scholarly journals Are Economists Different, and If So, Why?

1991 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R Carter ◽  
Michael D Irons
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Public Economics ◽  
Free Riding ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Behavioral Difference ◽  
Student Groups ◽  
Economics Students ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Interest Model ◽  
Over Time

Do economists behave differently from noneconomists? Some evidence suggests they do. In a well-known 1981 study in the Journal of Public Economics, Gerald Marwell and Ruth E. Ames found that free riding was significantly greater among a group of economics graduate students than among other student groups in their experiments. Marwell and Ames offered two conjectures for why economics students might in fact behave differently. First, students who are particularly concerned with economic incentives might self-select into economics. In addition, or alternatively, economics students might adapt their behavior over time to the basic axioms of the theories they study. These conjectures may be called respectively the selection and learning hypotheses. In this paper we explore whether Marwell and Ames' result is robust—whether economists are indeed different. In particular, we use a simple ultimatum bargaining experiment to test whether economics students behave more in accordance with predictions of the rational/self-interest model of economics. Finding that a behavioral difference does exist, we then conduct tests to discriminate between the selection and learning hypotheses.

Public Service, Public Goods, and the Common Good

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerardo Sanchis Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
International Agencies ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Common ◽  
Appointed Officials

The proper provision of public goods by a well-functioning, impartial government is not the only thing necessary for attaining the common good, but it is essential. The economic view of the human person as a rational, self-interested maximizer has become pervasive in analyzing government dysfunction and is employed by international agencies to generate proposals to realign the economic incentives of government officials. But this mindset assumes and encourages self-interest and undermines idoneidad (suitability)—which includes integrity, motivation, and competence—as the most fundamental characteristic that must be demanded of both elected and appointed officials at all levels of government. The failure of public institutions in Argentina is employed as a telling example of such problems.

Reasonable Self-Interest

1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-85
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Hill
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Rational Requirement ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Interest Model ◽  
Moral Requirements

Philosophers have debated for millennia about whether moral requirements are always rational to follow. The background for these debates is often what I shall call “the self-interest model.” The guiding assumption here is that the basic demand of reason, to each person, is that one must, above all, advance one's self-interest. Alternatively, debate may be framed by a related, but significantly different, assumption: the idea that the basic rational requirement is to develop and pursue a set of personal ends in an informed, efficient, and coherent way, whether one's choice of ends is based on self-interested desires or not. For brevity I refer to this as “the coherence-and-efficiency model.” Advocates of both models tend to think that, while it is sufficiently clear in principle what the rational thing to do is, what remains in doubt is whether it is always rational to be moral. They typically assume that morality is concerned, entirely or primarily, with our relations to others, especially with obligations that appear to require some sacrifice or compromise with the pursuit of self-interest.

scholarly journals Rallying the troops

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 366-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy JA Passmore ◽  
Megan Shannon ◽  
Andrew F Hart
Keyword(s):  
Action Theory ◽  
Free Riding ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Member States ◽  
Free Ride ◽  
Un Peacekeeping ◽  
Selective Incentives ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Peacekeeping Missions

Is the acquisition of personnel for UN peacekeeping missions susceptible to free-riding by UN member states? If so, what drives this behavior and what impact does this have on obtaining required personnel for the mission? Using data from 21 missions in 13 African countries between 1990 and 2010, this article addresses whether UN peacekeeping missions experience a shortfall in personnel due to incentives to free-ride by contributing states. It argues that as the number of states contributing to a mission increases, contributors have a greater incentive to free-ride and make suboptimal personnel contributions, leading to greater overall shortfall in the mission’s personnel. However, this free-riding behavior can be mitigated by the economic incentives of contributor states. The findings support two central tenets of collective action theory: that free-riding by member states contributing to the mission is more prevalent when the number of contributors is larger, and when selective incentives such as economic gains are lower. These findings have implications for the strategic composition and efficacy of peacekeeping forces. More broadly, the results underscore the struggle of international organizations to obtain compliance from member states in achieving their international objectives.

Field Specializations among Beginning Economists: Are There Gender Differences?

2021 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 86-91
Author(s):  
Eva Sierminska ◽  
Ronald L. Oaxaca
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Industrial Organization ◽  
Graduate Students ◽  
Public Economics ◽  
Dissimilarity Index ◽  
Institutional Variables ◽  
Academic Employment ◽  
Macro Finance

We examine the process underlying field specialization among beginning economists. Our multivariate logit framework accommodates single-and dual-field specializations with correlated choices. Including field-specific relative salaries and expected probabilities of academic employment is a novel aspect of this research. After conditioning on personal, economic, and institutional variables, we find that women graduate students are less likely to specialize in labor/health, macro/finance, industrial organization, public economics, and development/growth/international fields and are more likely to specialize in agricultural/resource/environmental fields. The Duncan dissimilarity index suggests that 14 percent of either sex would have to change specialization in order to achieve complete parity.

scholarly journals Social Preferences, Beliefs, and the Dynamics of Free Riding in Public Goods Experiments

2010 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 541-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Urs Fischbacher ◽  
Simon Gächter
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Real World ◽  
Social Preferences ◽  
Free Riding ◽  
Voluntary Contributions ◽  
Conditional Cooperation ◽  
Individual Preferences ◽  
D 83 ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Voluntary Cooperation

One lingering puzzle is why voluntary contributions to public goods decline over time in experimental and real-world settings. We show that the decline of cooperation is driven by individual preferences for imperfect conditional cooperation. Many people's desire to contribute less than others, rather than changing beliefs of what others will contribute over time or people's heterogeneity in preferences makes voluntary cooperation fragile. Universal free riding thus eventually emerges, despite the fact that most people are not selfish. (D12, D 83, H41, Z13)

Workfare: conditioning the attitudes of benefit recipients towards social security?

2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Humpage ◽  
Simone Baillie
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Study Data ◽  
Welfare Dependency ◽  
Election Study ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
People’S Attitudes ◽  
The Unemployed ◽  
Over Time

Have increasing levels of conditionality fundamentally changed the attitudes of the unemployed towards social security, work obligations and welfare dependency? Both neopaternalist and governmentalist theorising suggests that workfare policies should have shifted this group's conceptions of self-interest over time yet previous evidence has been rather mixed. This article makes a fresh contribution to the literature by drawing upon New Zealand Election Study data (1990–2014) and New Zealand qualitative data (2007–2008; 2014) to analyse the attitudes of “undeserving” unemployed benefit recipients who are subject to work obligations over 21 years and by comparing their attitudes to those of “deserving” benefit recipients not subject to work obligations (the retired and students) and wage/salary earners. It finds a notable hardening of unemployed people's attitudes towards some welfare dependency propositions over time and evidence of “self-governing rationalities” being adopted by some unemployed individuals but, overall, attitudes amongst this group remain nuanced and ambivalent.

scholarly journals TEMPORAL CHANGES IN THE EVALUATION OF POLITICAL PARTIES: DOES EVALUATION OF POLITICAL PARTIES REFLECT ATTITUDINAL IDEOLOGIES?

1970 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boban Petrović ◽  
Janko Međedović
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Temporal Stability ◽  
Principal Component ◽  
Time Points ◽  
Three Samples ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Sources Of Authority ◽  
Democratic Parties ◽  
Over Time

Previous research has shown that since the beginning of the 1990s, differentiation in the ideological orientations of political parties in Serbia has been increased. Comparing three samples, we explored the temporal stability of relations between evaluations of Serbian political parties (DSS, DS, SRS, SPS, SNS, and LDP) and lexically derived ideological dimensions: Traditional and Religious Sources of Authority, Unmitigated Self-Interest, Communal Rationalism, and Subjective Spirituality. We hypothesize that: 1) political parties should be divided into conservative and socio-liberal parties, and this structure should become stable over time; 2) the evaluation of political parties should consistently reflect their political ideology orientation : conservative parties should be related to an indicator of conservative ideology, Traditional Religiosity, while socio-liberal parties should be related to a humanistic ideological orientation, Communal Rationalism. Data was collected in three time-points: 2010 (N = 102), 2014/15 (N = 358) and 2016 (N = 117) from university students in Serbia. In all three studies principal component analyses of evaluations of political parties showed that two components were extracted and interpreted as evaluations of the National-Conservative Parties and Socio-Liberal Parties (in 2010 and 2014), i.e. Democratic parties (in 2016). However, while the structure of evaluations of the National-Conservative Parties remained stable, the congruence of evaluations of the Socio-Liberal Parties decreased over time. Additionally, the results of regression analyses showed that evaluations of the National-Conservative Parties were rooted in Traditional and Religious Sources of Authority and Unmitigated Self-interest, but the percentage of explained variance decreased over time. The evaluations of the Socio-Liberal Parties had much weaker relations with ideological orientations throughout all three time-points. The findings suggested that there was some kind of ‘’ideological crisis’’ in Serbia, primarily regarding the Socio-Liberal Parties and their supporters.

scholarly journals Foreign National Doctoral Students In U.S. Economics Programs

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe G. Baker ◽  
Michael G. Finn
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Doctoral Students ◽  
Graduate Programs ◽  
Baccalaureate Degree ◽  
Foreign National ◽  
New Information ◽  
Economics Students ◽  
The 1960S

This paper examines why enrollment of foreign national students in U.S. economics graduate programs increased so dramatically since the 1960s.   New information regarding the “stay rates” of foreign national students is examined.  The paper concludes that growth in the number of  foreign national economics graduate students was related to the quality of U.S. graduate programs, growth in foreign social science baccalaureate degree awards, growing foreign incomes, and movement of foreign economies towards markets.  These trends were especially pronounced in Asia, where most foreign national economics students are from.

Global Academic Interest Scale for Undergraduate and Graduate Students

2020 ◽  
pp. 073428292094614
Author(s):  
Jihyun Lee ◽  
Tracy L. Durksen
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Career Aspiration ◽  
Validity Evidence ◽  
Factor Scores ◽  
Academic Interest ◽  
Student Groups ◽  
The Future ◽  
Item Scores ◽  
Future Work

Using an established global academic interest scale, academic interest dimensions of undergraduate ( n = 326) and graduate ( n = 401) students were compared. The four-factor structure, consisting of passion for learning, confidence in the future, career aspiration, and self-expression, held for both student groups. However, the item scores and mean factor scores as well as the pattern of factor correlations differed between the two groups. While the sample of graduate students exhibited greater levels of passion for learning, the undergraduate students showed higher levels of confidence in the future. Overall, a broad range of correlates of academic interest employed in this study provided construct validity evidence of academic interest, supporting the main tenants of the motivational theory of life-span development. Limitations and directions for future work are discussed.

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