The American Economist

This paper puts the current global recession in the context of Jewish theological thought. We will show that the failed conduct of the players in the subprime sector violates specific moral principles. Moreover, no amount of wrongdoing by these players could spiral into an international financial meltdown without the legal underpinning of the holder-in-due-course doctrine. We demonstrate that Jewish law rejects this doctrine. To prevent the recurrence of the current debacle, Jewish law's imitatio Dei principle calls for the restructuring of the incentive system economic actors face. It consists of replacing the perverted system of incentives now in place with sticks and carrots designed to tilt economic actors toward virtue and away from wrongdoing. Beyond fixing the incentive system, the current malaise tells us that we are living in a society of broken promises. Improving the moral climate of society hence entails reinforcing the values of integrity and taking responsibility seriously. Jewish religious thought puts the onus on parents and the educational system to accomplish this.

The Hindu doctrine has broad covering laws for the description and management of crises. Economic swings are covered under a theory of long cycles that parallels the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron ages of the West. Order breaks down in each cycle, and society is reconstituted anew. The individuals and ruler produce, accumulate, and distribute wealth in each epoch in accordance with scriptural injunctions, and crises occur when the codes of eternal religion are broken. In the process of their everyday experiences, people are urged to adhere to the truth, to be conscious of their true nature, and to pursue happiness. The ruler is charged with managing economic affairs with proper council. Within that broad framework that has been morphing over history from foreign invasion-to-invasion, operational elements can be drawn out for any crises situation.

We find the determinants of the college enrollment decision differ greatly between whites and blacks. Within race, differences exist between black males and females, and to a lesser extent between white males and females. The largest differences are in the effects of parents' education, school quality, and family income. Of the four race-gender groups, black males are the most sensitive likely to their mother's education attainment and to changes in school quality. Unlike whites, we find almost no effect of income on the black college enrollment decision, particularly for black females. We conclude that policies that increase affordability do not expand the pool of college-bound blacks.

This paper investigates the production of research in business and economics. A scholar's reward is positively related to the quantity and quality of research. In turn, the quality of a paper depends on the scholar's ability to internalize new ideas and the overall quality of external research. The individual scholar is subject to a trade-off between writing more papers or reading in order to take in new ideas. In the Nash symmetric equilibrium, the quantity and quality of published papers are jointly determined. Under reasonable assumptions about the research production process, in equilibrium researchers write too many papers of too low a quality compared to the cooperative outcome. The model sheds some light on the effectiveness of various research policies currently under review by European policymakers.