Economists have long been ambivalent about whether the discipline should focus on the analysis of markets or should be concerned with social interactions more generally. Recently the discipline has sought to broaden its scope while maintaining the rigor of modern economic analysis. Major theoretical developments in game theory, the economics of the family, and endogenous growth theory have taken place. Economists have also performed new empirical research on social interactions, but the empirical literature does not show progress comparable to that achieved in economic theory. This paper examines why and discusses how economists might make sustained contributions to the empirical analysis of social interactions.

ABOUT ONE billion people globally live in households with per capita incomes of under one dollar per day. The policymakers and practitioners who have

We create an environment in which congestion forces agents to match inefficiently early. We then introduce one of two centralized clearinghouse mechanisms. One of these has been successfully used to halt this kind of unraveling in a number of labor markets, while the other has failed. When it is costly for �rms and workers to be mismatched compared with the costs of matching early, the experimental observations reproduce the �eld observations. Furthermore, the experiment permits us to observe the transition between a decentralized and a centralized market, both when the centralized market fails to control unraveling and when it succeeds, at a level of detail unavailable in �eld data. Field studies of competitive entry-level professional labor markets reveal a common form of market failure involving the ‘‘unraveling’ ’ of hiring decisions, in which employment contracts from year to year become earlier and earlier in advance of employment, even when this becomes very costly {Roth and Xing 1994}. Sometimes the cause is that the market is organized in

This study investigates how parental employment affects child cognitive development. The results indicate that maternal labor supply during the first three years of the child's life has a small negative effect on the predicted verbal ability of 3 and 4 year olds and a larger detrimental impact on the reading and mathematics achievement of 5 and 6 year olds – working an extra 20 hours per week is anticipated to reduce test scores from the median to the 49 th, 46 th, and 47 th percentiles respectively. Job-holding during the second and third years has particularly deleterious consequences if the mother works long hours or was also employed in the first year. The findings are robust to the inclusion of controls for day care arrangements or paternal employment. There is some indication that early work may be particularly costly for children in “traditional ” two-parent families and the data also hint at the importance of time investments by fathers. There are two main reasons why this study provides a more negative assessment of the impact of early employment than most prior research. First, previous analyses often control relatively crudely for differences in child and household characteristics that are correlated with parental labor supply. Second, the deleterious effects are more pronounced for the reading and mathematics performance of 5 and 6 year old children than for the verbal test scores of 3 and 4 year olds that have more frequently been examined.

: Using cross-country and panel regressions, this paper investigates to what extent gender inequality in education and employment may reduce growth and development. The paper finds a considerable impact of gender inequality on economic growth which is robust to changes in specifications and controls for potential endogeneities. The results suggest that gender inequality in education has a direct impact on economic growth through lowering the average quality of human capital. In addition, economic growth is indirectly affected through the impact of gender inequality on investment and population growth. Point estimates suggest that between 0.4-0.9 % of the differences in growth rates between East Asia and Sub Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East can be accounted for by the larger gender gaps in education prevailing in the latter regions. Moreover, the analysis shows that gender inequality in education prevents progress in reducing fertility and child mortality rates, thereby c...

s, whether a woman finds individuality in her job, occupation, profession, or career. The third concerns "decision making." Here the distinction is whether labor force decisions are made fully jointly, if a woman is married or in a long term relationship, or, on the other hand, whether the woman is a "secondary worker" who optimizes her time allocation by taking her husband's labor market decisions as given to her. Thus the transition from evolution to revolution was a change from static decision making, with limited or intermittent horizons, to dynamic decision making, with long-term horizons. It was a change from agents who work because they and their families "need the money" to those who are employed, at least in part, because occupation and employment define one's fundamental identity and societal worth. It involved a change from "jobs" to "careers," where the distinction between these two concepts concerns both horizon and human capital investment. Those in the evolutionary pha

Five studies explored cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to proscribed forms of social cognition. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that people responded to taboo trade-offs that monetized sacred values with moral outrage and cleansing. Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that racial egalitarians were least likely to use, and angriest at those who did use, race-tainted base rates and that egalitarians who inadvertently used such base rates tried to reaffirm their fair-mindedness. Experiment 5 revealed that Christian fundamentalists were most likely to reject heretical counterfactuals that applied everyday causal schemata to Biblical narratives and to engage in moral cleansing after merely contemplating such possibilities. Although the results fit the sacred-value-protection model (SVPM) better than rival formulations, the SVPM must draw on cross-cultural taxonomies of relational schemata to specify normative boundaries on thought. Research on social cognition ultimately rests on functionalist assumptions about what people are trying to accomplish when they judge events or make choices. The most influential of these assumptions have been the intuitive scientist and the intuitive economist. The former tradition depicts people whose central objective

An overlapping generations model of marriage and divorce is constructed to analyze family structure and intergenernational mobility. Agents differ by sex, marital status, and human capital. Single agents meet in a marriage market and decide whether to accept or reject proposals to wed. Married couples must decide whether to separate or not. Parents invest in their children depending on their wherewithal. A simulated version of the theoretical prototype can generate an equilibrium with a significant number of female-headed households and a high degree of persistence in income across generations. To illustrate the model's mechanics, the effects of two antipoverty policies, namely child support and welfare, are investigated

This paper exploits the variation occurring from the different timing of divorce law reforms across the United States to evaluate how unilateral divorce changed family violence and whether the option provided by unilateral divorce reduced suicide and spousal homicide. Unilateral divorce both potentially increases the likelihood that a domestic violence relationship ends and acts to transfer bargaining power toward the abused, thereby potentially stopping the abuse in extant relationships. In states that introduced unilateral divorce we find a 8–16 percent decline in female suicide, roughly a 30 percent decline in domestic violence for both men and women, and a 10 percent decline in females murdered by their partners. I.

The deferred acceptance algorithm proposed by Gale and Shapley (1962) has had a profound influence on market design, both directly, by being adapted into practical matching mechanisms, and, indirectly, by raising new theoretical questions. Deferred acceptance algorithms are at the basis of a number of labor market clearinghouses around the world, and have recently been implemented in school choice systems in Boston and New York City. In addition, the study of markets that have failed in ways that can be fixed with centralized mechanisms has led to a deeper understanding of some of the tasks a marketplace needs to accomplish to perform well. In particular, marketplaces work well when they provide thickness to the market, help it deal with the congestion that thickness can bring, and make it safe for participants to act effectively on their preferences. Centralized clearinghouses organized around the deferred acceptance algorithm can have these properties, and this has sometimes allowed failed markets to be reorganized.