Knowledge that Transforms

In a 1976 survey, Kearl et al. (1979; hereafter, 1976 survey) concluded that the then widespread perception that there was little agreement among professional economists on matters of theory or policy was simply wrong. However, the most casual empiricism, namely the continuing popularity of jokes about disagreements among economists, suggests the perception of noneconomists has not changed much since the 1970's. What is the present state of consensus among economists? This question is of interest because more than a decade has elapsed since the 1976 survey and during this time many issues confronting economists and the composition of the profession have changed.1 Benjamin M. Friedman and Lawrence H. Summers (1991 p. ix), for example, have asserted that ...economic thinking in many subfields of the discipline now differs markedly from what it was in 1970.... Consensus among European economists has been examined by Bruno S. Frey et al. (1984). Martin Ricketts and Edward Shoesmith (1990, 1992) focus exclusively on British economic opinion. This paper provides the first general analysis of opinions of U.S. economists in more than a decade. I. The Survey and Questionnaire

This paper exploits a newly developed data set to investigate recent changes in the international distribution of industrial pollution. In particular, the authors examine three issues: (1) the relationship between the toxic intensity of industrial production and the level of economic development, (2) the impact of OECD environmental regulation on global changes in toxic intensity, and (3) the relationship between trade policy and the toxic intensity of industrial production in LDC's. 10 refs.

The greenhouse effect itself is simple enough to understand and is not in any real dispute. What is in dispute is its magnitude over the coming century, its translation into changes in climates around the globe, and the impacts of those climate changes on human welfare and the natural environment. These are beyond the professional understanding of any single person. The sciences involved are too numerous and diverse. Demography, economics, biology, and the technology sciences are needed to project emissions; atmospheric chemistry, oceanography, biology, and meteorology are needed to translate emissions into climates; biology, agronomy, health sciences, economics, sociology, and glaciology are needed to identify and assess impacts on human societies and natural ecosystems. And those are not all. There are expert judgments on large pieces of the subject, but no single person clothed in this panoply of disciplines has shown up or is likely to. This article makes an attempt to forecast the economic and social consequences of global warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases, and attempting to prevent it.

Several experimental sessions were conducted to elicit certainty equivalents for a sequence of lotteries involving real monetary outcomes. The opportunity to conduct sessions in the People's Republic of China afforded the ability to offer very large monetary incentives relative to subjects' living costs; in the highest payoff condition, subjects earned three times their normal monthly revenue in the course of a two-hour experiment. Results indicate a statistically significant impact of the level of monetary incentives on revealed risk preferences. However, even under extreme monetary incentives, subjects demanded amounts well in excess of expected value for low-probability gain prospects.

Whether those who claim benefits should face a work requirement has been an issue of long-standing social concern. Important examples of schemes which require work are the Californian workfare program, Indian food security schemes and the English Poor Law of 1834. We present two arguments for demanding work for benefits: first, a work requirement can scree the truly needy from those who are not in need of support and second, it can provide incentives for people to invest in skills which enable them to avoid poverty. In the context of a simple model of a target population with two ability types we find conditions under which a work requirement reduces the costs of poor relief, and those when it does not. We concentrate on a case when work done in return for benefits has no social value, showing that even if this is true, work requirements may be a valuable policy tool.

The importance of seignorage relative to other sources of government revenue differs markedly across countries. The main theoretical implication of this paper is that countries with more unstable and polarized political systems rely more heavily on seignorage. This result is obtained within the context of a political model of tax reform. The model implies that the more unstable and polarized the political system, the more inefficient is the equilibrium tax structure (in the sense that tax collection is more costly to administer), and the higher therefore, the reliance on seignorage. This prediction of the model is tested on cross-section data for 79 countries. It is found that, after controlling for other variables, political instability significantly contributes to explain the fraction of government revenue derived from seignorage. This finding is very robust. We also find that seignorage is positively related to political polarization, even though here the evidence is weaker because of difficulties in measuring polarization.

Results from the Iowa Political Stock Market are analyzed to ascertain how well markets work as aggregators of information. The authors find that the market worked extremely well, dominating opinion polls in forecasting the outcome of the 1988 presidential election, even though traders in the market exhibited substantial amounts of judgment biases. Their explanation is that judgment bias refers to average behavior, while in markets it is marginal traders who influence price. They present evidence that in this market a sufficient number of traders were free of judgment bias so that the market was able to work well.

Including data from the 1980s sharply weakens the postwar time-series evidence indicating significant relationships between money (however defined) and nominal income or between money and either real income or prices separately. Focusing on data from 1970 onward destroys this evidence altogether. Evidence indicating cointegration of real income and real money balances, with due allowance for the effect of interest rates, also deteriorates when the sample extends through the 1980s. A positive finding is that the spread between the commercial paper rate and the Treasury bill rate consistently contains highly significant information about future movements in real income.