Coverage of Behavioral and Experimental Economics in Undergraduate Microeconomics Textbooks

Here is the latest draft the paper “Coverage of Behavioral and Experimental Economics in Undergraduate Microeconomics Textbooks” which I wrote with Minna Autio. Here is the abstract: This paper analyzes to what degree 25 undergraduate microeconomics textbooks incorporate contributions from behavioral economics and experimental economics.

We find that ten of the 25 textbooks examined make no reference at all to behavioral economics; six dedicate less than 1% of total pages to it, six between 1% and 2.6 %, and three between 6% and 11%. When behavioral economics is discussed, the focus tends to be on bounded rationality rather than on bounded self-interest or bounded willpower. Experimental economics is not discussed at all in ten textbooks, twelve textbooks dedicate less than 0.6% of total pages to it, while three dedicate between 2% and 10% of total pages.

We discuss the possible causes of the detected variation in the coverage of behavioral economics drawing from a variety of qualitative materials.

Keywords: behavioral economics, economics education and teaching of economics, experimental economics, microeconomics, psychology, textbooks.

JEL classification codes: A22, B49, B59, D01.

The Status of Women in Environmental Economics

Bhattacharjee, Herriges and Kling examine the “Status of women in Environmental Economics” in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Summer 2007, v. 1, iss. 2, pp. 212-27. Here is the abstract:

” This article examines the status of women in the environmental economics profession in terms of their representation and impact. Three indicators are used to gauge the status of women in the profession. They are the representation of women in academia in the United States and Canada, the publication profiles of female environmental economists, and the representation of women in the roles of leadership within the professional association and lead journal of the profession. In a survey of schools with graduate programs in environmental economics, we find that female environmental economists are better represented in the faculty of noneconomics departments than in those of economics departments. A study of the publication profiles of women in the profession’s main journal, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, indicates that women publish fewer articles on average than their male counterparts, and their papers receive fewer citations on average. Women are well represented in the leadership of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and also in editorial positions at the Journal of Environment Economics and Management.”

Summer School on Social Norms 14. July 2008 to 17. July 2008

For graduates and postgraduates  with a research interest in Social Norms, the University of the Basque Country’s  and the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation’s XI summer school on economics and philosophy will  focus on social norms.  The summer school will take placein San Sebastian, Spain from 14. July 2008 to 17. July 2008. The deadline for applications is  31. January 2008. Further information at  http://www.urrutiaelejalde.org/SummerSchool/2008.html as well as below

 ”A summer school organized by the University of the Basque Country and the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation.
San Sebastián, July 14-17 (2008)

Director: Cristina Bicchieri (UPenn)

Coordinators: Alfonso Dubois (UPV/EHU), David Teira & Jesús Zamora(UNED)

Aims and Scope | Speakers | Call for papers

1. Aims and scope:

Since 1998 the Urrutia Elejalde has annually organized a Summer School on frontier topics between philosophy, economics and other social sciences, bringing together scholars from all these fields to explore them. The aim of this year Summer School is to introduce participants to the vast research that is taking place in the area of social norms. From philosophy and psychology to evolutionary game theory and experimental economics, recent work on social norms is shedding light on why and under what circumstances people engage in pro-social behavior, and how norms may emerge, stabilize or decay.

2. Preliminary list of speakers

Jason Alexander (LSE), Daniel Andler (Paris IV-ENS), Cristina Bicchieri (UPenn), Jordi Brandts (UAB), Pablo Brañas (Ugr), Cristiano Castelfranchi (ISTC- CNR), Jason DanaJon Elster (Columbia+College de France), Diego Gambetta (Oxford), Herbert Gintis (UMass), Russell Hardin (NYU), Shaun Nichols (U. Arizona), Dan SperberEdna Ullmann-Margalit (Jerusalem) (UPenn), (CNRS),

3. Call for papers

We encourage submission of papers that cover one or more of the above areas. The scientific committe will consider a number of submissions by young scholars at graduate or postgraduate level. The Foundation will cover the registration fees and accomodation expenses of the authors. Please send a 2000 words pdf abstract to David Teira (dteira [@] fsof.uned.es) before Jan 31st 2008. A decision will be made by March 15th.

Scientific Committee: Cristina Bicchieri, Jason Alexander, Jason Dana, Diego Gambetta.”

 

Timothy Taylor’s new Principle of Economics textbook free download

Free exchange reports that ” TIMOTHY TAYLOR, a man Brad DeLong calls, “The best intro econ teacher I know,” has a textbook out“. The book is available as a free download.

Taylor himself writes “The publisher, Freeload Press, will earn revenue by selling advertising on the website where the book is distributed. Also, when you download chapters (as PDF files), the first couple of pages might be advertisements. There is a short registration form, but downloads are free.”

Here are the links for the free donwloads:

Principles of Macroeconomics

Principles of Microeconomics

A note of caution: registration in my case turned out to be problematic: the system did not recognize my university address and I could never get past the registration step (I am going to retry registering again tomorrow).

Roth on repugnant markets

Al Roth discusses repugnant markets in the paper  Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets
published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives,  Summer 2007. Vol. 21, Iss. 3. You can get an earlier draft of the paper from here. You can also read Roth’s discussion with Martha Lagace on the topic in Repugnant Markets and How They Get That Way. The Economist blog Free Exchangealso discusses Roth’s paper in Repugnant markets: it’s not just kidneys.

Repugnant markets

“Thousands of people die every year while on the waiting list for a kidney; billions have a spare kidney. There’s the possibility of a trade here, but buying and selling kidneys is widely thought of as, frankly, a repugnant exploitation of the poor by the rich. Should it be? (…) Kidney selling is just one example of a repugnant market …”

Tim Harford discussed repugnant markets in a BBC News programme, from which I took the except above. Now he takes up the issue again in his blog. Russ Roberts also discusses with Richard Epstein what we should be allowed to sell and buy in a podcast on the economics of organ donation at EconTalk.

Good food for thought.

Trends in undergraduate economics degrees awarded to women in 2001-2006

Siegfried (2007) reports that the percentage of undergraduate degrees in economics awarded to women “has declined slowly but steadily over the past five years, from a peak of 34.4 percent in 2001 to 31.0 percent in 2006. Although the decline in the share of women among undergraduate economics degrees awarded over the past five years is only 3.4 percentage points, the drop has occurred during a period when the share of all bachelor’s degrees earned by women has risen from 57.2 to 59.0 percent.“

See Trends in Undergraduate Economics Degrees, 1991-2006 by John J Siegfried in the Journal of Economic Education. Washington: Summer 2007. Vol. 38, Iss. 3; pg. 360

Divorce and the environment

 

Resource-inefficient lifestyles such as divorce?  Yu and Liu in Environmental impacts of divorce , published online Dec 5 2007 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA suggest that divorce increase the amount of resources devoted to housing and quantify such increase.

The point they make is simple: there are economies of scale in housing so that a person living in a large household consumes less resources than one living in a smaller one. Divorce increases the number of households and thereby the amount of resources housing uses up.

In the abstract, the authors use the expression “resource-inefficient lifestyles such as divorce“. I am perplexed: shouldn’t one evaluate the efficiency or inefficiency of a lifestyle taking into account, in addition to the resource used, also the benefit such use yields? Russ Roberts is outright critical in Not from the Onion:

“The environmental impact of divorce? Are you kidding me? This is the cost of not understanding economics, not understanding trade-offs, not understanding the role of prices. The virtue of prices is that prices tell us what things cost. Some things are relatively cheap. Some are relatively expensive. Marriage is tough on cotton. When you marry, you tend to have kids. Kids tend to wear clothes and that means marriage is tough on cotton. But we don’t worry about that. We understand that the price of clothes discourages people from consuming too much clothing. And when clothing gets cheaper, as it has over the last 50 years, people buy more clothing as a result, use more cotton, devote more land to cotton farming and so on. That’s not a downside of marriage or having kids–people pay for the clothing they use. They take account of the cost when they decide to buy something. So when they do buy it or use it, that means that the benefits outweigh the costs. And that means that live IMPROVES and gets better, not worse when we use more of something.

In the case of water or electricity, if they’re subsidized, then yes, people ignore the full costs when they use more of those things, whether it’s because they’re divorced or simply because they want a warmer home or take a longer shower. The solution isn’t to decry divorce, it’s to fix the prices.”

We could fix prices with Pigouvian taxes as suggested in the Pigou club manifesto.

More on the topic: NPR podcast ‘Marketplace:’ Divorce, an Environmental Hazard?

Becker and Posner on carbon offsets

Becker and Posner discuss carbon offsets on the Becker-Posner blog. Posner suggests that the most serious drawback of the carbon offset movement is that it “creates the false impression that global warming can be tamed by voluntary efforts just as cleaning up after dogs has been achieved by voluntary efforts, without need for legal compulsion. Global warming cannot be tamed by voluntary efforts, because the costs of significantly reducing carbon emissions in order to reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (or at least stop it from increasing) are enormous. If people believe that voluntary efforts will suffice, there will be no political pressure to incur the heavy costs that will be necessary to avert the risk of catastrophic climate change.“

In a comment Adam Stein co-founder of TerraPass, a carbon offsets selling company objects: “…offsets are not a substitute for cap-and-trade at all. Rather, the voluntary market is a potentially useful complement to a regulated market, acting in the short-term as a sort of policy bridge while the world waits for the U.S. federal government to take meaningful action; and in the long term as a supplementary source of carbon reductions…Regarding whether the existence of a voluntary market reduces political pressure for mandated reductions: this is a charge that is made frequently, and without real evidence. Awareness of the causes and potential solutions of climate change is still dismally low in the United States, and it is hard to see the disadvantage of programs which draw attention to the problem. In fact, the rise of the voluntary market has coincided with a remarkable surge in support for political solutions to climate change.”

Taleb’s Black Swan

I recently finished reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, a book I found very stimulating. For those who aren’t acquainted with this book, here is a link to the good Ecological Economics blog post Nassim Taleb on Cultural Blinders and the excellent interview with Taleb on EconTalk podcast. See also Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Home Page.