Each of 2 Universities-National Bureau of Economic Research Conferences on demographic economics held in 1958 and in 1976 resulted in a volume of essays with great significance for those working in demographic economics. Both are discussed for the 2 sets of essays do much to illustrate what the subdiscipline is doing and neglecting. The 1st dealt nominally with more developed countries and the 2nd purportedly with less developed countries. During the 1st period the dominant idea was neo-Malthusian with emphasis on demographic performance as a consequence of economic progress although in which direction (more children and sooner or fewer children and later) was in part a matter of choosing between the Becker/Mincer formulation of opportunity costs of parenthood and the Easterlin formulation of satisfaction with oneself or alternatively a fear that prosperity was effectively bounded. The book of the 2nd conference includes 9 essays plus a brief introduction by the editor. Each of these essays is reviewed briefly. What is most impressive about this volume are the preferences for the Iron Law of Wages/neo-Malthusian approach -- economic progress leads to demographic response and not the other way around.

NANCY STOKEY AND ROBERT LUCAS, JR., and Ed Prescott have produced an exceptionally useful, thorough, and timely introduction to stochastic economic dynamics. Dynamic optimization techniques developed in Operations Research, formulated initially by Richard Bellman (1957), have been used extensively in economics, particularly in macroeconomics, finance, and public finance. Economic theorists have extended dynamic programming theory in several valuable directions. Of particular note for this book is the concept of recursive equilibrium introduced in Edward Prescott and Rajnish Mehra (1980). While these techniques have been used extensively, there has been no broad, unified, and comprehensive presentation of the concepts, tools, and applications of recursive dynamic techniques that is written for economists and demands no more mathematics than a typical student is exposed to in a good graduate program. This book succeeds marvelously in filling this need. Furthermore, given the depth of development, it is also a valuable reference for researchers. Before describing the book's contents in detail, we should discuss what is distinctive and important about the recursive approach to dynamic economic problems. To do this, let's examine a simple problem and an alternative approach to its solution. The canonical problem for economic dynamics is the infinite horizon deterministic growth problem. Let k, be the capital stock at the beginning of period t, f(kt) a neoclassical production function expressing period t production as a function of kt, ct consumption in period t chosen at the end of the period, u(c) a concave utility function, and I the discount factor. Then a social planner for this infinitely lived economy will solve the problem

Loss aversion is one of the most widely used concepts in behavioral economics. We conduct a large-scale, interdisciplinary meta-analysis to systematically accumulate knowledge from numerous empirical estimates of the loss aversion coefficient reported from 1992 to 2017. We examine 607 empirical estimates of loss aversion from 150 articles in economics, psychology, neuroscience, and several other disciplines. Our analysis indicates that the mean loss aversion coefficient is 1.955 with a 95 percent probability that the true value falls in the interval [1.820, 2.102]. We record several observable characteristics of the study designs. Few characteristics are substantially correlated with differences in the mean estimates. (JEL D81, D91)