Related papers: Wariness and Poverty Traps
Socio-technical systems, where technological and human elements interact in a goal-oriented manner, provide important functional support to our societies. Here we draw attention to the underappreciated concept of timeliness -- i.e., system…
Redistribution of resources within a group as a method to reduce wealth inequality is a current area of debate. The evolutionary path to or away from wealth sharing is also a subject of active research. In order to investigate effects and…
Heterogeneous treatment effects are of major interest in economics. For example, a poverty reduction measure would be best evaluated by its effects on those who would be poor in the absence of the treatment, or by the share among the poor…
Can one demonstrate quantitative effects of diversity within a system comprised of distinct individuals on the performance of the system as a whole? Assuming that individuals can be different, we develop a model to interpolate between…
We construct a model of an exchange economy in which agents trade assets contingent on an observable signal, the probability of which depends on public opinion. The agents in our model are replaced occasionally and each person updates…
Economic and financial models -- such as vector autoregressions, local projections, and multivariate volatility models -- feature complex dynamic interactions and spillovers across many time series. These models can be integrated into a…
I study the economic effects of testing during the outbreak of a novel disease. I propose a model where testing permits isolation of the infected and provides agents with information about the prevalence and lethality of the disease.…
In this work, we analyse the relationship between heterogeneity and cooperation. Previous investigations suggest that this relation is nontrivial, as some authors found that heterogeneity sustains cooperation, while others obtained…
Most of the world poorest people come from rural areas and depend on their local ecosystems for food production. Recent research has highlighted the importance of self-reinforcing dynamics between low soil quality and persistent poverty but…
Exchange of resources among individual components of a system is fundamental to systems like a social network of humans and a network of cities and villages. For various reasons, the human society has come up with the notion of money as a…
Approaches to understanding resilience from psychology and sociology emphasise individuals' agency but obscure systemic factors. Approaches to understanding resilience stemming from ecology emphasise system dynamics such as feedbacks but…
Cooperation between individuals is emergent in all parts of society, yet mechanistic reasons for this emergence is ill understood in the literature. A specific example of this is insurance. Recent work has, though, shown that assuming the…
Time-varying electricity pricing better reflects the varying cost of electricity compared to flat-rate pricing. Variations between peak and off-peak costs are increasing due to weather variation, renewable intermittency, and increasing…
Ergodicity economics is a new branch of economic theory that notes the conceptual difference between time averages and expectation values, which coincide only for ergodic observables. It postulates that individual agents maximise the time…
Costly pre-play messages can deter unnecessary wars - but the same messages can also entrench stalemates once violence begins. We develop an overlapping-generations model of a security dilemma with persistent group types (normal vs bad),…
The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this…
The scale and terms of aggregate borrowing in an economy depend on the manner in which wealth is distributed across potential creditors with heterogeneous beliefs about the future. This distribution evolves over time as uncertainty is…
This paper proposes a new way to model behavioral agents in dynamic macro-financial environments. Agents are described as neural networks and learn policies from idiosyncratic past experiences. I investigate the feedback between…
We empirically investigate the distributional effects of inflation on workers' unemployment tail risks using instrumental variable quantile regression. We find that supply-driven inflation disproportionately raises unemployment tail risks…
Modern economies evolved from simpler human exchanges into very convoluted systems. Today, a multitude of aspects can be regulated, tampered with, or left to chance; these are economic {\em degrees of freedom} which together shape the flow…