Scholarship@UMass Lowell
Scholarship at UMass Lowell is an open access institutional repository established by the university's library. Material hosted here is freely and permanently accessible.
Scholarship at UMass provides permanent open access to articles and other research related materials produced by university faculty, students, and staff.
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- The Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Recent Submissions
"A Tale of Two Gravities"
(Working Papers, 2020-06) Bowman, Jason H.; Chen, Xiaoping; Li, Ben G.
"Inequality and Peer Punishment in a Common-pool Resource Experiment"
(Working Paper, 2020-03) De Geest, Lawrence R.; Kingsley, David C.
We test the effect of inequality on peer punishment in a common-pool resource (CPR) experiment with equal endowments (Equal) or unequal endowments (Unequal). Peer punishment reduces extractions in both treatments, but it is more effective in Unequal. Subjects with lower endowments coordinated around an Equal Earnings norm, subjects with higher endowments matched, and peer punishment tightened this coordinate-and-match dynamic. By contrast, there was less coordination in Equal, and as a result, more peer punishment and lower payoffs.
"Norm Enforcement with Incomplete Information"
(Working Paper, 2019-11) De Geest, Lawrence R.; Kingsley, David C.
We study the emergence of norms and their enforcement in a public goods game with private information about endowments. Subjects were randomly assigned a Low or High endowment and across treatments endowments were either Observed or Unobserved. We estimate contribution norms and then estimate the expected costs of noncompliance. We find that incomplete information does not affect norms, but rather their enforcement. In both Observed and Unobserved we see a “contribute-your-endowment” norm emerge. Enforcement in Observed is close to theoretic predictions. However, enforcement in Unobserved depended on how well subjects could map contributions to endowments in a given round. When at least one High type pooled with Low types (by contributing less than or equal to the Low endowment), punishment was used to protect Low rather than attack High: contributions equal to the Low endowment were not punished (in case they came from a cooperative Low type) while contributions of zero were punished as if they were from a High type. This kept cooperation from unraveling, but it also enabled High types to hide behind small endowments. Our results dovetail with results from bargaining games and suggest that in settings with incomplete information, norms emerge to attenuate rather than eliminate non-cooperative behavior.
"What Drives Trends in Employment and Hours Worked per Worker? A Cross Country Analysis."
(Workin Paper, 2021-04-02) Ramnath, Shanthi; Mukherjee, Rahul; Finkelstein Shapiro, Alan; Epstein, Brendan
Hours worked are fundamentally important for aggregate economic activity,
and their long run trends diverge considerably in Europe versus the United
States. Yet, canonical macroeconomic models even tax-inclusive ones fail at
replicating these di¤ering trend behaviors. We develop a simple extension of
the canonical macroeconomic model that decomposes trend hours into exten-
sive and intensive margins via household-side employment-attainment costs and
rm-side employment adjustment costs. Predictions of a tax-inclusive version
of this model track very well the trend behavior of hours and its two underlying
margins in both the United States and a host of European countries. The model
shows that taxes and, in particular, capital taxes, impact the two margins of
labor quite di¤erently. Therefore, if these margins are not disentangled the full
impact of taxes on work hours does not come through. The model has im-
plications related to the relative rigidity of labor markets across countries and
also to international risk sharing that are in line with the data and, therefore,
validate its structure. The model s success in tracking work hours in a range of
countries suggests that it can be used as a laboratory to study a broad set of
issues regarding the trend behavior of labor markets.