When deciding how to weigh benefits to different groups, standard economic models assume that people focus on the final distribution of utility, health or whatever. Thus, an egalitarian is assumed to be an egalitarian in the outcome space. But what about egalitarianism in the gains space, such that people focus instead on how equally benefits are distributed? This paper reports on a study in wh...

Land-use changes have dramatically transformed tropical landscapes. We describe an ecological-economic land-use change model as an integrated, exploratory tool used to analyze how tropical land-use change affects ecological and socio-economic functions. The model analysis seeks to determine what kind of landscape mosaic can improve the ensemble of ecosystem functioning, biodiversity, and econom...

The human enterprise is flooding Earth's ecosystems with exotic species. Human population size is often correlated with species introductions, whereas more proximate mechanisms, such as economic activities, are frequently overlooked. Here we present a hypothesis that links ecology and economics to provide a causal framework for the distribution of exotic plants in the United States. We test two...

The environmental impacts of land use vary regionally. Differences in geomorphology, climate, landscape structure, and biotope inventories are regarded as the main causes of this variation. We present a methodological approach for identifying regional responses in land use type to large-scale changes and the implications for the provision of habitat for farmland birds. The methodological innova...

Decisions involving charitable giving often occur under the shadow of risk. A common finding is that potential donors give less when there is greater risk that their donation will have less impact. While this behavior could be fully rationalized by standard economic models, this paper shows that an additional mechanism is relevant: the use of risk as an excuse not to give. In a laboratory study...

The challenge of effective merger enforcement is tremendous. U.S. antitrust agencies must, by statute, quickly forecast the competitive effects of mergers that occur in virtually every sector of the economy to determine if mergers can proceed. Surprisingly, given the complexity of the regulators task, there is remarkably little empirical evidence on the effects of mergers to guide regulators. T...

The adoption of neo-liberal economic models in Latin American countries between the late 1980's and early 1990's has led to, among other impacts, a significant change in the rural production model, with a clear incentive to exportation-oriented agribusiness, especially that based on extensive monoculture (soy-bean, corn, cotton etc.). This change, primarily focused on rural production increment...

We consider an economic model that features : 1. a continuum of agents 2. an aggregate state of the world over which agents have an infinitesimal influence. We first propose a review, based on work by Jara (2007), of the connections between the “eductive viewpoint” that puts emphasis on “Strongly Rational Expectations equilibrium” and the standard game-theoretical rationalizability concepts. We...

Various economic models are used for forecasting the macro-economy at the New Zealand Treasury. One of the models is NZM98, which is a macroeconometric model of the NZ economy that was developed by Chris Murphy in 1998. NZM98 is constructed in the style of the Murphy Model of Australia, but is modified to allow for differences in institutional structures, data availability and data properties b...

Empirical models with social interactions or peer effects allow the outcome of an individual to depend on the outcomes, choices, treatments, and/or characteristics of the other individuals in the group. We document the subtle relationship between the data and the objects of interest in models with interactions in small groups, and show that some econometric assumptions, that are direct extensio...