Human Behavior
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Membership Theory of Inequality
Mar 15, 2017
A transition from the conventional policy of “redistributing income” to “redistributing membership”, could promote economic integration across communities and intergenerational mobility.
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Working Paper Series
Stock-Market Expectations: Econometric Evidence that both REH and Behavioral Insights Matter
May 2016
Behavioral finance views stock-market investors’ expectations as largely unrelated to fundamental factors. Relying on survey data, this paper presents econometric evidence that fundamentals are a major driver of investors’ expectations.
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Years granted:
2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016
A New Tractable Approach for Bounded Rationality in Economics
This research project formulates a new model of bounded rationality, based on the idea that agents will keep a simple, or “sparse,” model of the world.
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Externalities and Public Goods: Theory OR Society?
Nov 19, 2015
How much does the standard theory of externalities and public goods really say?
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Matching the Moment, But Missing the Point?
Oct 19, 2015
This essay critically evaluates the benefits and costs of the dominant methodology in macroeconomics, the DSGE approach. Although the approach has led to great progress in some areas, it has also created biases and blind spots in the profession that hold back our understanding and our ability to govern the macroeconomy. There is great scope for progress in macroeconomics by judiciously pushing the boundaries of some of the methodological restrictions imposed by the DSGE approach.
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Working Paper Series
Exploring the Concept of Homeostasis and Considering its Implications for Economics
Sep 2015
The reality of human homeostasis expands the views on preferences and rational choice that are part of traditionally conceived Homo economicus and casts doubts on economic models that depend only on an “invisible hand” mechanism.
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Intersections of Psychology and Economics
Sep 11, 2015
Tania Singer on the key importance of understanding preferences and behavioral change.
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How Dated Theories & Underlying Research Misguide Policy
Jul 15, 2015
The financial crisis of 2008 was unforeseen to a significant extent. One reason is that the dominant academic theories influencing political decision makers ignore recent advances and instead rely largely on models and decision science dating back to the Second World War.
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Conference paper
A New Rational Expectations Hypothesis: What Can Economists Really Know About the Future?
Apr 2015
John Muth proposed the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH) to represent how the market (an aggregate of its participants) understands and forecasts outcomes. REH imposes internal consistency between the market’s forecasts and “the relevant economic theory” (Muth 1961, p. 316).
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Information And Economics: How Should Expectations Be Modeled? What Actually Works?
Apr 9, 2015 | 10:45—12:15
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Conference paper
Information and Economics: A New Way to Think About Expectations and to Improve Economic Prediction.
Apr 2015
The largely unexpected arrival of the global economic crisis and the largely unpredicted slowness of the recovery from the Great Recession should be precipitating an intellectual crisis across economics and policy making. We require additional theories and additional methods to detect how an economy is evolving and to provide the basis for policy intervention (Haldane, 2014).
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Conference paper
Social Interaction Models and Keynes' Macroeconomics
Apr 2015
The central concepts of Keynes’ macroeconomic theories concerning the behavior of labor markets, aggregate demand, and asset pricing can be formulated as special cases of a general social interaction model.
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Conference paper
Caring Economics
Apr 2015
Caring Economics is about a new way of thinking about human prosperity. In mainstream economics, prosperity is a matter of consumption, income and wealth. By contrast, Caring Economics conceives of prosperity in terms of deeper sources of durable human wellbeing.
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Conference paper
FAQs about “GWAS of 126,559 individuals identifies genetic variants associated with educational attainment”
Apr 2015
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.
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Conference paper
The Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics
Apr 2015
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.”