This volume presents the results of archaeological work carried out by MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) at Highflyer Farm in 2018. Remains dating from the Neolithic to the post-medieval period ...were recorded, with most of the activity occurring between the early Iron Age and late Roman periods.
This lecture considers the case for consumer financial regulation in an environment where many households lack the knowledge to manage their financial affairs effectively. The lecture argues that ...financial ignorance is pervasive and unsurprising given the complexity of modern financial products, and that it contributes meaningfully to the evolution of wealth inequality. The lecture uses a stylized model to discuss the welfare economics of paternalistic intervention in financial markets, and discusses several specific examples including asset allocation in retirement savings, fees for unsecured short-term borrowing, and reverse mortgages.
The Economist as Plumber Duflo, Esther
The American economic review,
05/2017, Volume:
107, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
As economists increasingly help governments design new policies and regulations, they take on an added responsibility to engage with the details of policy making and, in doing so, to adopt the ...mindset of a plumber. Plumbers try to predict as well as possible what may work in the real world, mindful that tinkering and adjusting will be necessary since our models gives us very little theoretical guidance on what (and how) details will matter. This essay argues that economists should seriously engage with plumbing, in the interest of both society and our discipline.
The debate about behavioral economics-the incorporation of insights from psychology into economics-is often framed as a question about the foundational assumptions of economic models. This paper ...presents a more pragmatic perspective on behavioral economics that focuses on its value for improving empirical predictions and policy decisions. I discuss three ways in which behavioral economics can contribute to public policy: by offering new policy tools, improving predictions about the effects of existing policies, and generating new welfare implications. I illustrate these contributions using applications to retirement savings, labor supply, and neighborhood choice. Behavioral models provide new tools to change behaviors such as savings rates and new counterfactuals to estimate the effects of policies such as income taxation. Behavioral models also provide new prescriptions for optimal policy that can be characterized in a non-paternalistic manner using methods analogous to those in neoclassical models. Model uncertainty does not justify using the neoclassical model; instead, it can provide a new rationale for using behavioral nudges. I conclude that incorporating behavioral features to the extent they help answer core economic questions may be more productive than viewing behavioral economics as a separate subfield that challenges the assumptions of neoclassical models.
Immigration and Inequality Card, David
The American economic review,
05/2009, Volume:
99, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper presents an overview and synthesis of research on the connection between immigration and wage inequality, focusing on the evidence derived from comparisons across major US cities.
During Pennsylvanian to Early Permian time, much of southwestern Laurentia experienced broad deformation far from the nearest plate boundaries. The bulk of this deformation is known as the Ancestral ...Rocky Mountains orogeny, which consists of several basement uplifts and proximal basins north and northwest of the Ouachita‐Marathon suture. The Ely‐Bird Spring basin formed during this time, located between the classic Ancestral Rocky Mountains and the complex and poorly constrained western Laurentian margin. In this study, we used tectonic subsidence curve analyses to evaluate the tectonic style of basin subsidence in this basin and several northern Ancestral Rocky Mountains basins. The Ely‐Bird Spring and Wood River basins have convex upward and stair‐stepped tectonic subsidence curves similar to curves from migrating foreland basins. These curves, combined with sedimentological and structural data, are consistent with these basins forming due to loading from the west and northwest as part of the complex western Laurentian plate boundary, not due to classic Ancestral Rocky Mountains tectonics. The other northern Ancestral Rocky Mountains basins have much steeper and more linear subsidence curves, similar to foreland basins with fixed loads. However, the Oquirrh basin, in particular, displays a large amount of subsidence far from hypothesized tectonic drivers of deformation. A combination of transmitted stress from both the western Laurentia margin and traditional Ancestral Rocky Mountains tectonism explains the anomalously large subsidence in the Oquirrh basin. Therefore, transmitted stresses from more than one side of western and southern Laurentia are required to explain the observed pattern of deformation.
Key Points
The Ely‐Bird Spring and Wood River basins have different subsidence mechanisms than coeval Ancestral Rocky Mountains basins
The Ely‐Bird Spring and Wood River basins formed due to loading from periodic contraction to the west and northwest
Transmitted stress from more than one side of southwestern Laurentia is required to explain observed Late Paleozoic intraplate deformation
US cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were five decades ago. Yet, urban non-college workers perform substantially less skilled jobs than decades earlier. This ...deskilling reflects the joint effects of automation and, secondarily, rising international trade, which have eliminated the bulk of non-college production, administrative support, and clerical jobs, yielding a disproportionate polarization of urban labor markets. The unwinding of the urban non-college occupational skill gradient has, I argue, abetted a secular fall in real non-college wages by: (1) shunting non-college workers out of specialized middle-skill occupations into low-wage occupations that require only generic skills; (2) diminishing the set of non-college workers that hold middle-skill jobs in high-wage cities; and (3) attenuating, to a startling degree, the steep urban wage premium for non-college workers that prevailed in earlier decades. Changes in the nature of work--many of which are technological in origin--have been more disruptive and less beneficial for non-college than college workers.
Are discrepancies between national exports and imports ever a legitimate cause for government concern or intervention? The question is as old as economic theory itself. Sixteenth-century English ...writers deplored the drainage of precious metals implied by decits in foreign trade; as a result, the term balance of trade had entered into public discourse by the early seventeenth century. David Hume's account in 1752 of the price-specie-ow mechanism, arguably the greatest set piece of classical monetary economics, vanquished for many years the mercantilist position that the perpetual accumulation of external wealth was both desirable and feasible. More than 250 years later, however, the foreign trade imbalances of national units - including even some that share common currencies - still gure prominently in debates over economic policy.
Elderly individuals exhibit wide disparities in their sources of income. For those in the bottom half of the income distribution, Social Security is the most important source of support; program ...changes would directly affect their well-being. Income from private pensions, assets, and earnings are relatively more important for higher-income elderly individuals, who have more diverse income sources. The trend from private sector defined benefit to defined contribution pension plans has shifted responsibility for retirement security to individuals. A significant subset of the population is unlikely to be able to sustain their standard of living in retirement without higher pre-retirement saving.
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