Much of the political economy analysis of reform focuses on the conflict of interest between groups that stand to gain or lose from the competing policy proposals. In reality, there is also a lot of disagreement about the working of the policy: in addition to conflicting interests, conflicting...

Markets are ubiquitous in our daily life and, despite many imperfections, they are a great source of human welfare. Nevertheless, there is a heated recent debate on whether markets erode social responsibility and moral behavior. In fact, competitive pressure on markets may create strong...

When policymakers and private agents use models, the economists who design the model have an incentive to alter it in order to influence outcomes in a fashion consistent with their own preferences. I discuss some consequences of the existence of such ideological bias. In particular, I analyze...

The Cold War division of Korea, regarded as a natural experiment in institutional change, provides a unique opportunity to examine whether institutions affect social preferences. We recruited North Korean refugees and South Korean students to conduct laboratory experiments eliciting social...

Two very different approaches are used to explore the relation between market orientation and gender wage differentials in international data. More market orientation might be related to gender wage gaps via its effects on competition in product and labor markets and the general absence of...

Why does inequality vary across societies? We advance the hypothesis that in a market economy, where earning differentials reflect variations in productive traits among individuals, a significant component of the differences in inequality across societies can be attributed to variation in...

Using a new set of micro evidence from an original survey of 28 transition countries, we show that democracy increases citizens' support for the market by guaranteeing income redistribution to inequality-averse agents. Our identification strategy relies on the restriction of the sample to...

This paper uses as source material twenty-three autobiographical essays by Nobel economists presented since 1984 at Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas) and published in Lives of the Laureates (MIT Press). A goal of the lecture series is to enhance understanding of the link between biography...

We use roster data of 96 top U.S. economics departments to document the academic origins of their tenure-track faculty. Academic origins may have implications for how undergraduate (B.A.) and doctoral (Ph.D.) students are trained and placed, as well as the type of research produced. We find that...