Knowledge that Transforms

This paper investigates the implications of social rewards on the allocation of talent in society and consequently on the process of economic growth. The authors consider two sources of heterogeneity among workers: nonwage income and innate ability. A greater emphasis on status may induce the 'wrong' individuals, that is, those with low ability and high wealth, to acquire schooling, causing workers with high ability and low wealth to leave the growth-enhancing industries. This crowding-out effect, taken alone, discourages growth. Growth may be enhanced by a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, which reduces the demand for status.

This paper studies the behavior of the exchange rate in the Kareken-Wallace overlapping generations economy with two currencies in which decision rules are updated using the genetic algorithm. The analysis shows that a stationary monetary equilibrium of the Kareken-Wallace model is not stable under the genetic algorithm dynamics. The fluctuations in the genetic algorithm exchange rate are driven by fluctuations in the portfolio fractions, which change over time in response to the inequality between the rates of return on two currencies. Further, both the genetic algorithm simulations and the experiments with human subjects were characterized by continuing fluctuations of the exchange rate.

This paper studies the political and economic determinants of regional public transfers. Specifically, it focuses on how such transfers are shaped by alternative fiscal constitutions, where a constitution is an allocation of fiscal instruments across different levels of governments plus a procedure for the collective choice of these instruments. Realistic restrictions on fiscal instruments introduce a trade-off between risk sharing and redistribution. Different constitutions produce very different results. In particular, a federal social insurance scheme, chosen by voting, provides overinsurance, whereas an intergovernmental transfer scheme, chosen by bargaining, provides underinsurance.

We show that discrimination can occur even when it is common knowledge that underlying group characteristics do not differ and when employers do not prefer same-group candidates. When employers can judge job applicants' unknown qualities better when candidates belong to the same group and hire the best prospect from a large pool of applicants, the top applicant is likely to have the same background as the employer. The model has policy, empirical, and experimental implications. For example, the model predicts that "screening discrimination" is more likely to occur and persist in sectors in which underlying quality is important but difficult to observe, there are numerous applicants, interviewing (screening) is relatively cheap, and applicants have to acquire job-specific skills.

Government may provide a good that can, if legally permitted, be supplemented by private purchases. Policy is determined by majority rule. Under standard assumptions on preferences, a majority voting equilibrium exists. A regime of positive government provision with no restriction on private supplements is shown to be majority preferred to a regime of either only market provision or only government provision. Combined public and private expenditure on the good is higher under this dual-provision regime than under either of the alternatives. Under some preference configurations, the median-income voter is pivotal; under others, a voter with income below the median is pivotal.

Local opposition to many projects makes it increasingly difficult to find sites for socially desirable facilities. As has been widely documented, compensation for local disamenities does not increase the level of support. An empirical analysis of the Swiss search for a nuclear waste repository even reveals decreased acceptance due to the rejection of bribes and the crowding-out of public spirit. However, a "compensation cycle" may be exploited to finally win the support of host communities. As siting issues are decided in the realm of politics, an economic theory of compensation must focus on the interplay between morals and markets.

"Biodiversity prospecting" has been touted as a mechanism for both discovering new pharmaceutical products and saving endangered ecosystems. It is unclear what values may arise from such activities, however. Evidence from transactions is incomplete and existing theoretical models are flawed. We calculate an upper bound on the value of the "marginal species." Even under favorable assumptions this bound is modest. Slightly modified assumptions lead to drastically lower estimates. We extend our findings to the value of the marginal hectare of habitat and find that the incentives for habitat conservation generated by private pharmaceutical research are also, at best, very modest.

Objective measures of employee performance are rarely available. Instead, firms rely on subjective judgments by supervisors. Subjectivity opens the door to favoritism, where evaluators act on personal preferences toward subordinates to favor some employees over others. Firms must balance the costs of favoritism--arbitrary rewards and less productive job assignments--against supervisors' demands for authority over subordinates. The authors analyze the conditions under which favoritism is costly to organizations and the effects of favoritism on compensation, the optimal extent of authority, and the use of bureaucratic rules.

We analyze how relative wage movements among birth cohorts and education groups affected the distribution of household consumption and economic welfare. Our empirical work draws on the best available cross-sectional data sets to construct synthetic panel data on U.S. consumption, labor supply, and wages during the 1980s. We find that low-frequency movements in the cohort-education structure of pretax hourly wages among men drove large changes in the distribution of household consumption. The results constitute a spectacular failure of between-group consumption insurance, a failure not explained by existing theories of informationally constrained optimal consumption behavior. A welfare analysis indicates that the cost of between-group consumption variability is larger than the cost of aggregate consumption variability by two orders of magnitude.

By buying cheap and selling dear, risk-neutral commodity speculators can smooth commodity prices and induce serial dependence in price even when none would exist under a simple process of supply and demand. Commodity prices are variable and strongly positively correlated from one year to the next. The variability is often explained by supply factors and the autocorrelation by the activities of speculators. The authors show that this explanation is not consistent with the evidence. Speculation can substantially increase autocorrelation for prices that are weakly autocorrelated in its absence but not to the high levels that are observed in the data.