Civil society: Tracking 100 years of economic research beyond markets and states

with Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin 

Using topic modeling on the corpus of papers published in seven leading economics journals since 1900, we study the evolving emphasis in research on themes relating to the state, markets, and civil society, the latter referring to families, firms as organizations, other private organizations, neighborhoods, and identity groups. We document a shift between 1900 and 1970 away from research on state-related topics towards the market, even as the economic importance of the state was growing. This was followed by a substantial movement away from market topics towards topics related to civil society. We associate the first shift with the mathematical formalization of the Marshallian paradigm. The subsequent increased attention to civil society coincided with novel research questions and empirical methods including experiments and the use of large datasets. Since the middle of the last century advances in game theory and the economics of asymmetric information also facilitated the extension of economists’ research agendas to encompass themes central to economic behavior in civil society, including other-regarding preferences and social norms as well as strategic interactions not covered by complete contracts.(Economic Letters, 2024) 

CEPR coverage 

A Response: Game Theory in Economics

with Meghana Prasad

Adding to the ongoing debate on how best to understand game theory and its relevance to economics, a response to Atanu Sengupta and Abhijit Ghosh’s “Non-cooperative Game Theory and Pay-off” (EPW, 2017)

Economic Networks and the Dynamics of Wealth Inequality: A Longitudinal Cross-Cultural Investigation.

with Matthew Jackson, Tom Rutter et. al. 

Despite theory linking wealth inequality to social structure, empirical evidence has been limited to a handful of studies using online social media data. This study draws on a very different type of data, extending global coverage to societies of markedly different kinds and investigating new questions. We collect data from approximately 3,500 sharing units (households) across 46 communities worldwide, representing considerable human social and cultural diversity. In each, we analyze the relationship between people's material wealth and the structure of social networks: borrowing money, sharing food, working together, socializing, and so on. In almost all communities, a sharing unit's material wealth is positively associated with the number of other sharing units it both helps and is helped by. Wealth is also associated with the relative wealth of the sharing units to which a unit is linked—a form of economic homophily. Notably, communities with greater wealth inequality are characterized by network structures in which poorer sharing units are less well connected to wealthier ones. We augment these data with community-level environmental, institutional, and economic attributes, opening new avenues for research into the co-determination of wealth and social networks.

presented at NSF Networks Science Conference 2024

What do we think an economics student should know? A machine learning investigation of research and intermediate-level texts.

with Samuel Bowles, Wendy Carlin and Simon D. Halliday

The content of intermediate-level undergraduate textbooks represents a consensus in the discipline about what a student trained in economics should know. We use topic modeling to explore both this conceptual benchmark in leading textbooks and the content of economic research in journal publications over 115 years. Our mapping of content to 3-dimensional meta-topic spaces in microeconomics and macroeconomics reveals that the conceptual frameworks used in research have diverged over the last four decades from the benchmarks conveyed to majors through textbooks. We suggest that the origins of the divergences and the implications for economics education differ between microeconomics and macroeconomics.

Task Allocation and Labor Market Decisions among Couples: A field experiment with Adrian Blattner, Mariana Guido and Jason Weitze on the household dynamics of the motherhood penalty