Upcoming seminars of potential interest at Columbia Monday, Feb. 22
12.10-1.30, Schermerhorn 200C (Psych Dept Cognitive Lunch) Brian Scholl (Yale) “It's Alive!: Perceiving Animacy, and Some Visual Roots of Social Cognition” iCal (to add this event to your calendar)
2.40-4.00, Schermerhorn 200C (Psych Dept Social Snack) Becca Franks (Columbia) “The Role of Motivation in Individual Differences in Animal Behavior” iCal (to add this event to your calendar)
2.30-4.00, IAB 1027 (Economic Theory Workshop) Larry Blume (Cornell/Santa Fe Institute) Title TBA iCal (to add this event to your calendar)
Tuesday, Feb. 23
2:15-3:45, IAB 1027 (I.O., Organizations, and Strategy) Heski Bar-Isaac (NYU) “Search, Design, and Market Structure” iCal (to add this event to your calendar)
4:15-5:45, IAB 1027 (Money Macro Workshop) Victor Rios-Rull (U. of Minnesota) “Credit Lines” iCal (to add this event to your calendar)
Wednesday, Feb. 24
4:15-5:45, IAB 1027 (Applied Microeconomics Seminar) Heather Royer (UC Santa Barbara) “The Effect of Education on Adult Mortality and Health: Evidence from Britain” iCal (to add this event to your calendar)
4.10-5.30, Schermerhorn 614 (Psych Dept Colloquium) Karen Adolph (NYU) “Learning to Move” iCal (to add this event to your calendar)
Thursday, Feb. 25
4.00-5.30 Uris Hall room TBA (Finance Division Seminar) Nagpurnanand Prabhala (U. of Maryland) iCal (to add this event to your calendar)
Upcoming seminars of potential interest at NYU Monday, Feb. 22
2.00-?, Room 624, 19 West 4th St. (Colloquium on Market Institutions & Economic Processes) T. Clark Durant (NYU) “Making Politics Mutually Productive” iCal (to add this event to your calendar) Thursday, Feb. 25 12.30-1.30, Room 517, 19 West 4th St. (CESS Experimental Economics seminar) John Ledyard (Caltech) Title TBA
Weblink of the week A common objection to the moral hazard explanation of the financial crisis is the following: Bankers did not explicitly factor in the possibility of being bailed out. In fact, they genuinely believed that their firms could not possibly collapse under any circumstances… This objection errs in assuming that the moral hazard problem requires an explicit intention on the part of economic agents to take on more risk and maximise the free lunch available courtesy of the taxpayer…. Reaching this optimum does not require explicit intentionality on the part of economic actors. The same may be achieved via a Hayekian spontaneous order of agents reacting to local incentives or even more generally through “natural selection”-like mechanisms.
http://www.macroresilience.com/2010/02/17/natural-selection-self-deception-and-moral-hazard/ Working paper of the week
Medium of Exchange Matters: What’s Fair for Goods Is Unfair for Money Sanford E. DeVoe and Sheena S. Iyengar
From Psychological Science published online 8 January 2010
Abstract: Organized groups face a fundamental problem of how to distribute resources fairly. We found people view it as less fair to distribute resources equally when the allocated resource invokes the market by being a medium of exchange than when the allocated resource is a good that holds value in use. These differences in fairness can be attributed to being a medium of exchange, and not to other essential properties of money (i.e., being a unit of account or a store of value). These findings suggest that egalitarian outcomes have a greater likelihood of being accepted as fair when the resources being distributed take the form of in-kind goods rather than of cash transfers. |
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