This chapter presents an economic approach to character and personality traits with an application to the study of virtue. Economists interpret psychological traits, including character traits and virtue, as strategies that shape responses to situations (actions) determined by underlying...

In this chapter, we discuss field experiments in surveys that are conducted with the purpose of learning about expectation formation and the link between expectations and behavior. We begin by reviewing the rationale for conducting experiments within surveys, rather than just relying on...

This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is really an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but...

In applied historical research, geographic units often differ in level of aggregation across datasets. One solution is to use crosswalks that associate factors located within one geographic unit to another, based on their relative areas. We develop an alternative approach based on relative...

Efforts to document long-term trends in socioeconomic mobility in the United States have been hindered by the lack of large, representative datasets that include information linking parents to their adult children. This problem has been especially acute for women, who are more difficult to link...

Confederate monetary reforms encouraged holders of Treasury notes to exchange these notes for bonds by imposing deadlines on their convertibility. We show that Confederate funding acts aimed at precipitating the conversion of currency into bonds did temporarily suppress currency depreciation....