The Class Content of Preferences Towards Anti-Inflation and Anti Unemployment Policies

This paper assesses class based preferences towards anti-inflationary and anti-unemployment policy. Using a consistent cross-country social survey, I find that the working class broadly defined, and those with lower occupational skill and status are more likely to prioritize combating unemployment rather than inflation. The result is robust to the inclusion of several plausible controls. The idea that the working class is less ‘relatively inflation averse’ is consistent with earlier predictions coming from large body of political economy research in the 1970s. The finding that inflation and unemployment aversion have a distinct class character has implications for current debates on the implications of macroeconomic policies such as inflation targeting..Inflation; Unemployment; Social surveys, Radical Political Economy

Logarithm laws and shrinking target properties

We survey some of the recent developments in the study of logarithm laws and shrinking target properties for various families of dynamical systems. We discuss connections to geometry, diophantine approximation, and probability theory.Comment: This is a survey paper written following the Conference on Measures and Dyanmics on groups and homogeneous spaces, at TIFR, Mumbai, in Dec. 2007. It is in honor of Prof. S.G. Dani's 60th Birthda

Global Governance and Human Development: Promoting Democratic Accountability and Institutional Experimentation

This paper seeks to critically examine recent debates on global governance, albeit from a human development perspective. In doing so it identifies and describes two important principles for building institutions for the advancing of human development: what may be termed the imperative of democratic accountability (most closely associated with the work of Amartya Sen) and the imperative of institutional experimentation (which has been theorized most extensively by Roberto Unger). The paper discusses these two principles in light of some of the major challenges that can and do affect the international community as a whole. It reviews some of the decentralized forms of governance which are evolving as developing countries assert themselves in debates on institutional organization. It then focuses more extensively on the global financial crisis as a case study in the inadequacies of current global governance. Finally, it uses the two imperatives mentioned to review the lessons that the crisis has provided, before describing specific proposals to redesign systems of global economic governance. Chief among these are the reforms advocated by the Commission of Experts of the President of the United Nations General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System.Human Development, Economic Development, Inequality, Human Rights, Capabilities, Health, Governance

Estimating Guard Labor

As a background paper to Jayadev and Bowles (2006), this paper provides details on our measure of guard labor as we measure these in labor units. Data from the United States indicate a significant increase in its extent in the U.S. over the period 1890 to the present. Cross-national comparisons show a significant statistical association between income inequality and the fraction of the labor force that is constituted by guard labor, as well as with measures of political legitimacy (inversely) and political conflict.Incomplete contracts; Property rights; Comparative institutions; Inequality; Guard labor