Jacob Mincer and Labor Supply–Before and Aftermath

This paper discusses the impact that Jacob Mincer's 1962 paper Labor-Force Participation of Married Women... had on the analysis and empirical estimation of the labor supply of married women, and the supply of labor in general. It is argued that this paper has revolutionized the analysis of labor supply. The sharp increase in married women's labor supply still constitutes a challenge to labor economists who try to explain the phenomenon in terms of income and price effects derived from cross-section studies. It constituted a puzzle to labor economists in the 1950s and 1960s, still captives of the notion of a backwards-bending supply of labor. Mincer combined a theoretical model distinguishing between three uses of time (leisure, work at home, and work in the market) and Friedman's distinction between permanent and transitory earning. He showed that the wage has a positive effect on married women's labor supply, and that this supply is more affected by transitory than by permanent income changes. The new theory serves as the scaffold on which Mincer builds the empirical estimation. The interplay between theory, data, and empirical estimation, and the ingenuity of the empirical research using scant data sources, made this paper the object of emulation. The ideas first discussed in this paper generated many of the developments in the analysis of labor supply witnessed over the last four decades.     

RECESSIONS AND RECOVERIES IN REAL BUSINESS CYCLE MODELS

We evaluate the ability of a simple real business cycle model to generate business cycles in the classical NBER sense of the term, where recessions are periods of absolute declines in economic activity. We use the "phase" classification of Burns and Mitchell [1946] to determine the "shape" of the business cycle and to look for asymmetries between expansions and contractions. We show that such a model can generate business cycles of plausible duration and depth, but cannot match the actual "Shape" of the business cycle. Nonlinear models, such as Friedman's [1993] "plucking" model may more closely match the observed shape.     

SOCIALLY OPTIMAL PLEA BARGAINING WITH COSTLY TRIALS AND BAYESIAN JURIES

This paper investigates optimal plea bargaining when trials are costly, defendant guilt is uncertain, and juries rationally respond to the plea bargaining policy employed. The model shows that when innocence rates among the arrested are low, it is optimal to offer all defendants pleas that are acceptable to guilty and innocent defendants. However, as the innocence rate becomes more significant, optimal plea policy switches to one in which plea offers are only acceptable to guilty defendants. However, even when optimal, the societal benefits to such separating policies are limited due to constraints on the frequency such offers can be made. (JEL D6, D8, K4)     

The concept of a “merit good” the ethical dimension in economic theory and the history of economic thought or the transformation of economics into socio-economics

The purpose of this paper is to defend the concept of a “merit good” and to expand its application. This is achieved by using a Kantian philosophical argument applied to the writings of foundational economists such as Adam Smith and Henry Simons (and Walter Eucken in the German literature). As a result the concept of a “merit good” is used to classify and argue for a number of governmental tasks such as the institutional arrangements to make a free market economy work, work efficiently and work in a humane way. Methodologically, this paper connects—as the work of Joseph A. Schumpeter already has—economic theory, the history of economic thought and institutional economics and thereby demonstrates that economics is necessarily about socio-economics.     

Soziologie der Aufmerksamkeit

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the theoretical relevance of the concept of “attention” for understanding the social. Against the backdrop of neurological, psychological and philosophical insights into this subject matter, and drawing on both classical as well as current theories on this phenomenon, the article will examine the term’s respective meanings and develop genuinely sociological questions in order to underline the heuristic value of research on this topic. Furthermore, it will be argued that the (post-)modern subject oscillates between being at liberty to bestow his attention at will and being forced to do so, and the social processes accounting for attention gradually becoming an ever more scarce resource will be identified. The field of science is then drawn upon as an example to illustrate the fight for attention, followed by a plea for the comprehensive treatment of attention as a key sociological issue.     

THE IMPACT OF BAD WRITING IN ECONOMICS

We find significant style differences between articles written by economists for their professional journals and articles by the same economists in the Wall Street Journal. We find no evidence that style influences the professional success of economists, which suggests that the private rewards to improving the quality of writing are low. Indeed, each community of scholars has probably adopted a "professionally correct" writing style, from which its members diverge little. However, scholars do alter their rhetorical style to communicate effectively with audiences other than the professional community. This suggests that intra- and inter-group (written) communication by economists is efficient.     

The Authenticity in Ambiguity: Appreciating Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Abductive Logic as Communicative Practice

This article is a reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "An Unpublished Text" (1964a), as an exemplar of communicative praxis. As a poetic, "stylistic" account of the body of his life's work, this text self-signifies his potential as an "authentic" scholar. Employing a motivated logic that is abductive (Peirce, 1955), he argued for an appreciation of our phenomenological and semiotic circumstances of existential ambiguity. Furthermore, from this phenomenal ground, he articulated the pragmatic conditions of authenticity that inhere within every communication engagement with an Other. My interpretation of the Etre Au Monde of his philosophy depicts authenticity as human potentiality in the context of an existential dialectic between personal consciousness and sociocultural experience. We find that ambiguity and authenticity implicate one another as philosophical issues and thus remain highly relevant for a postmodern philosophy that problematizes our constitution as communicative beings.     

Adam Smith’s Economics and the Modern Minimum Wage Debate:The Large Distance Separating Kirkcaldy from Chicago

In the post-World War II period the spearhead of opposition to minimum wage (MW) legislation has been economists associated with the Chicago School, such as Friedman, Stigler, and Becker. They have captured the high ground in the debate partly by claiming their anti-MW position is grounded in the free market/invisible hand theory espoused by the founder of economics, Adam Smith. This paper shows the Chicago position rests on a skewed, one-sided, and partisan reading of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. A more inclusive, balanced, and neutral review reveals that while Smith definitely favored free trade and opposed protection as general principles, his non-competitive model of labor markets, dynamic theory of production, and humanistic social welfare criteria suggest that on both positive and normative grounds he might well have favored a minimum wage set at the poverty level. (Smith never took a position on a MW mandate). Besides balancing and correcting the historical record, the paper broadens MW analysis by reintroducing several behavioral and institutional dimensions emphasized by Smith but typically neglected in the current mainline debate which narrowly focuses on competitive versus monopsony models. A Smithian analysis also has several implications for findings from empirical MW studies.     

INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE ON FRIEDMAN'S THEORY OF THE BUSINESS CYCLE

Milton Friedman's theory of the business cycle implies two empirical regularities tested for here. One regularity is that business cycles are asymmetric: The size of a contraction affects the size of the following expansion, but not vice versa. The second regularity is that a supply-side ceiling to aggregate output limits the size of expansions. Friedman's correlation methods yield only very weak support for the asymmetry hypothesis when applied to real GNP data of eight OECD countries. A time series model with a ceiling component fits the data well for a majority of the countries.     

Colour as a visual signifier in screen typography: ‘less means more’

This article makes a (programmatic) plea for constraints in the use of colour in electronic writing. ‘Spontaneous’, ‘free’, ‘unconstrained’ use of colour, it is argued, impoverishes both the creative and the communicative aspects of typographic design in digital environments, whereas constrained or rule‐governed design can prove a powerful strategy in enhancing creativity and communication. A special plea is made for minimalism, which can be considered one of the most efficient forms of constrained writing.     

You are what you read. The use of bibliotherapy to facilitate psychotherapy

1. In the course of therapy with individuals or couples, it is sometimes helpful to suggest reading specific material to assist in the therapeutic process. 2. It is important that the therapist be totally familiar with the recommended material and have a specific purpose for the recommendation. 3. The therapeutic interaction, rather than the reading of material, is the focus of the treatment. 4. Such reading may prove helpful because it becomes an educational experience and comprehension of a concept is increased; the material can be "validating" when written by someone unknown to the client who has had a shared experience; and it can remove a struggle for control from the therapeutic relationship by giving information or opinions directly to the client.     

Simmel and the Dialectic of the Double Boundary: The Case of the Metropolis and Mental Life

George Simmel's sociology was only one expression of his overall project of understanding the modern human condition. Works such as "The Metropolis and Mental Life" have been appropriated by sociology for their substantive insights. These works are more fully understood when they are interpreted in terms of Simmel's late philosophical writings, which are based on an image of man as standing between boundaries and therefore of being a boundary for them. In light of the boundary dialectic the metropolis becomes, for Simmel, a symbol of the failed mediations attempted in modernity between the objective culture of things and the subjective culture of personal development.     

Expected subjective utility: Is the Neumann-Morgenstern utility the same as the Neoclassical's?

Using axioms no stronger than those for the Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility hypothesis, with the recognition of finite sensibility, it is shown that the utility function derived by the N-M method is a neoclassical subjective utility function, contrary to the belief otherwise by prominent economists. This result is relevant for issues of utility measurability, social choice, etc. since it is subjective utility that is relevant for social choice. The relevance of individual risk aversion to the form of social welfare functions and the rationality of pure risk aversion are also discussed.     

阅读与分享改变生活

吴海家庭来自宁夏回族自治区银川市,他们不仅热爱读书,也热衷分享。5年来,通过组织不同主题的阅读活动,吴海和妻子孙萍将许多喜欢读书的家庭聚在一起,分享收获,树立了“爱读书、读好书、善读书”的良好文明风尚。     

Foundations of British sociology 1880–1930: contexts and biographies

‘This paper provides an overview of aspects of the history of British sociology. In particular, it tries to answer critical historical work by among others, Perry Anderson and Philip Abrams, which sought to explain the supposed indigenous ‘failure’ to develop academic sociology in Britain before the 1960s. It is argued that a narrowly academic reading of the history of sociology cannot do justice to its role in the service of social administration and public enlightenment and may exaggerate the degree to which sociology from its foundations was conceived as a purely intellectual discipline. The paper points to a thriving sociological culture in Britain in the generation before the First World War, though it was one in which many contributions came from philosophers, natural scientists and political economists rather then self‐proclaimed ‘sociologists’. It ends with a brief review of Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford, a founder of the Sociological Society and editor of the Sociological Review, whose biographies and eclectic social and international interests tell us something about the personalities and political interests of early British sociological pioneers.’     

Equality FOR the labor market: An appreciation of W. H. Hutt

Conclusion I am optimistic about the future of labor economics. The socialist world-view, and the sentimentality that made that world-view so attractive to so many well inten-tioned people, has collapsed. Eventually even pro-union labor economists will have to accept that fact. The impulse to treat labor as a special case was, I believe, based on socialist sentiments. Private sector unionism is declining throughout the devel-oped world. According to Leo Troy (1994), American private sector union density will be 7 percent by the year 2000 — exactly what it was in 1900. Troy calls this the symmetry of history. Labor economists who focus on the private sector will come increasingly to regard unionism as irrelevant to contemporary analysis. They will come increasingly to believe, as Hutt always did, that labor economics should be nothing more or less than the application of economic principles to the labor market. More than most other economists of the twentieth century, Hutt has made straight the path to such a reconstruction of labor economics. I thank my colleague, James Ahiakpor, for several useful criticisms of the first draft of this paper and exonerate him from any blame for remaining faults.     

"Sex" versus "gender": a renewed plea

Evidence from scholarly journals, texts, and other sources indicates that the terms "sex" and "gender" continue to be used incorrectly, despite earlier pleas to remedy this and related errors (e.g., the terms sex role, gender role, male/female). I advance the plea again, in the hope of reducing confusion and thereby improving scholarly communication with our students and one another.     

The economists and the primitive societies: A critique of economic imperialism

The extension of economics to topics that lie outside its classical domain is known as ‘economic imperialism’. But there are territories of social science that persist to be largely intractable using the postulates of economic theory: the anthropological subject of primitive societies represents one such territory. This paper describes and discusses the representation of primitive societies by economists from the proto-imperialist model of Smith to the imperialist Posner's model. It maintains that (a) the economists’ attempt at interpretation is highly unsatisfactory and (b) it is possible to offer a different representation of the primitive societies, one more coherent with the anthropological and ethnographical data, and able to show the inadequacy and insubstantiality of many economic categories when applied to those societies.     

Are Political Economists Selfish and Indoctrinated? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Most professional economists believe that economists in general are more selfish than other people and that this increased selfishness is due to economics education. This article offers empirical evidence against this widely held belief. Using a unique data set about giving behavior in connection with two social funds at the University of Zurich, it is shown that economics education does not make people act more selfishly. Rather, this natural experiment suggests that the particular behavior of economists can be explained by a selection effect.