Eastern Economic Journal最新文献

Differences in how Republicans and Democrats responded to COVID-19 resulted in differences in the functioning of housing markets. Democrats adjusted behavior more than Republicans in response to the pandemic. Democrats engaged in more social distancing, were less likely to have people into their homes, and were less willing to visit strangers’ homes. This resulted in supply effects that caused higher housing prices, fewer listings, and fewer days on the market for counties with lower support for former president Donald Trump in the 2020 election. We find no impact of state-imposed shutdowns or population density when political partisanship is accounted for.

The events of 9/11 not only caused anger and fear among citizens the world over, but also led to counterterrorist legislation (CTL) in many countries. This paper identifies the most important determinants of passing CTL and the effects of such legislation on the likelihood of future terrorist attacks and on civil liberties. We particularly focus on the interplay between constitutionalized emergency provisions and CTL. We find that constitutional emergency provisions seem unrelated to CTL. It is not newly passed CTL, which drives civil liberties down, but, rather, the terrorist attacks themselves and the immediate and unmediated government responses to them.

This article gives an appraisal of the work of David Colander. His economic focus and the problems he pursued made him a different economist. Colander was less interested in theory and more concerned with policy and applied economics since he saw most economists doing applied policy and teaching. What limited the work and teaching of most economists was using a strict method of science when a different method that is more eclectic would be more appropriate. A crucial part of his work is viewing the economy and the economic profession as an adaptive complex system.

Many governments transfer physical and human capital to other governments as military assistance with the goals of enhancing recipient’s governing capabilities and achieve foreign policy goals. These transfers, however, are also “coercion-enabling” as they lower the cost of engaging in predatory behavior, are associated with multiple principal-agent problems, and result in system effects. We provide a framework of coercion-enabling capital and suggest such transfers are likely to lead to predation in many cases. To illustrate these dynamics, we examine the case of U.S. transfers to El Salvador during the Cold War and the Salvadoran Civil War of 1979–1992.

Artificial intelligence has been a hot topic in recent years, particularly as it relates to warfare and military operations. While rational choice approaches have been widely used to understand the causes of war, there is little literature on using the rational choice methodology to investigate the role of AI in warfare systematically. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring how rational choice models can inform our understanding of the power and limitations of AI in warfare. This theoretical approach suggests (a) an increase in the demand for moral judgment due to a reduction in the price of AI and (b) that without a human in the AI decision-making loop, peace is impossible; the very nature of AI rules out peace through mutually assured destruction.

The state capacity-civil society tradeoff model tends to treat the “state” and “civil society” as separate entities who move to constrain one another. However, this modeling technique leaves out the nuances of individual action within a collective setting by treating each as a relative black box. This article explores this balance in the context of the surveillance state that has arisen in the 20th and 21st century. As state capacity in surveillance increases it better allows the state to respond to threats to citizens from citizens. However, the increased capacity also lessens the ability of societal pressure to check authoritarian advances even in a nation with a thriving civil society presence.

Can the demographic trends of increased life expectancy and decreasing birth rates, along with the labor market patterns of returns to human capital investment and changes in real hourly earnings, account for changes in women’s and men’s lifetime earnings? Using a vector error correction model to analyze annual US CPS data from 1964 to 2019, we find patterns linking these factors and demonstrating that they have significant roles to women's lifetime earnings but not to men's. These findings are consistent with the reduced gender earning gap having occurred mainly due to women’s responses to changing demographic and socioeconomic factors.

This paper introduces a household model of addiction that focuses on how a breakdown point, derived from non-cooperative and collective model outcomes, diverges with variations in the spousal preference for household addiction (PHA). The model reveals that in households with different PHAs between the husband and wife, the spouse with the negative PHA will garner higher utility from the collective outcome. When a spouse has a negative PHA, an increase in their relative decision power will decrease the consumption of the addictive good for the other partner. The model highlights a few reasons why people stay in addiction-affected households.

Tournament theory analyzes labor market outcomes where rewards are distributed on the basis of relative rank. An important factor in these outcomes is the likely return to additional effort. Using National Basketball Association game event data across two seasons, we estimate each team’s game player portfolio and find that teams who were in contention to win the draft lottery reduce their portfolio’s return differential during the 2017–2018 season but not for the 2018–2019 season. We attribute the change to the reduction in the probability of obtaining a higher pick for the 2019 draft.

We use Google Trends data to identify hostile sexism and find that sexism negatively predicts Clinton’s vote share in the 2016 general election and is associated with lower voter turnout among those more likely to vote for a Democrat. Although we find no evidence that hostile sexism was more prevalent in states in which Trump held more than 10 pre-election rallies, we find that sexism had a larger impact on votes in these areas. This shows that the marginal effect of sexism was not uniform across the country and links the differing magnitudes of the effect to Trump rallies.