Nea presidential address, 1993: Why black economists?

This article looks, with humor, at the role of black economists in academia and in the economics profession.     

Herd Behaviour in Adoption of Network Technologies

In technology adoption, herd behaviour can lead to a suboptimal outcome as shown, among others, by Choi (1997). However, empirics find little support for the idea that a less efficient technology can conquer the market and lock out a more efficient one. Accordingly, we improve and generalize Choi's results, by introducing an additional source of uncertainty: the economic environment. We investigate how the economic environment can affect herding and consequently the efficiency of the technology choice. The result is a smaller adoption bias. In the limit, firms may optimally experiment with the new technology that turns out to be social welfare improving.     

Income Inequality and Macroeconomic Volatility: An Empirical Investigation

We explore the impact of macroeconomic volatility on the distribution of income. Using a cross‐section of developed and developing countries, we find that greater output volatility, defined as the standard deviation of the rate of output growth, is associated with a higher Gini coefficient and income share of the top quintile. The coefficients suggest that a strong effect on inequality resulting from a reduction in volatility: the Gini coefficient of a country like Chile would fall by 6 points if it were to reduce its volatility to the same level as Sweden or Norway. Our results seem not to be driven by the high‐inequality/high‐volatility Latin American countries.     

Who Has the Time? Community College Students’ Time-Use Response to Financial Incentives

We evaluate the effect of performance-based scholarship programs for post-secondary students on student time use and effort and whether these effects are different for students we hypothesize may be more or less responsive to incentives. To do so, we administered a time-use survey as part of a randomized experiment in which community college students in New York City were randomly assigned to be eligible for a performance-based scholarship or to a control group that was only eligible for the standard financial aid. This paper contributes to the literature by attempting to get inside the “black box” of how students respond to a monetary incentive to improve their educational attainment. We find that students eligible for a scholarship devoted more time to educational activities, increased the quality of effort toward and engagement with their studies, and allocated less time to leisure. Additional analyses suggest that students who were plausibly more myopic (place less weight on future benefits) were more responsive to the incentives, but we find no evidence that students who are arguably more time constrained were less responsive to the incentives.

     

Bridging Business and Society: The Abrinq Foundation in Brazil

This article presents the process of creation and expansion of the Fundação Abrinq pelos Direitos da Criança et do Adolescente (Abrinq Foundation for Rights of Children and Adolescents). Established in 1990 by a group of entrepreneurs from the Brazilian Toy Manufacturers’ Association (ABRINQ), the Fundação Abrinq has been successful at raising the issue of children in Brazilian society by bridging business and several other sectors of society. This article more particularly examines (1) the societal challenges related to the situation of children in Brazil; (2) the creation and development of the Abrinq Foundation; and (3) the achievements of this innovative bridging organization over 15 years.     

Workshop on unconfined vapor cloud explosions

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the principle points made during the course of the workshop, identify (to whatever extent is possible) a consensus position of the panel members on key issues, and to review research needs as identified by the panel. No attempt will be made to summarize each panel members' individual presentation, as such, since there was considerable overlap both in the presentation topics and in the subsequent discussions.     

对丹尼尔·伯恩鲍姆的访问

茜茜:此次主题展的题目《制造世界》从何而来?丹尼尔·伯恩鲍姆:这个题目源于美国哲学家纳尔逊·古德曼(Nelson Goodman)的一本很棒的书《构造世界的多种方式》,它试图传达出一种信息而不是试图做出规定。"制造"这一理念涉及的是工作室环境下的艺术,同博物馆中的艺术有很大差别。