What Can Be Learned from Skeletons that Might Interest Economists, Historians, and Other Social Scientists? by Richard H. Steckel. Published in volume 93, issue 2, pages 213-220 of American Economic Review, May 2003

The paper investigates the common dynamic properties of business-cycle fluctuations across countries, regions, and the world. We employ a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model to estimate common components in macroeconomic aggregates (output, consumption, and investment) in a 60-country sample covering seven regions of the world. The results indicate that a common world factor is an important source of volatility for aggregates in most countries, providing evidence for a world business cycle. We find that region-specific factors play only a minor role in explaining fluctuations in economic activity. We also document similarities and differences across regions, countries, and aggregates.

The Effects of Environmental Regulation on Technology Diffusion: The Case of Chlorine Manufacturing by Lori D. Snyder, Nolan H. Miller and Robert N. Stavins. Published in volume 93, issue 2, pages 431-435 of American Economic Review, May 2003

The probit is generally considered to be one of the easiest nonlinear maximum likelihood problems. Nonetheless, in the course of at-tempting to replicate G. S. Maddala’s (1992, pp. 335–38) probit example, Houston Stokes (2003) encountered great difficulty. Of the six coeffi-cients, five coefficients/standard errors he could duplicate, but the sixth was off by more than rounding error. So he tried another package. And another. And another.... Finally, five dif-ferent packages had declared convergence to five solutions that differed only in the sixth coefficient. Estimates of the sixth coefficient ranged from 4.4 to 8.1, and estimates on its standard error ranged from 46 to 114,550.

This paper synthesizes findings from an ongoing research program on learning in signaling games. The present paper focuses on cross-game learning- the ability of subjects to take what has been learned in one game and generalize it to related games- an issue that has been ignored in most of the learning literature. We begin by laying out the basic experimental design and recapitulating early results characterizing the learning process. We then report results from an initial experiment in which we find a surprising degree of positive cross-game learning, contrary to the predictions of commonly employed learning models and to the findings of cognitive psychologists. We next explore two features of the environment that help to explain when and why this positive transfer occurs. First, we examine the effects of abstract versus meaningful context, an issue that has been largely ignored by economists out of the belief that behavior is largely dictated by the deep mathematical structure of a game. In contrast, results from cognitive psychology suggest that behavior may well be sensitive to context employed. Our results show that the use of meaningful context serves as a catalyst for positive transfer. Second, we explore how play by two-person teams differs from play by individuals. The psychology literature is quite pessimistic about the ability of teams to beat a “truth wins ” standard based on performance of individuals. But teams easily surpass this norm in our cross-game experiment. We use the dialogues between team members to gain insight into how this transfer occurs, gaining direct confirmation for hypotheses generated by econometric analysis of earlier data. I. The Experimental Environment: Our experiments are based on a simplified version of Paul Milgrom and John Roberts ' (1982) entry limit pricing game. The game proceeds as follows: (1) Monopolists (Ms) observe their cost level- high (MH) or low (ML) cost- realized according to equal probabilities that are common knowledge. (2) Ms choose a quantity (output) whose payoff is contingent on the entrant’s (Es) response (see Table 1). (3) E sees this output, but not M’s type, and either enters or stays out. The asymmetric information, in conjunction with the fact that it is profitable to enter against MHs, but not against MLs, provides an incentive for strategic play (limit pricing).

The Future of the IMF and World Bank: Panel Discussion by Stanley Fischer, Allan H. Meltzer, Jeffrey D. Sachs and Nicholas Stern. Published in volume 93, issue 2, pages 45-50 of American Economic Review, May 2003