Globalization and Redistribution: Feasible Egalitarianism in a Competitive World

A reduction of impediments to international flows of goods, capital and professional labor is thought to raise the economic costs of programs by the nation state (and labor unions) to redistribute income to the poor and to provide economic security. But some of the more politically and economically successful examples of such policies --for example Nordic social democracy and East Asian land reform-- have occurred in small open economies which would, on the above account, provide a prohibitive environment for egalitarian interventions. I present a model of globalization and redistribution to answer the following question: in a liberalized world economy, what programs of egalitarian redistribution and social insurance are implementable by democratic nation states acting independently? While in the absence of international coordination, globalization indeed makes it difficult for nation states to affect the relative (after tax) prices of mobile goods and factors of production and for this and other reasons may limit the effectiveness of some conventional strategies of redistribution, a large class of state and trade union interventions leading to substantial improvements in the wages, employment prospects, and economic security of workers is not ruled out by globalization. Included are redistributions of assets which provide efficient solutions to incentive problems arising in principal agent relationships such as wage employment, farm and residential tenancy.

Optimal Parochialism: The Dynamics of Trust and Exclusion in Networks

Networks such as ethnic credit associations, close-knit residential neighborhoods, 'old boy' networks, and ethnically linked businesses play an important role in economic life but have been little studied by economists. These networks are often supported by cultural distinctions between insiders and outsiders and engage in exclusionary practices which we call parochialism. We provide an economic analysis of parochial networks in which the losses incurred by not trading with outsiders are offset by an enhanced ability to enforce informal contracts by fostering trust among insiders. We first model one-shot social interactions among self-regarding agents, demonstrating that trust (i.e., cooperating without using information about one's trading partner) is a best response in a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium if the quality of information about one's partner is sufficiently high. We show that since larger networks have lower quality information about specific individuals and greater trading opportunities, there may be an optimal (payoff-maximizing) network size. We then model the growth and decline of networks, as well as their equilibrium size and number. We show that in the absence of parochialism, networks may not exist, and the appropriate level of parochialism may implement an optimal network size. Finally, we explore the welfare implications and reasons for the evolutionary success of exclusion on parochial and other grounds.

International Trade, Factor Mobility and the Persistence of Cultural-Institutional Diversity

Cultural and institutional differences among nations may result in differences in the ratios of marginal costs of goods in autarchy and thus be the basis of specialization and comparative advantage, as long as these differences are not eliminated by trade. We provide an evolutionary model of endogenous preferences and institutions under autarchy, trade and factor mobility in which multiple asymptotically stable cultural-institutional conventions may exist, among which transitions may occur as a result of decentralized and un-coordinated actions of employers or employees. We show that: i) specialization and trade may arise and enhance welfare even when the countries are identical other than their cultural-institutional equilibria; ii) trade liberalization does not lead to convergence, it reinforces the cultural-institutional differences upon which comparative advantage is based and may thus impede even Pareto-improving cultural-institutional transitions; and iii) by contrast, greater mobility of factors of production favors decentralized transitions to a superior cultural-institutional convention by reducing the minimum number of cultural or institutional innovators necessary to induce a transition.institutions, incomplete contracts, evolutionary game theory, culture, trade integration, factor mobility, globalization

Risk Aversion, Insurance, and the Efficiency-Equality Tradeoff

Under conditions of informational asymmetry, redistributing the property rights may improve work incentives but lead to an inefficient choice of entrepreneurial risk. We present a model in which reassignment of property rights does not affect factor prices and we show that there exist egalitarian asset redistributions that enhance allocative efficiency. The scope for such redistributions can be broadened by offering fair insurance protecting the independent entrepreneur against risk unassociated with the production process and against production uncertainties that are unrelated to the quality of their individual decisions. The market will generally supply insurance of this type suboptimally.

Walrasian Economics in Retrospect

Two basic tenets of theWalrasian model, behavior based on self-interested exogenous preferences and complete and costless contracting have recently come under critical scrutiny. First, social norms and psychological dispositions extending beyond the selfish motives of Homo economicus may have an important bearing on outcomes, even in competitive markets. Second, market outcomes depend on strategic interactions in which power in the political sense is exercised. It follows that economics must become more behavioral and more institutional. We can return to these themes of the classical tradition, now equipped with more the powerful mathematical tools developed over the past century.

Power

We consider the exercise of power in competitive markets for goods, labour and credit. We offer a definition of power and show that if contracts are incomplete it may be exercised either in Pareto-improving ways or to the disadvantage of those without power. Contrasting conceptions of power including bargaining power, market power, and consumer sovereignty are considered. Because the exercise of power may alter prices and other aspects of exchanges, abstracting from power may miss essential aspects of an economy. The political aspect of private exchanges challenges conventional ideas about the appropriate roles of market and political competition in ensuring the efficiency and accountability of economic decisions

Emulation, Inequality, and Work Hours: Was Thorsten Veblen Right

We investigate the importance of Veblen effects on work hours, namely the manner in which a desire to emulate the consumption standards of the rich influences individuals’ allocation of time between labor and leisure. Our model of the choice of work hours captures Veblen effects by taking account of the influence of the consumption of the well-to-do on the marginal utility of consumption by the less well-off. The main result is that work hours are increasing in the degree of income inequality. We use data on work hours of manufacturing employees in ten countries over the period 1963-1998, along with three different measures of income inequality to explore this hypothesis. Using both OLS and country-fixed-effects estimates, we find that greater inequality predicts longer work hours. Its effects are large, and estimates are robust across a variety of specifications. Additional evidence suggests that while greater inequality may induce longer hours for conventional incentive reasons, this mechanism does not account for our results. We show that in the presence of Veblen effects, a social welfare optimum cannot be implemented by a flat tax on consumption but may be accomplished by more complicated (progressive) consumption taxes or by subsidizing the leisure of the rich.Interdependent utility, relative income, emulation, Veblen effects, work hours

Social Segregation and the Dynamics of Group Inequality

We explore the dynamics of group inequality when segregation of social networks places the initially less affluent group at a disadvantage in acquiring human capital. Extending Loury (1977), we demonstrate that (i) group differences in economic success can persist across generations in the absence of either discrimination or group differences in ability, provided that social segregation is sufficiently great, (ii) there is threshold level of integration above which group inequality cannot be sustained, (iii) this threshold varies systematically but non-monotonically with the population share of the disadvantaged group, (iv) crossing the threshold induces convergence to a common high level of human capital if the less affluent population share is suf- ficiently small (and the opposite, otherwise), and (v) a race-neutral policy that reduces the cost of acquiring human capital can expand the range over which reducing segregation can be Pareto-improving. JEL Categories: D31, Z13, J71segregation, networks, group inequality, human capital