an active professor in any given year is zero this requires an estimation procedure designed to accommodate a high probability mass at zero levin and stephan 5 address this problem with the tobit regression the tobit is a truncated regression model where in this context publications are distributed as a truncated normal random variable if a vector combination of attributes and coefficients exceeds a threshold level and are zero other

malpractice risk and medical treatment selection abstract we study how legal and financial incentives affect medical decisions using patient level data from italy we identify the effect of a change in medical liability pressure by exploiting the geographical distribution of hospitals across court districts where some districts increase the predictability of expected damages per injury while others do not using a difference in differences identification strategy we show that as certainty of compensation increases c sections increase by 6 5 percentage points there is no statistically significant effect on secondary health outcomes of either mothers or newborns but the increase is higher for low risk than high risk mothers the increase is driven by hospitals that have lower quality are governed by inefficient court districts face lower expected damages and are paid more per c section

willful blindness the inefficient reward structure in academic research this article examines how economics departments judge research articles and assign credit to authors it begins with a demonstration that only strictly prorated author credit induces researchers to choose e cient sized teams nevertheless survey evidence reveals that most economics departments only partially prorate authorship credit implying excessive coauthorship indeed a half century increase in coauthorship may be better explained by incomplete proration than by any increased specialization among authors a possible explanation for the reliance on incomplete proration is the self interest of economists who are more likely to engage coauthorship full professors the self interest of senior faculty may also explain the relatively small role given to citations in senior promotions a rational response by economists to the under proration of author credit is to engage in false authorship although false authorship is of dubious ethical status it may have the perverse impact of improving the e ciency of team production grossly excessive coauthorship where little attention is paid to most authors listed on a paper as found in some other academic disciplines may be the path down which economics is headed if the reward structure is not altered jel a14 o30 i23

secure implementation in allotment economies an allocation rule is securely implementable if it is strategy proof and has no bad nash equilibrium in its associated direct revelation game saijo t sjostrom t yamato t 2007 secure implementation theoretical econ 2 203 229 original work published in rieti discussion paper 03 e 019 2003 we study this implementability notion in allotment economies with single peaked preferences sprumont y 1991 the division problem with single peaked preferences a characterization of the uniform allocation rule econometrica 59 509 519 the equal division rule and priority rules are characterized on the basis of secure implementability which underlines a strong trade off between efficiency and symmetry though the uniform rule is not securely implementable we show that in its direct revelation game any bad nash equilibrium is blocked by a credible coalitional deviation and any good nash equilibrium is never blocked thus the impossibility of securely implementing the uniform rule can be resolved by allowing pre play communication among players

does regulation of physicians reduce health care spending the medical community argues that physician fear of legal liability increases health care spending theoretically though the effect could be positive or negative and empirical evidence has supported both cases previous studies however have ignored the fact that physicians face risk from industry oversight groups like state level medical licensing boards in addition to civil litigation risk this article addresses this omission by incorporating previously unused data on punishments by oversight groups against physicians known as adverse actions along with malpractice payments data to study state level health care spending my analysis suggests that contrary to conventional wisdom spending does not rise in response to increased risk an increase in adverse actions of 16 the year to year average is associated with statistically significant annual decreases in state spending on hospital care of approximately 22 million and on prescription drugs of nearly 10 million malpractice payments are estimated to have smaller statistically insignificant effects

salary differentials by sex in the academic labor market this paper examines faculty time allocation decisions that are fundamental to the functioning of a university a random utility approach yields a grouped data multinomial logit model and predicts that time allocation decisions depend systematically on

women in the economics profession this article discusses evidence from recent literature on gender literature on gender differences among ph d economists it finds many gender similarities in accomplishments including undergraduate grades publication rates ceteris paribus and labor market commitment it finds no evidence of disadvantages for women in admissions to ph d programs or in nonacademic salaries yet gender differences remain ceteris paribus in gre scores attrition from ph d programs non tenure track academic jobs academic salaries and academic promotion rates the paper suggests that trends toward increasing percentage of females may be peaking particularly given recent drops in female undergraduate economics majors