Knowledge that Transforms

In this article, the book written by Juan Gabriel Valdes - entitled "Pinochet's Economists: The Chicago School in Chile" - serves as a point of departure. Valdes's account of the way in which University of Chicago economists came to be linked with the Catholic University in Chile in the mid-1950s is summarized, as is his characterization of the manner in which Chilean "Chicago Boys" subsequently won control of the economics faculty there. The centerpiece of Valdes's story is the behavior of the "Chicago Boys" in restructuring Chile's economy in the service of General Pinochet's military dictatorship (1973-89). The article concludes that Valdes's treatment of two additional themes - the cross-cultural transmission of economic ideas and the capacity of Chicago School economists to accommodate to authoritarian regimes - calls for qualification.

We review and critique the empirical literature on the links between investments in children and children's attainments. The primary theoretical perspectives that dominate this literature form the framework for our review. The potential effects on children of family choices and neighborhood characteristics are emphasized. The outcomes of interest include educational attainment, fertility choices, and work-related outcomes such as earnings and welfare recipiency. A set of tables provides details on the existing empirical literature. The focus is on the economics literature, but relevant studies from other social sciences are included as well.

This paper reports the results of a statistical summary of estimates of the marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for reducing particulate matter from hedonic property value models developed between 1967 and 1988. Results using both ordinary least squares and minimum absolute deviation estimators suggest that market conditions and the procedures used to implement the hedonic models were important to the resulting MWTP estimates. The interquartile range for these estimated marginal values (measured as a change in asset prices) lies between zero and $98.52 (in 1982-84 dollars) for a one-unit reduction in total suspended particulates (in micrograms per cubic meter). The mean MWTP is nearly five times the median ($109.90 vs. $22.40), suggesting that outliers are important influences to any summary statistics for these estimates.