Race

Pernicious cultural norms inside American banks and regulatory agencies have crowded out fundamental moral principles. Ed Kane proposes an antidote.

What we’re reading: A weekly scan of published items relevant to the Institute’s work

Does the technology revolution require a new social policy?

European Union countries are facing an epic challenge of integrating more than 1 million refugees from conflict zones in the Middle East and beyond.

The tragic crisis in Flint, Michigan, where residents have been poisoned by lead contamination, is not just about drinking water. And it’s not just about Flint. It’s about race and class, and the stark contradiction between the American dream of equal rights and opportunity for all and the American nightmare of metastasizing inequality of wealth and power.

Since Aristotle the question about the potential relationship between economic inequality and democratic changes has been studied and debated – but scientifically our ability as researchers to assess and understand how such complex social phenomena may be related is much more limited than recognised.

Can education stop the country’s backward slide?

The United States economy has come apart, with the rich getting richer and workers’ incomes not advancing at all.

Exploring inequality, gender, and the North-South divide.

How much does the standard theory of externalities and public goods really say?

The effect of ethnic violence on electoral results provides useful insights into voter behaviour and the incentives for political parties in democratic societies.

News about a wonderful workshop, “Knowledge Transfer and Its Contexts”

Inequality, racism, and violence are the real killers in America.

America’s economic system has failed by not raising living standards for most.

Good incentives are no substitute for good citizens.

There is a renewed interest in the size of labour supply elasticities and the discrepancy between micro and macro estimates. Recent contributions have stressed the distinction between changes in labour supply at the extensive and the intensive margin. In this paper, we stress the importance of individual heterogeneity and aggregation problems.

Janine Wedel charts the fast–evolving system of power and influence. Who is accountable? What are the remedies available to the average citizen?

How do we create a “change in culture”?

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen, and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde joined a renowned group of globally influential women in discussing how the financial system can be re-imagined to truly benefit society.

Most sociologists believe that formal and informal institutions are more critical in explaining the rising inequality observed in advanced economies. In this light, changing institutions such as the ascendance of shareholder-centered corporate governance model, finance-friendly policies since the late 70s, credentialism, and deunionization all contribute to the earnings dynamics at different parts of the distribution.

Gudrun Johnsen on Iceland, “womenomics”, and Finance & Society

This paper presents an experiment investigating the effect of social identity on hiring decisions. The question is whether people discriminate between own and other group candidate

In much of Europe, the social rights and social protections won in the first post-war decades, by labour movements in particular, have subsequently been seriously eroded, and are further threatened by neoliberal austerity.

This paper studies the glass ceiling by analyzing the presence of women at the top of the income distribution using tax record data reported for a sample of countries with individual taxation.

Using a sample of U.S. firms spanning 2001-2011, we examine whether female directors (female audit committee members) affect audit quality in terms of audit effort and auditor choice.

A recent New York Times article observed that Americans want action to address inequality. 2016 presidential candidates from both parties also acknowledge that inequality is a pressing concern. But not one of the candidates has proposed to do anything meaningful about it, sharing wealthy Americans’ (understandable) opposition to any solution (Scheiber 2015). Perhaps nothing has been done because there is nothing to do about it.

The SSGAC is a research infrastructure designed to stimulate dialogue and cooperation between medical researchers and social scientists. The SSGAC facilitates collaborative research that seeks to identify associations between specific genetic markers (segments of DNA) and behavioral traits, such as preferences, personality and social-science outcomes.

Behavior genetics is the study of the relationship between genetic variation and psychological traits. Turkheimer (2000) proposed “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics” based on empirical regularities observed in studies of twins and other kinships. On the basis of molecular studies that have measured DNA variation directly, we propose a Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics: “A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability.”

It is impossible to ignore material inequality. Wealth, and the goods that come with it, are accumulating at the top of society while others seem to be struggling in the middle and bottom.

This text is part of a research project still in working progress that collects different contributions by the author and rewrite and reanalyse some reflections, already present, in a different form, in some publications:

The interaction between social structure and markets remains a central theme in the social sciences. In some instances, markets can build on and enhance social networks’ economic role; in other contexts, markets appear to be in direct competition with social networks. The impact of markets on inequality and welfare is also varying: while markets can sometimes offer valuable outside options to marginalised individuals, in other situations only well connected and better off individuals can benefit from them.

This research project explores the underlying limits—especially of the social and economic sciences—in identifying causalities including, among other aspects, the strong epistemological and statistical limitations of and assumptions behind the methods applied.

This research project investigates how gender and race affect the earnings of African American, Latina, and Asian American women in the United States over five decades, from 1970 to 2010.

The economics of religion is a relatively new field of research in economics. This survey serves two purposes – it is backward-looking in that it traces the historical and sociological origins of this field, and it is forward-looking in that it examines the insights and research themes that are offered by economists to investigate religion globally in the modern world.

Can we learn something from philosophy students?

Improved access to education is often touted as the key to addressing racial inequality in the economy, but Lisa Cook’s research into the innovation economy shows that women and African-Americans are underrepresented despite their educational qualifications.

In recent decades, market values have crowded out non- market norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?

What happens when a market-based economy becomes a market-based society?

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

What happens when professionals lose touch with the people they’re supposed to serve?

what is economically correct must always be balanced with what is morally right.

A review of The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, the new book by Mariana Mazzucato

“Four men sat at a table. Raised sixty floors above the city, they did not speak loudly as one speaks from a height in the freedom of air and space; they kept their voices low, as befitted a cellar.”

A genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment was conducted in a discovery sample of 101,069 individuals and a replication sample of 25,490. Three independent single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are genome-wide significant (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266), and all three replicate.

There are a number of possible purposes in assessing the level of economic development of a country or part of a country. The assessment may provide an incentive for better development, particularly if it can be compared meaningfully with assessments for other countries.

What is the purpose of economics?

This research project shows what economists can learn from political philosophers in thinking about economic inequality while also investigating the philosophical significance of recent empirical work on inequality, within economics and elsewhere.

Elephant seals have got too big for their beaches. A large specimen might weigh over 8000 lbs (3700 kg).Their size has a simple evolutionary explanation. Large males fight for the right to mate with a whole beach full of females. For elephant seals it is, quite literally, winner-takes-all. And the key to winning is simple – size.

We have grown accustomed to regulating financial markets based on imagined, not real markets. Real markets are shaped by and co-evolve with institutional arrangements within two fundamental constraints: Imperfect knowledge and the threat of illiquidity.

The financial sector can support growth but it can also cause crisis. The present crisis has exposedgaps in economists’ understanding of this dual potential.

Many feel that due to its size and scale the financial system has become a burden on society rather than a servant to it. What are the key elements of a productive financial sector?