We examine an evolutionary model of preferences in a society where resources are finite. Agents who develop better strategies for bargaining and trading will grow to dominate the population. We show that successful agents will have preferences that exhibit the "endowment effect". The social...

This paper presents results from a 1971 natural experiment carried out by the Canadian government on the unemployment insurance system. At that time they dramatically increased the generosity of the system. We find that the propensity to collect UI increases with a first time exposure to the...

In standard shirking models of efficiency wages, workers are motivated only by high wages. Yet 23% of young US workers report receiving some form of performance pay. This paper extends the efficiency wage framework using the theory of self-enforcing agreements to allow for performance pay in the...

Gift giving is a practice common to many societies. In an evolutionary model the social custom of giving gifts at the beginning of a relationship can lead to trust and cooperation. The evolutionary approach makes predictions about the character of the goods that can be used as gifts. For...

This paper introduces a model of contract incompleteness and bounded rationality based on the multi-tasking model of Holmstrom and Milgrom (1991). It is shown that the trade-off between the use of an employment relationship versus and explicit state contingent contract depends on number of tasks...

Research by Chirinko (1982,1985,1987) makes a convincing argument that Q theory is unlikely to provide a satisfactory investment model. However, Klock Thies, and Baum (1991) show that Q is commonly mismeasured. The finding is applicable to Chirinko’s empirical research and raises the question...

By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership. We study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the...

This tutorial will discuss a number of elementary Stata programming constructs and discuss how they may be used to automate and robustify common data manipulation, estimation and graphics tasks. Those used to the syntax of other statistical packages or programming languages must adopt a...

Using comparable micro-level data from three countries, we ask what type of person works in the informal sector and whether informal workers earn lower wages than observationally equivalent workers in the formal sector. The characteristics of informal workers are similar across countries....

This paper provides estimators of discrete choice models, including binary, ordered, and multinomial response (choice) models. The estimators closely resemble ordinary and two stage least squares. The distribution of the model's latent variable error is unknown and may be related to the...