Human Behavior

It would be nonsensical to blame economists for not foreseeing the crisis; even less for causing it. It was obvious there would be a crisis. It was impossible to foresee how it would start and evolve, and at what moment these events would occur.

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.

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.

Tania Singer on the key importance of understanding preferences and behavioral change.

This research project explores how genomic data can inform the understanding of social science questions. The genomic revolution means that social scientists are able to correlate a range of outcomes and behaviors with genes. This research studies what these correlations mean.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.