economics of a bottleneck abstract drawing on vickrey amer econ rev 59 251 261 1969 and subsequent literature this paper provides a thorough economic analysis of the simplest bottleneck model of road congestion with peak load demand in the morning rush hour a fixed number of identical individuals one per car must travel from home to work between which is a bottleneck of given capacity the costs of travel include queuing time and schedule delay time early or late for work the frequency distribution of departure times adjusts so that in equilibrium all individuals have the same travel costs the paper extends the previous literature by examining a coarse toll and solving for optimal capacities the application of congestion tolls can generate efficiency gains by altering the frequency distribution of departure times previous estimates of the efficiency gains from congestion tolling are likely to be substantially downward biased because they have ignored this effect

political holes in the economy the business network of partisan firms in hungary this article redirects attention from the question of how business ties have an impact on politics to the question of how political ties have an impact on business specifically do divisions within the field of politics become divisions in the field of business networks to study co evolution of political and economic fields we conducted a historical network analysis of the relationship between firm to party ties and firm to firm ties in the hungarian economy we constructed a dataset of all senior managers and boards of directors of 1 696 corporations and the complete set of all political officeholders from 1987 to 2001 findings from our field interviews and dyadic logistic regression models demonstrate that director interlocks depend to a significant extent on political affiliations although the political and economic fields have been institutionally separated firms and parties have become organizationally entangled firms of either left or right political affiliation exhibit a preference for par

indirect effects of an aid program how do cash transfers affect ineligibles consumption cash transfers to eligible households indirectly increase the consumption of ineligible households living in the same villages this effect operates through insurance and credit markets ineligible households benefit from the transfers by receiving more gifts and loans and by reducing their savings thus the transfers benefit the local economy at large looking only at the effect on the treated underestimates the impact one should analyze the effects of this class of programs on the entire local economy rather than on the treated only and use a village level randomization rather than selecting treatment and control subjects from the same community

central bank transparency and cross border banking abstract we analyze the effect of central bank transparency on cross border bank activities based on a panel gravity model for cross border bank claims for 21 home and 47 destination countries from 1998 to 2010 we find strong empirical evidence that a rise in central bank transparency in the destination country on average increases cross border claims using interaction models we find that the positive effect of central bank transparency on cross border claims is only significant if the central bank is politically independent and operates in a stable economic environment central bank transparency and credibility are thus considered complements by banks investing abroad

social networks and technology adoption in northern mozambique despite their potentially strong impact on poverty agricultural innovations are often adopted slowly using a unique household dataset on sunflower adoption in mozambique we analyse whether and how individual adoption decisions depend upon the choices of others in the same social networks since farmers anticipate that they will share information with others we expect farmers to be more likely to adopt when they know many other adopters dynamic considerations however suggest that farmers who know many adopters might strategically delay adoption to free ride on the information gathered by others we present empirical evidence that shows that the relationship between the probability of adoption and the number of known adopters is shaped as an inverse u in line with information sharing the network effect is stronger for farmers who report discussing agriculture with others the data contains information which is needed to ameliorate the identification issues that commonly arise in this context in particular social networks are precisely identified and in addition we can control for village heterogeneity and endogenous group formation

a simple auctioneerless mechanism with walrasian properties abstract a simple mechanism for reallocating holdings is described in which no auctioneer is required outcomes are determined solely from traders actions and without any requirement that the mechanism be in equilibrium the mechanism is shown to exactly duplicate the performance of the walrasian auctioneer both in its equilibria and in its disequilibrium path if individuals are price takers and if the number of individuals is large to approximately duplicate the auctioneer s performance even when individuals behave strategically each taking account of his own influence on prices

urban poverty and juvenile crime evidence from a randomized housing mobility experiment this paper uses data from a randomized housing mobility experiment to study the effects of relocating families from high to low poverty neighborhoods on juvenile crime outcome measures come from juvenile arrest records taken from government administrative data our e ndings seem to suggest that providing families with the opportunity to move to lower poverty neighborhoods reduces violent criminal behavior by teens

family welfare cultures strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fuelled a long standing debate over whether welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation some claim a causal relationship in welfare receipt across generations has created a culture in which welfare use reinforces itself through the family others argue the determinants of poverty or poor health are correlated across generations so that children s welfare participation is associated with but not caused by parental welfare receipt however there is little empirical evidence to sort out these claims in this paper we investigate the existence and importance of family welfare cultures in the context of norway s disability insurance di system to overcome the challenge of correlated unobservables across generations we take advantage of random assignment of judges to di applicants whose cases are initially denied some appeal judges are systematically more lenient which leads to random variation in the probability a parent will be allowed di using this exogenous variation we find strong evidence that welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation when a parent is allowed di their adult child s participation over the next five years increases by 6 percentage points this effect grows over time rising to 12 percentage points after ten years while these findings are specific to our setting they serve to highlight that welfare reforms can have long lasting effects on program participation since any original effect on the current generation could be reinforced by changing the participation behavior of their children as well the detailed nature of our data allows us to compare the intergenerational transmission with spillover effects in other networks and to explore mechanisms our findings point to a special link between parents and their children with little impact due to close neighbors di participation we find suggestive evidence that what may change as a result of a parent being allowed di is their children s beliefs about the efficacy of trying to get on to the di program or their attitudes about di participation and its stigma

katrina s children evidence on the structure of peer effects from hurricane evacuees in 2005 hurricanes katrina and rita forced many children to relocate across the southeast while schools quickly enrolled evacuees receiving families worried about the impact of evacuees on non evacuee students data from houston and louisiana show that on average the influx of evacuees moderately reduced elementary math test scores in houston we reject linear in means models of peer effects and find evidence of a highly non linear but monotonic model student achievement improves with high ability and worsens with low ability peers moreover exposure to undisciplined evacuees increased native absenteeism and disciplinary problems supporting a bad apple model in behavior

the conditional nature of embeddedness a study of borrowing by large u s firms 1973 1994 economic and organizational sociologists have increasingly demonstrated that the actions of individuals and firms are affected by the social networks within which they are embedded in recent years scholars have begun to recognize that the effects of these social networks may vary across populations or types of relations this article examines the extent to which the effects of interfirm networks on the behavior of firms are historically contingent focusing on the level of debt financing among approximately 140 large u s corporations over a 22 year period the authors show that the extent to which the firms use of debt was influenced by those with which they were tied through director interlocks declined over time the authors argue that this decline in the network effect reflected a shift in the institutional environment within which the firms operated and that it was driven by three processes the professionalization of the finance function within the firm the internalization of financial decision

how does working in a finance profession affect mortgage delinquency abstract this paper uses a dataset from a leading american subprime lender which contains detailed information on borrower and loan characteristics we find that financial professionals are less likely to become delinquent this effect cannot be explained by borrower characteristics such as income education loan terms property characteristics geographic effects or strategic default we also find variation in the effect of working in a financial profession across borrowers of different ages and income levels we discuss explanations for these results

social interaction effects in disability pension participation evidence from plant downsizing we estimate the magnitude of social interaction effects in disability pension participation among older workers in norway the problem of omitted variable bias is addressed using the exposure of an individual s neighbors to plant downsizing events as an instrument for the disability entry rate among the individual s previously employed neighbors our instrumental variable iv estimates suggest that an increase of one percentage point in the participation rate of previously employed neighbors increased the subsequent four year entry rate of older workers by about 0 4 percentage points numerous robustness and specification tests appear to support the validity of the identifying assumption in our iv strategy

regional institutional development political connections and entrepreneurial performance in china s transition economy while previous research emphasizes the role of political connections in facilitating entrepreneurial performance during china s early reform period 1978 1999 this study argues that regional institutions were increasingly conducive to entrepreneurial activities and thus also played a key role in china s entrepreneurial success during that period the purpose of this study is twofold first it aims to demonstrate how regional institutional development facilitated entrepreneurial performance in china second it aims to understand how formal institutional development among chinese regions affected the role of political connections using a two level hierarchical dataset on chinese private enterprises this study finds that not only legal protection of property rights but also the development of market systems mattered for entrepreneurial performance in addition it shows that political connections played a diminishing role during regional institutional development in china

defense against recession u s business mobilization 1950 19701 the unexpected investment decisions of companies during recessions often frustrate commentators and policy makers who view the economy from the top down companies may act against immediate market signals during recessions because of uncertainties about strategy and the future direction of the economy a mesolevel sociological model of how firms interpret and respond to economic conditions in uncertain times improves understanding of firms variable responses to recessions which cumulatively shape macroeconomic trajectories examining firm level employment during four recessions from 1950 to 1970 the author generates results from dynamic panel models to show that firms set their employment levels against profits and market share and in alignment with peers and political affiliations firms manage uncertainty by imitating peers but also by endeavoring to construct their environment collectively through business associations this article s counterintuitive economic findings and the evidence of social and

the effect of school choice on participants evidence from randomized lotteries school choice has become an increasingly prominent strategy for enhancing academic achievement to evaluate the impact on participants we exploit randomized lotteries that determine high school admission in the chicago public schools compared to those students who lose lotteries students who win attend high schools that are better in a number of dimensions including peer achievement and attainment levels nonetheless we find little evidence that winning a lottery provides any systematic benefit across a wide variety of traditional academic measures lottery winners do however experience improvements on a subset of nontraditional outcome measures such as self reported disciplinary incidents and arrest rates

moving to opportunity in boston early results of a randomized mobility experiment this paper examines the short run impacts of a change in residential neighborhood on the well being of low income families using evidence from a program in which eligibility for a housing voucher was determined by random lottery we examine the experiences of households at the boston site of moving to opportunity mto a demonstration program in five cities families in high poverty public housing projects applied to mto and were assigned by lottery to one of three groups experimental offered mobility counseling and a section 8 subsidy valid only in a census tract with a poverty rate of less than 10 percent section 8 comparison offered a geographically unrestricted section 8 subsidy or control offered no new assistance but continued to be eligible for public housing our quantitative analyses of program impacts uses data on 540 families from a baseline survey at program enrollment a follow up survey administered l to 3 5 years after random assignment and state administrative data on earnings and welfare receipt 48 percent of the experimental group and 62 percent of the section 8 comparison group moved through the mto program one to three years after program entry families in both treatment groups were more likely to be residing in neighborhoods with low poverty rates and high education levels than were families in the control group however while members of the experimental group were much more likely to be residing in suburban communities than were those in the section 8 group the lower program take up rate among the experimental group resulted in more families remaining in the most distressed communities households in both treatment groups experienced improvements in multiple measures of well being relative to the control group including increased safety improved health among household heads and fewer behavior problems among boys experimental group children were also less likely to be a victim of a personal crime to be injured or to experience an asthma attack there are no significant impacts of either mto treatment on the employment earnings or welfare receipt of household heads in the first three years after random assignment

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

recombinant property in east european capitalism recombinant property is a form of organizational hedging in which actors respond to uncertainty by deversifying assets redefining and recombining resources it is an attempt to hold resources that can be justified by more than one legitimating principle property tansformation in postsocialist hungary involves the decentralized reorganization of assets and the centralized management of liabilities together they blur the boundaries of public and private the boundaries of enterprises and the boundedness of justificatory principles enterprise level field research data on the ownership structure of hungary s 220 largest enterprises and banks and an examination of the government s recent debt consolidation programs suggest the emergence of a distinctively east european capitalism that will differ as much from west european capitalism as do contemporary east asian variants

implementation in undominated nash equilibria without integer games a mechanism which uses neither integer games nor modulo games is shown to implement any social choice function in a production economy with private and excludable public goods more precisely th

efficient allocation of a prize king solomon s dilemma abstract a planner is interested in allocating an indivisible good a prize to one of many agents in the economy his objective is to give the prize to the agent who values it most without any payments being made by the recipient the planner however does not know the identity of this agent while the agents themselves do this paper shows how the planner can construct simple multistage mechanisms with a unique subgame perfect equilibrium outcome at this outcome the agent who values the prize most gets it without any transfer of money being made by any of the agents or the planner

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

stable implementation of lindahl allocations abstract the resource allocation mechanisms using nash equilibrium as the solution concept in economies with incomplete information rely on the assumption that agent s disequilibrium messages converge to a nash equilibrium the mechanisms implementing lindahl allocations are however extremely unstable under the most used process to represent disequilibrium behaviour in games of incomplete information the cournot process we provide a new mechanism overcoming the instability difficulty in the case of quasi linear preferences

excess payoff dynamics and other well behaved evolutionary dynamics abstract we consider a model of evolution in games in which agents occasionally receive opportunities to switch strategies choosing between them using a probabilistic rule both the rate at which revision opportunities arrive and the probabilities with which each strategy is chosen are functions of current normalized payoffs we call the aggregate dynamics induced by this model excess payoff dynamics we show that every excess payoff dynamic is well behaved regardless of the underlying game each excess payoff dynamic admits unique solution trajectories that vary continuously with the initial state identifies rest points with nash equilibria and respects a basic payoff monotonicity property we show how excess payoff dynamics can be used to construct well behaved modifications of imitative dynamics and relate them to two other well behaved dynamics based on projections

taxes and the timing of births because the tax savings of having a child are a realized only if the birth takes place before midnight january 1 the incentives for the marginal birth are substantial using a sample of children from the national longitudinal survey of youth we find that the probability that a child is born in the last week of december rather than the first week of january is positively correlated with tax benefits we estimate that increasing the tax benefit of having a child by 500 raises the probability of having the child in the last week of december by 26 9 percent

evolutionary implementation and congestion pricing we consider an implementation problem faced by a planner who manages a roadway network the problem entails both hidden information and hidden actions we solve the planner s problem by introducing a new class of mechanisms and a new notion of implementation the mechanisms called price schemes attach transfers to the available routes they do not involve direct revelation the method of implementation is evolutionary requiring that players who follow any reasonable myopic adjustment process eventually learn to behave as the planner desires we show that efficient behaviour can be guaranteed using simple decentralized price schemes

the effects of lottery prizes on winners and their neighbors evidence from the dutch postcode lottery each week the dutch postcode lottery pcl randomly selects a postal code and distributes cash and a new bmw to lottery participants in that code we study the effects of these shocks on lottery winners and their neighbors consistent with the life cycle hypothesis the effects on winners consumption are largely confined to cars and other durables consistent with the theory of in kind transfers the vast majority of bmw winners liquidate their bmws we do however detect substantial social effects of lottery winnings pcl nonparticipants who live next door to winners have significantly higher levels of car consumption than other nonparticipants

causal effects of paternity leave on children and parents reserving a share of the parental leave period for fathers is considered necessary in order to induce fathers to take leave and to increase men s participation in child rearing we investigate how a parental leave reform directed towards fathers affected leave taking and in turn children s and parents long term outcomes a paternal leave quota greatly increases the share of men taking paternity leave we find evidence that children s school performance improves as a result particularly in families where the father has higher education than the mother we find no evidence that paternity leave counters the traditional allocation of parents labor supply

the illusion of sustainability this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled the illusion of sustainability conducted during the time period 1998 to 2001 in kenya the study observed that deworming is a public good since much of its social benefit comes through reduced disease transmission people were less likely to take deworming if their direct first order or indirect second order social contacts were exposed to deworming the introduction of a small fee for deworming drugs led to an 80 percent reduction in treatment rates take up was not sensitive to the exact price level suggesting that it is particularly counter productive to charge small positive prices for the treatment of infectious diseases an intensive school health education had no impact on worm prevention funding for the study derived from world bank nih fogarty international center berkeley center for health research

rewarding schooling success and perceived returns to education evidence from india this paper tests two specific mechanisms through which individuals can form expectations about returns to investments in education recognition for schooling performance and exposure to successful students through family or social networks using a regression discontinuity design we study the impact of two fellowship programs recognizing educational performance in secondary schools in india we find that the fellowship award is associated with a significant increase in the perceived value of education by both increasing the perceived mean of earnings 0 74 standard deviations sd and decreasing the perceived variance in earnings 1 03 sd associated with additional years of schooling the effects spill over only selectively to social and family networks peers exposed to successful students do not update their beliefs but parents of fellows report higher perceived returns to education peers of fellows are however more informed about fellowship opportunities and report a higher intention to apply for the fellowship thus contributing to the persistence of the potential impact of the fellowship across different cohorts

peer effects in program participation the influence of peers could play an important role in the take up of social programs however estimating peer effects has proven challenging given the problems of reflection correlated unobservables and endogenous group membership we overcome these identification issues in the context of paid paternity leave in norway using a regression discontinuity design our approach differs from existing literature which attempts to measure peer effects by exploiting random assignment to peer groups in contrast we study peer effects in naturally occurring peer groups but exploit random variation in the price of a social program for a subset of individuals fathers of children born after april 1 1993 in norway were eligible for one month of governmental paid paternity leave while fathers of children born before this cutoff were not there is a sharp increase in fathers taking paternity leave immediately after the reform with take up rising from 3 to 35 while this quasirandom variation changed the cost of paternity leave for some fathers and not others it did not directly affect the cost for the father s coworkers or brothers therefore any effect on the brother or the coworker can be attributed to the influence of the peer father in their network our key findings on peer effects are four fold first we find strong evidence for substantial peer effects of program participation in both workplace and family networks coworkers and brothers are 11 and 15 percentage points respectively more likely to take paternity leave if their peer father was induced to take up leave by the reform second the most likely mechanism is information transmission about costs and benefits including increased knowledge of how an employer will react third there is essential heterogeneity in the size of the peer effect depending on the strength of ties between peers highlighting the importance of duration intensity and frequency of social interactions fourth the estimated peer effect gets amplified over time with each subsequent birth exhibiting a snowball effect as the original peer father s influence cascades through a firm our findings demonstrate that peer effects can lead to long run equilibrium participation rates which are substantially higher than would otherwise be expected

social times of network spaces network sequences and foreign investment in hungary to model from its inception interenterprise network formation and its interaction with foreign investment across an entire epoch of rapid and profound economic transformation the authors gathered data on the complete ownership histories of 1 696 of the largest hungarian enterprises from 1987 to 2001 they develop a social sequence analysis to identify distinctive pathways whereby firms use network resources to buffer uncertainty hide or restructure assets or gain knowledge and legitimacy during this period networked property grew stabilized and involved a growing proportion of foreign capital cohesive networks of recombinant property were robust and in fact integrated foreign investment although multinationals through their subsidiaries dissolved ties in joint venture arrangements the authors find evidence that they also built durable networks these findings suggest that developing economies do not necessarily face a forced choice between networks of global reach and those of local embedde

evolutionary implementation in a public goods game abstract we consider implementation of the efficient state in a large population public goods game due to positive externalities the efficient state is different from the nash equilibrium of the game we apply a transfer scheme equal to the externality in the game the externality adjusted public goods game is a potential game with a unique nash equilibrium which is the efficient state of the original game it is also a continuous strategy aggregative game we introduce the best response dynamic for such aggregative potential games to show evolutionary implementation agents converge to the efficient state under this dynamic in the externality adjusted game we extend this result to other prominent evolutionary dynamics the pure externality price scheme however causes a budget deficit a modification of this scheme solves this problem while evolutionarily implementing efficiency

stability of the groves and ledyard mechanism abstract it is shown that the nash equilibria of the game defined by the groves and ledyard mechanism in a public good economy can be made locally stable under cournot best replay behavior and general assumptions on preferneces

sharing costs in highways a game theoretic approach this paper introduces a new class of games highway games which arise from situations where there is a common resource that agents will jointly use that resource is an ordered set of several indivisible sections where each section has an associated fixed cost and each agent requires some consecutive sections we present an easy formula to calculate the shapley value and we present an efficient procedure to calculate the nucleolus for this class of games

the flexible few oligarchs and wealth defense in developing democracies based on an original large n dataset of individual ukrainian oligarchs and qualitative evidence this article tests competing perspectives on the political power of big capital we find surprising

clicking on heaven s door the effect of immigrant legalization on crime we estimate the eect of legalization on the crime rate of immigrants by exploiting the italian policy framework as an ideal regression discontinuity design xed quotas of residence permits are available each year applications must be submitted electronically on specic click days and they are processed on a rst come rst served basis until the available quotas are exhausted by matching data on applicants including the timing of applications in milliseconds with restricted use criminal records for the year before and after click days we show that obtaining legal status reduces the probability of being reported for having committed a serious crime by 0 6 percentage points on average on a baseline crime rate of 1 percent this eect is driven by applicants that are allegedly employed by other immigrants as domestic workers but are most likely unemployed who exhibit the highest crime rate in the year before click days as well as the greatest reduction in crime after obtaining legal status by contrast applicants sponsored by rms exhibit a very low crime rate both before and after click days we conclude that undocumented immigrants confronting worse labor market opportunities are at a higher risk of committing crimes while they are also more responsive to legalization

network effects and welfare cultures we empirically examine the role of social networks in welfare participation using data on language spoken at home to better infer networks within an area our empirical strategy asks whether being surrounded by others who speak the same language increases welfare use more for those from high welfare using language groups this methodology allows us to include local area and language group fixed effects and to control for the direct effect of being surrounded by one s language group these controls eliminate many of the problems in previous studies the results strongly confirm the importance of networks in welfare participation

the role of information and social interactions in retirement plan decisions evidence from a randomized experiment this paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees decisions to enroll in a tax deferred account tda retirement plan within a large university the experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of departments to attend a benee ts information fair organized by the university by promising a monetary reward for attendance the experiment multiplied by more than e ve the attendance rate of these treated individuals relative to controls and tripled that of untreated individuals within departments where some individuals were treated tda enrollment e ve and eleven months after the fair was signie cantly higher in departments where some individuals were treated than in departments where nobody was treated however the effect on tda enrollment is almost as large for individuals in treated departments who did not receive the encouragement as for those who did we provide three interpretations differential treatment effects social network effects and motivational reward effects to account for these results

direct and cross effects of employment protection the case of parental childcare i examine whether employment protection affects the willingness of working parents to provide childcare using a reform that made it easier for employers to dismiss workers in small firms i find that softer employment protection reduces the use of temporary parental leave among directly treated fathers in addition i find that households respond to an increase in the dismissal risk by reducing temporary parental leave for the indirectly treated spouse spousal labor supply can thus serve as informal insurance against adverse income shocks

foreclosure contagion and the neighborhood spillover effects of mortgage defaults in this paper i identify shocks to interest rates resulting from two administrative details in adjustable rate mortgage contract terms the choice of financial index and the choice of lookback period i find that a 1 percentage point increase in interest rate at the time of adjustable rate mortgage arm reset results in a 2 5 percentage increase in the probability of foreclosure in the following year and that each foreclosure filing leads to an additional 0 3 to 0 6 completed foreclosures within a 0 10 mile radius in explaining this result i emphasize price effects bank supply responses and borrower responses arising from peer effects

instability in the implementation of walrasian allocations abstract the existence of game forms which implement walrasian allocations as cournot nash equilibrium outcomes is well known however if the equilibria are also required to be locally dynamically stable at least for environments with unique walrasian allocations this paper shows that the requisite game forms do not exist our definition of a game form entails certain regularity conditions and requires the cournot equilibrium to be unique when the walrasian equilibrium is unique the main result is that for such a game form there does not exist a continuous time strategy adjustment process which ensures the local stability of cournot equilibria throughout a certain class of environments having unique walrasian equilibria each trader adjusts his strategy in response to his own characteristics and the observed current strategies of others but the direction and magnitude of adjustments are not constrained by any behavioral assumptions the definitions permit the inclusion of an artificial player such as an auctioneer so the well known tatonnement instability emerges as a special case

pigouvian pricing and stochastic evolutionary implementation abstract we study the implementation of efficient behavior in settings with externalities a planner would like to ensure that a group of agents make socially optimal choices but he only has limited information about the agents preferences and can only distinguish individual agents through the actions they choose we describe the agents behavior using a stochastic evolutionary model assuming that their choice probabilities are given by the logit choice rule we prove that there is a simple price scheme with the following property regardless of the realization of preferences a group of agents subjected to the price scheme will spend the vast majority of time in the long run behaving efficiently the price scheme defines a game that may possess multiple equilibria but we are able to obtain a unique and efficient selection from this set because of the stochastic nature of the agents choice rule we conclude by comparing the performance of our price scheme with that of vcg mechanisms

random interactions in the chamber legislators behavior and political distance abstract i investigate the role of social interaction among members of parliament mps and the impact of such interaction on the political distance between parties using the random allocation of seats in the icelandic parliament i find that mp s voting and speech behaviors are affected by the behavior of legislators seated nearby i also show that greater random exposure to mps from different parties ultimately reduces the political distance between parties similar evidence is found using historical data for the u s house of representatives by exploiting the introduction of a lottery mechanism to determine desk assignments in 1845 i argue that random seating arrangements could constitute a low cost way of reducing differences within the political arena

equal but inequitable who benefits from gender neutral tenure clock stopping policies many skilled professional occupations are characterized by an early period of intensive skill accumulation and career establishment examples include law firm associates surgical residents and untenured faculty at research intensive universities high female exit rates are sometimes blamed on the inability of new mothers to survive the sustained negative productivity shock associated with childbearing and early childrearing in these environments gender neutral family policies have been adopted in some professions in an attempt to level the playing field the gender neutral tenure clock stopping policies adopted by the majority of research intensive universities in the united states in recent decades are an excellent example but to date there is no empirical evidence showing that these policies help women using a unique data set on the universe of assistant professor hires at top 50 economics departments from 1985 2004 we show that the adoption of gender neutral tenure clock stopping policies substantially reduced female tenure rates while substantially increasing male tenure rates

the social multiplier aggregate data is often used to make inferences about individual level behavior if there are social interactions in which one person s actions influence his neighbor s incentives or information then these inferences are inappropriate the presence of positive social interactions or strategic complementarities implies the existence of a social multiplier where aggregate relationships will overstate individual elasticities we present a brief model and then estimate the size of the social multiplier in three areas the impact of education on wages the impact of demographics on crime and group membership among dartmouth roommates in these contexts there is a significant social multiplier jel ho jo co

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

coase lecture the glass ceiling despite decades of progress women remain underrepresented in the upper part of the earnings distribution we review the recent research trying to explain this phenomenon after briefly revisiting gender differences in education we turn our attention to a body of work that has argued that gender differences in psychological attributes are holding back women s earnings we then review another active area of research focused on the challenges that women may face when trying to juggle competing demands on their time in the workplace and the home particularly when the home includes children we discuss recent work documenting women s greater demand for flexibility in the workplace as well as work measuring the labour market penalties associated with such demand for flexibility particularly in the higher paying occupations in the economy we highlight possible countervailing forces both at work and at home that may explain why these work family considerations may remain highly relevant to today s glass ceiling despite reduced time spent in non market work and a trend towards a more equal division of non market work between men and women finally we discuss the role that public policy and human resource practices may play in adding more cracks to the glass ceiling

family networks and school enrolment evidence from a randomized social experiment we present evidence on whether and how a household s behavior is influenced by the presence and characteristics of its extended family using data from the progresa program in mexico we exploit information on the paternal and maternal surnames of heads and spouses in conjunction with the spanish naming convention to identify the inter and intra generational family links of each household to others in the same village we then exploit the randomized research design of the progresa evaluation data to identify whether the treatment effects of progresa transfers on secondary school enrolment vary according to the characteristics of extended family we find progresa only raises secondary enrolment among households that are embedded in a family network eligible but isolated households do not respond the mechanism through which the extended family influences household schooling choices is the redistribution of resources within the family network from eligibles that receive de facto unconditional cash transfers from progresa towards eligibles on the margin of enrolling children into secondary school

fair divisions as attracting nash equilibria of simple games abstract we give a mechanism fully implementing envy free divisions such that strategy spaces are symmetric the set of nash equilibria is a global attractor for the best reply dynamics as a byproduct undesired mixed strategy equilibria are weeded out by the adjustment process

networks or neighborhoods correlations in the use of publicly funded maternity care in california abstract this study focuses on network effects in the utilization of publicly funded prenatal care using vital statistics data from california for 1989 2000 networks are defined using 5 digit zip codes and a woman s racial or ethnic group like others we find evidence that the use of public programs is highly correlated within groups defined using race ethnicity and neighborhoods these correlations persist even when we control for many unobserved characteristics by including zip code year fixed effects and when we focus on the interaction between own group behavior and measures of the potential for contacts with other members of the group contact availability however the richness of our data allows us to go further and to conduct several tests of one important hypothesis about networks that the estimated effects represent information sharing within groups the results cast doubt on the idea that the observed correlations can be interpreted as evidence of information sharing in particular we find estimated effects to be as large or larger among women who have previously used the program as among first time users

the intergovernmental network of world trade igo connectedness governance and embeddedness membership in certain intergovernmental organizations igos such as the world trade organization has long been argued to stimulate trade yet evidence linking igos to trade is mixed the authors argue that identifying the influence of igos requires attention not only to the institutions igos enact but also to the network through which they enact them this approach allows them to demonstrate that trade between two countries increases by an average of 58 with every doubling of the strength of igo connection between the countries they also contribute to debates regarding the mechanisms through which structural relationships influence economic behavior by showing that substantial trade benefits occur not only through economic igos but also through igos that were formed for social and cultural purposes and that connections through igos that are organizationally strong have more impact than those through minimalist igos

neighborhood effects on crime for female and male youth evidence from a randomized housing voucher experiment the moving to opportunity mto demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five cities we use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by mto to estimate neighborhood effects on youth crime and delinquency the offer to relocate to lower poverty areas reduces arrests among female youth for violent and property crimes relative to a control group for males the offer to relocate reduces arrests for violent crime at least in the short run but increases problem behaviors and property crime arrests the gender difference in treatment effects seems to reflect differences in how male and female youths from disadvantaged backgrounds adapt and respond to similar new neighborhood environments

networks in the modern economy mexican migrants in the u s labor market this paper attempts to identify job networks among mexican migrants in the u s labor market the empirical analysis uses data on migration patterns and labor market outcomes based on a sample of individuals belonging to multiple origin communities in mexico over a long period of time each community s network is measured by the proportion of the sampled individuals who are located at the destination the united states in any year we verify that the same individual is more likely to be employed and to hold a higher paying nonagricultural job when his network is exogenously larger by including individual fixed effects in the employment and occupation regressions and by using rainfall in the origin community as an instrument for the size of the network at the destination

the dynamic instability of dispersed price equilibria abstract we adopt an evolutionary framework to explain price dispersion as a time varying phenomenon by developing a finite strategy analogue of the burdett and judd 1983 price dispersion model we show that all dispersed price equilibria are unstable under the class of perturbed best response dynamics instead numerical simulations using the logit dynamic show that price dispersion manifests itself as a limit cycle we verify that limit cycles persist even when the finite strategy model approaches the original continuous strategy model for a particularly simple case of the model we prove the existence of a limit cycle

the effects of class size on student achievement new evidence from population variation abstract i identify the effects of class size on student achievement using longitudinal variation in the population associated with each grade in 649 elementary schools i use variation in class size driven by idiosyncratic variation in the population i also use discrete jumps in class size that occur when a small change in enrollment triggers a maximum or minimum class size rule the estimates indicate that class size does not have a statistically significant effect on student achievement i rule out even modest effects 2 to 4 percent of a standard deviation in scores for a 10 percent reduction in class size

the two faces of capital corporations and individual capitalists as political actors widespread access to public records of campaign contributions by corporate political action committees pacs have made these the preferred data for analyzing political partisanship within the capitalist class by comparison data on political contributions by individual capitalists were until recently difficult to obtain and rarely subjected to systematic study important differences are demonstrated between these two forms of capitalist political action by directly comparing the campaign contributions of 592 individual capitalists with the contributions of the 394 major corporations with which those capitalists were associated campaign contributions by individual capitalists follow a logic different from that of corporate pacs corporations are generally more interested in buying influence with incumbents while individual capitalists are more concerned with bolstering the election prospects offavored candidates by providing a more direct measure of capitalists political preferences the analysis of campaign contributions by individual capitalists clarifies theoretical questions that remain unresolved in the research based on corporate pacs variables that elude measurement when corporations are the units of analysis e g ethnicity are shown to have important consequences for capitalist political partisanship

social interactions and schooling decisions abstract the aim of this paper is to study whether a child s schooling choices are affected by the schooling choices of other children identification is based on a randomized targeted intervention that grants a cash subsidy conditional on school attendance to a subgroup of eligible children within small rural villages in mexico progresa this policy change spills over to ineligible children if social interactions are relevant results indicate that the eligible children tend to attend school more frequently and the ineligible children acquire more schooling when the subsidy is introduced in their local village moreover the overall effect of progresa on eligible children is the sum of a direct effect due to cash transfers and an indirect effect due to changes in peer group schooling interestingly the social interactions effect is almost as important as the direct effect

learning efficient nash equilibria in distributed systems abstract an individual s learning rule is completely uncoupled if it does not depend directly on the actions or payoffs of anyone else we propose a variant of log linear learning that is completely uncoupled and that selects an efficient welfare maximizing pure nash equilibrium in all generic n person games that possess at least one pure nash equilibrium in games that do not have such an equilibrium there is a simple formula that expresses the long run probability of the various disequilibrium states in terms of two factors i the sum of payoffs over all agents and ii the maximum payoff gain that results from a unilateral deviation by some agent this welfare stability trade off criterion provides a novel framework for analyzing the selection of disequilibrium as well as equilibrium states in n person games

keiretsu governance and learning case studies in change from the japanese automotive industry thekeiretsu structuring of assembler supplier relations historically enabled japanese auto assemblers to remain lean and flexible while enjoying a level of control over supply akin to that of vertical integration yet currently there is much talk of breakdowns inkeiretsu networks this paper examines some recent developments in japanese parts supplykeiretsu we argue thatkeiretsu relationships are drifting from hybrid or network i e keiretsu governance modes toward the extremes of arms length contracting and top down administration these changes are best understood through a combination of transaction cost and learning perspectives on alliance consistent with transaction cost economics the shift in purchase supply relationships can be traced to changes in the nature of parts transactions andkeiretsu governance structures a learning perspective on alliance complements and extends transaction cost theory providing additional explanation of the sources of change and the specific governance choices being made our first two cases document a drift in toyota skeiretsu supply network toward a hierarchical form in the management of parts supply transactions toyota has effectively internalized its transactions with daihatsu by taking a controlling interest toyota s strategy toward long term partner denso on the other hand was very different toyota built from the ground up an in house capability in electronic components thus scaling down its dependence on denso a third case considers a general trend in the japanese auto industry toward greater standardization of parts with the routinization of quality reliability and speed in supply management the need forkeiretsu style governance has declined the withering ofkeiretsu obligations is also traceable to globalization and the continuing weakness of the japanese economy which have prompted japanese firms to question received business practice

negative externalities and evolutionary implementation in this paper we model externality abatement as an implementation problem our model incorporates techniques from evolutionary game theory assuming that agents dynamically adjust their choices in response to the incentives they currently face we offer a simple condition on aggregate payoffs under which a planner with limited information about preferences can nevertheless ensure that efficient behaviour is globally stable finally we present a series of applications that show that our sufficient condition holds in a variety of models involving negative externalities