Selections
Economics Seminar Series
All seminars are 3:30 - 5:00 and in room 441 B&E Building, except as noted.
Fall 2005 - Back to Resources Page
9/9/05:
Phil Graves, University of Colorado,
"Some Implications of a Flaw in the Valuation of Public Goods"
Abstract: For at least fifty years economists have believed that vertically-aggregated marginal willingness to pay, when set equal to marginal provision cost, will result in optimal public good provision levels. This methodological approach has been thought to yield an exact analog, in terms of optimal levels of public good provision, to efficient provision of private goods in a perfect market setting. There is, however, a serious flaw in this approach. While the so-called "demand revelation" problem has long been recognized, there will also be a concomitant "supply revelation" problem that has gone unrecognized. That is, since individuals cannot individually purchase public goods by generating income, they will have no incentive to generate any income that would have been devoted to public goods. Even with perfect demand revelation out of current income, the additional demands facilitated by income that would be generated, if public goods could be purchased as ordinarily private goods, go unobserved. As a consequence, there will be an infinite number of apparent optima, at any of which the public good will appear to have costs greater than benefits when true benefits exceed costs. Evidence is presented that this problem is of practical importance, with likely substantial undervaluation of pure public goods, and other goods for which non-use values are of importance.
9/23/05:
Bill Goffe, SUNY-Oswego,
"Multi-core CPUs, Clusters, and Grid Computing: A Tutorial"
9/30/05:
Pavel Yakovlev, West Virginia University
"Do Democracies Value Life Differently From Dictatorships in Miliatary Conflicts?"
10/7/05:
Todd Sandler, University of Southern California
"Terrorism: A Game-Theoretic Approach"
10/14/05:
Peter Boettke, George Mason University,
"Saving Government Failure Theory from Itself: Recasting Political Economy from an Austrian Perspective"
Abstract: The economics approach to politics revolutionized the way scholars in economics and political science approached the study of political decision-making by introducing the possibility of government failure. However, the persistent and consistent application of neoclassical models of economics also seemed to suggest that once the full costs were accounted for, this failure was an illusion. This paper counters these arguments associated with George Stigler, Gary Becker and more recently Donald Wittman, at the core of the economic theory that underlies their approach. In contrast, we develop an alternative model of political economy grounded in the Austrian conception of the dynamic market process.
10/28/05:
Christopher Wheeler, St. Louis Fed,
"Local Market Scale and the Pattern of Job Changes Among Young Men"
Abstract: In finding a career, workers tend to make numerous job changes, with the majority of 'complex' changes (i.e. those involving changes of industry) occurring relatively early in their working lives. This pattern suggest that workers tend to experiment with different types of work before settling on the one they like best. Of course, since the extent of economic diversity differs substantially across local labor markets in the U.S. (e.g. counties and cities), this career search process may exhibit important differences depending on the size of a worker's local market. This paper explores this issue using a sample of young male workers drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort. The results uncover two rather striking patters. First, the likelihood that a worker changes industries rises with the size and diversity of his local labor market when considering the first job change he makes. Second, however, this association gradually decreases as a worker makes greater numbers of job changes. By the time he makes his fourth change, the likelihood of changing industries significantly decreases with the scale and diversity of the local market. Both results are consistent with the idea that cities play an important role in the job matching process.
11/4/05:
Howard Wall, St. Louis Fed,
"Creating a Policy Environment for Entrepreneurs"
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