Author Archives: mar50@duke.edu

Attached to this post is a presentation given by Olga Kozlova and Kira Stearns to the Theory for Non-theorists seminar.  The presentation discusses “Public Information and Election Bias” by  Curtis R. Taylor and Huseyin Yildrim. Click here to view the presentation.

Attached to this post is a presentation given by Traviss Cassidy and Salama Freed discussing Edward Glaeser’s 2005 paper, “The Political Economy of Hatred.”  The paper discusses how politicians may spread hatred when their policies may harm a particular group in an effort to create the desire to exclude or deprive that particular group in [...]

In the attached notes, Kristin Johnson presents some of her own research on the role of subjective health expectations in HIV treatment related decision making.  She also examines additional literature, by Ahmed Khwaja, Frank Sloan, and Sukyung Chung, exploring the determinants of smoking. Click here to read more.

Attached to this post is a presentation given by Eric Banister and Matt Panhans to the Theory for Non-theorists seminar.   The presentation covers the Coase Theorem as well as Coase’s journey to getting the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics. Click here to view the presentation.

This presentation will start with the brief introduction of contract theory (Section 1). Then it will explore how to fit the selling of innovative ideas into the standard contract theory model (Section 2). Section 3, will present the 3 different contracting models based on the 2 papers. Section 4 is a brief summary.  Click here [...]

Research tournaments have been long used in business, government and academia for inducing research activity. Theoretically, a research tournament is, usually, adopted by a monopsonist as a method for committing itself to reward agents in an environment of unobservable research inputs und unverifiable research outcomes.  Click here to read more notes on this paper by Curtis [...]

In  Neuroeconomics: Using Neuroscience to Make Economic Predictions, Colin F. Camerer analyzes  the interaction between activity in the brain and the decisions made in different scenarios. In Myopic Loss Aversion and the Equity Premium Puzzle, Shlomo Benartzi and Richard H. Thaler explore the ideas of loss aversion and frequent evaluation.  Using these concept, they examine [...]

In this paper, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson examine the implications of changes in political institutions for economic institutions. Empirical evidence on whether the former leads to the latter is mixed, as are the results of cross country regressions with which others researchers tried to reveal the effect of political institutions on economic outcomes [...]

Previously, it has been assumed that well-defined property rights are necessary to promote economic growth in a post-socialist economy. David D. Li discusses the case of firms outside of the Chinese state/public sector, where ownership rights are often unclear. Yet it has been observed that the output of these firms has been an important component [...]

In the paper, Robert Solow applies the max-min principle to an optimal growth problem that assumes a continuum of generations. (An infinite number of infinitesimally small generations.) The model is based on Frank Ramsey’s 1928 article, “A Mathematical Theory of Saving,” though Solow’s optimization of the model is completely different. To read more, click here.