Economics and ethics both offer important perspectives on our society, but they do so from two different viewpoints - the central focus of economics is how the price system in our economy values resources; the central focus of ethics is the moral evaluation of actions in our society. The rise of...

We show that capital flows to emerging market economies create externalities that differ by an order of magnitude depending on the state-contingent payoff profile of the flows. Those with pro-cyclical payoffs, such as foreign currency debt, generate substantial negative pecuniary externalities...

In an interconnected world, national economic policies regularly lead to large international spillover effects, which frequently trigger calls for international policy cooperation. However, the premise of successful cooperation is that there is a Pareto inefficiency, i.e. if there is scope to...

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have the potential to revolutionize research in economics and other disciplines. I describe 25 use cases along six domains in which LLMs are starting to become useful as both research assistants and tutors: ideation, writing, background research, data...

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more powerful and widespread, the AI alignment problem--how to ensure that AI systems pursue the goals that we want them to pursue--has garnered growing attention. This article distinguishes two types of alignment problems depending on whose goals we...

Antimicrobial use in animal agriculture contributes to antimicrobial resistance in humans, which imposes significant health and economic costs on society. These costs are negative externalities. We review the relevant literature and develop a model to quantify the external costs of antimicrobial...

This paper synthesizes recent advances in the theoretical and empirical literature on capital controls. We start by observing that international capital flows have both benefits and costs, but some of these are not internalized by individual actors and thus constitute externalities. The...