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Mostrando postagens com marcador Nobel. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Nobel. Mostrar todas as postagens

27 outubro 2022

Nobel de Economia de 2022 gera polêmica

Nunca é tarde para uma boa discussão: 

No ano de 2022, o comitê que escolhe os ganhadores do Nobel não conseguiram agradar a muitos na opção do campo da economia. Ao escolherem três economistas que lidaram com a questão da crise bancária, o comitê provocou uma grande polêmica. Nem todo mundo considera que o prêmio foi "justo" ou "merecido", ao contrário do que ocorreu nos anos anteriores. 

O Nakedcapitalism apresenta um longo texto indicando que o modelo dos três ganhadores é errado e simplista. O texto destaca que Bernanke sequer era considerado um economista de destaque e mesmo o trabalho citado pelo comitê não era o seu melhor trabalho. O mesmo texto tenta convencer o leitor que o modelo Diamond-Dybvig é visto como fraco. 

O site Nakedcapitalism também critica o tempo que Bernanke passou no Fed e como ele conduziu o banco central antes, durante e depois da crise financeira de 2008. 

Sobre o modelo Diamond-Dybvig, o  Nakecapitalism traz um artigo que tenta desmontar o modelo. Mostra que o modelo deturpa a realidade - o que não é algo "grave" na economia, tornando "os economistas mais estúpidos e mais propensos a fazer a coisa errada antes de lerem o texto". 

Outro texto, de John Tanny (via aqui) afirma que Bernanke acredita que o crescimento econômico possui relação com a mudança de preços. Para ele, as ideias de Bernanke é um vergonha para os economistas e para o prêmio. 

Outro texto diz que o prêmio é uma piada. E foca na gestão de Bernanke no Fed, especialmente na crise sistêmica de 2008. 

O início desse estresse ocorreu apenas cerca de um mês depois que Ben Bernanke proclamou publicamente que os fundamentos da economia global eram fortes.

“A economia global continua forte, apoiada por um sólido crescimento econômico no exterior. No geral, a economia dos EUA parece se expandir em ritmo moderado no segundo semestre de 2007, com o crescimento se fortalecendo um pouco em 2008 a uma taxa próxima à tendência subjacente da economia." - Ben Bernanke, Julho de 2007

Bernanke previu em julho de 2007 que a economia dos EUA se fortaleceria em 2008. Foi apenas um ano após essa previsão que o país e o mundo estavam à porta de um "pior cenário" para os mercados globais: um colapso sistêmico.

Finalmente, no CafeHayek uma frase que chamou a atenção:

O Prêmio Nobel de Economia é financiado não pela Fundação Nobel, mas pelo banco central da Suécia. Normalmente, não acho que isso importe, mas, neste caso, me pergunto se isso acontece. O prêmio de 2022 parece ser uma afirmação dos banqueiros centrais do valor do banco central.

07 outubro 2022

Imposto, Crime e Paz: Ales Bialiatski


Gostamos de lembrar que a fraude tributário foi responsável pela prisão de Al Capone. De forma simplista, a contabilidade conseguiu prender o criminoso, que outras provas não foram capaz. 

No anúncio do Prêmio Nobel de hoje, para Ales Bialiatski (juntamente com a entidade Memorial Center for Civil Liberties) mostra que o "crime tributário" também pode ser usado para prender pessoas que lutam pela paz. Bialiatski foi preso em 2021 - e continua até hoje - por crimes tributários:

On October 6, 2021, Bialiatski was charged with tax evasion with a maximum penalty of 7 years in prison. As of January 1, 2022, he was still in prison.

13 outubro 2021

Nobel e Gênero

 


Enquanto entre 1901 e 1920, apenas 4% dos laureados eram mulheres, esse número foi de 13,5% entre 2001 e 2020. Os últimos anos em que nenhuma mulher ganhou o Prêmio Nobel foram 2017, 2016 e 2012.

34 mulheres ganharam prêmios Nobel de literatura ou da paz, em comparação com 25 nas ciências, apesar de mais tarde abranger mais categorias e nomear mais frequentemente vários vencedores.

[Lembrando que o Nobel é resultado de algo que foi realizado há 30 ou 40 anos. Mas neste ano a Fundação poderia ter rompido a tradição e premiado a pesquisa do RNA mensageiro]

Fonte: aqui

09 outubro 2021

Nobel de Física e a contabilidade


Parece maluquice deste blogueiro, mas eis o que encontrei na justificativa que a Acadêmica Sueca escreveu para dar o Nobel de Física deste ano: 

Claramente, os laureados deste ano (Giorgio Parisi e a dupla Syukuro Manabe e Klaus Hasselmann) fizeram contribuições inovadoras para nossa compreensão de sistemas físicos complexos em seu sentido mais amplo, do microscópico ao global. Eles mostraram que, sem uma contabilidade adequada da desordem, do ruído e da variabilidade, o determinismo é apenas uma ilusão. De fato, o trabalho reconhecido aqui reflete em parte o comentário atribuído a Richard Feynman (Nobel de 1965), em que ele “acreditava na primazia da dúvida, não como um defeito em nossa capacidade de saber, mas como a essência do conhecimento."

[grifo do blog]

01 maio 2021

Nobel para Mileva

#NobelforMileva foi criado em defesa da igualdade de gênero e do reconhecimento feminino em ciência e tecnologia. É também um movimento global para defender a justiça, pedindo à Fundação Nobel da Suécia reconhecer o trabalho e o talento de Mileva Marić, a física e matemática sérvia que foi também a primeira esposa do físico Albert Einstein, vencedor do Prêmio Nobel em 1921 (exatamente 100 anos atrás). Mileva foi co-autora em muitas realizações acadêmicas do famoso cientista, incluindo a teoria da relatividade.

Uma das ações para lançar a campanha é um vídeo sobre plataformas digitais com uma breve história de Mileva Marić e um convite para mulheres e pessoas de qualquer identidade de gênero pegarem selos de língua de fora e depois colocá-los nas mídias sociais, dando novo significado ao gesto que transformou Albert Einstein em um ícone pop e representação de um gênio. O gesto é o principal símbolo para representar a luta pela igualdade de direitos.

Além da mobilização digital, a campanha reconhece a contribuição de Mileva para a ciência em outras frentes, incluindo pinturas, grafites, murais e até mesmo tatuagens do rosto do primeiro cônjuge de Albert Einstein, feitas por artistas de diferentes partes do mundo. O movimento inclui estátuas de busto da cientista com a língua para fora, que podem ser impressas em 3D para serem exibidas em universidades de classe mundial.

O movimento também conta com a "Milevas of the Future", um curta de animação, com a história de três garotas apaixonadas pela ciência e que encontram em Mileva Marić o incentivo necessário para seguir seus sonhos .

    

Fonte: aqui

05 outubro 2020

Nobel de Economia: os favoritos


Novo ano, novo Nobel. Os favoritos, segundo Clarivate:

Claudia Goldin - Estados Unidos - Harvard

David Dickey; Wayne Fuller; e Pierre Perron - Estados Unidos

Steven Berry; James Levinshon; e Ariel Pakes - Estados Unidos

01 novembro 2019

Absurdo do prêmio Nobel em Ciências

Todo ano, durante a premiação do Nobel, o principal da área acadêmica mundial, volta a discussão sobre a escolha realizada pela Fundação. Além das injustiças, este ano um artigo do The Atlantic destacou um fato importante: a premiação está distorcendo e reescrevendo a história. Além de muitas vezes deixar de fora bons pesquisadores, o processo científico nos dias atuais mudou. Com respeito ao primeiro ponto, não existe dúvida. O texto de Ed Yong (The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science) aponta vários casos. Eu lembro, na área de economia, o fato de Black e Tversky não terem sido premiados por terem falecido precocemente. Mas Baumol viveu bastante tempo e não foi contemplado.

Em muitos casos, o esquecimento pode representar reescrever a história da ciência. Yong narra o caso de Damadian que foi “esquecido” pelo Nobel, enquanto seus colegas, Paul Lauterbur e Peter Mansfield, foram contemplados. Damadian publicou anúncios em três jornais dos EUA protestando contra o esquecimento. No Nobel de Economia eu me lembro de Roberts (mas Fama, que escreveu depois sobre a eficiência de mercado, foi reconhecido), Milgrom (mas Myerson e Bengt Holmstrom) e Martin Weitzman (mas Nordhaus), sendo que este último “pode”  ter cometido suicídio pelo “esquecimento” do prêmio.

Mas o texto do The Atlantic destaca outro ponto também importante. Atualmente a ciência é um esforço de um grupo de cientistas. Reconhecer um cientista (ou dois ou três) é injusto com o grupo de trabalhou na pesquisa. Isto pode dar a impressão de que a ciência é feita por uma pessoa solitária, sem interação com outras pessoas:

críticos notam que é um absurdo e um anacronismo o reconhecimento do trabalho de cientistas. Em lugar de honrar a ciência, isto distorce sua natureza, reescreve a história e negligencia o papel de importantes pessoas [tradução livre]

Ganhar o prêmio traz vantagens, conforme lembra Yong: mais citações, um tempo de vida médio maior, lucro em palestras e a sensação de grandeza. Ser esquecido pode ser pior.

07 maio 2018

Nobel de Literatura

No mês passado publicamos uma postagem com o título "Teremos Nobel de Literatura este ano?". A Academia Sueca, depois de reconhecer o escândalo, resolveu não divulgar o vencedor de 2018 neste ano. Assim, em 2019, termos dois ganhadores do prêmio, um do ano de 2018 e outro de 2019 (aqui. aqui e aqui)

20 abril 2018

Academia Sueca confirma o escândalo

A centenária Academia Sueca, responsável pela escolha do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura, reconheceu os problemas que podem levar até a não concessão do prêmio este ano (vide aqui).

Depois de uma auditoria na instituição, a Academia confirmou as acusações relacionadas com Jean-Claude Arnault, que foi acusado de assédio sexual (18 mulheres) e divulgação do ganhador do prêmio (pelo menos 7 ganhadores). Arnault é marido de uma acadêmica, que participa do processo de escolha do Nobel.

La nota de la Academia asegura que el informe también ha hallado tambíen conflictos de interés en torno a Fórum, el conocidísimo centro cultural propiedad de Arnault, que recibía financiación de la poderosa institución y que los miembros solían frecuentar tanto que lo denominaban "el club". La auditoría ha detectado que la académica Frostenson es socia de la compañía que recibía esas contribuciones económicas; algo que la Academia ha asegurado que desconocía.


Um dos problemas está relacionado com problemas de governança corporativa da instituição.

13 abril 2018

Teremos Nobel de Literatura este ano?

Se você gosta de acompanhar os vencedores do Nobel, este ano poderemos ter uma novidade: a não premiação para o Nobel de Literatura.

Pelo processo de premiação, geralmente nesta época a Academia Sueca já trabalha com alguns dos potenciais candidatos ao prêmio. Entretanto, neste momento, faltam pessoas para fazer o serviço. E tudo começou em novembro do ano passado, quando foi divulgado que o fotógrafo Jean-Claude Arnault foi acusado por 18 mulheres de agressão sexual e assédio, entre 2013 e 2015

Arnault é casado com a poetisa Katarina Frostenson, que por sua vez é integrante da Academia. No passado, a própria Academia ajudou Arnault em um projeto cultural. Além disto, parece que Arnault vazou o nome de ganhadores do Nobel em pelo menos sete ocasiões. Com a crise, a secretaria da Academia renunciou, assim como Frostenson, além de outros membros. O problema é que o membro da academia é permanente. E não existe previsão para o caso de renúncia, o que significa que estes nomes não teriam substitutos. E existe a necessidade de no mínimo de 12 votos, mas com todos os problemas, só existem 11 membros atualmente. Ou seja, nenhum candidato teria, formalmente, os votos necessários.

Os políticos suecos estão preocupados com a imagem do país no exterior.

Leia mais aqui e aqui

04 outubro 2016

Nobel de Economia

Começou a temporada de premiação da mais importante distinção científica do mundo: o Nobel. Pela proximidade das áreas, o interesse volta-se para o prêmio de economia. As especulações são várias, que inclui Blanchard, Lazear e Melitz, segundo a Thomson Reuters.

O Marginal Revolution aposta em Baumol (fotografia) e um prêmio conjunto para economia ambiental (Nordhaus, Dasgupta e Martin Weitzman, por exemplo). Mas existe a possibilidade de Barro, Romer, Duflo, Diamond, Bernanke, entre outros.

Minha simpatia – e isto não conta nada para o comitê que escolhe o prêmio – é para Baumol. Com 94 anos de idade, Baumol tem um grande trabalho em diversas áreas, mas o seu enfoque sobre os custos merece mais atenção da contabilidade. Na década de sessenta, Baumol, juntamente com Bowen, notou que em alguns setores os custos aumentavam mais do que a inflação, de maneira persistente. Ele citava saúde e educação como exemplos. Baumol mostrava que nestes setores os ganhos com produtividade eram difíceis de serem incorporados ao processo econômico. Já comentamos diversas vezes sobre isto neste blog.

P.S. Não descarto uma premiação para as pesquisas sobre economia e rede social

02 fevereiro 2016

Bill Gates sobre professores

Os melhores professores deixam impressões duradouras ou eternas em seus alunos.

O Business Insider publicou um texto sobre uma postagem que Bill Gates fez em seu blog discursando sobre o professor, laureado com o Nobel, Richard Feynman. Apesar de nunca ter sido aluno de Feynman, Gates admira seu estilo de ensino e, para celebrar os 50 anos da premiação de Feynman, Bill Gates compartilhou suas opiniões sobre o que torna um professor especial.

Estas são as qualidades que podem ser aplicadas em qualquer sala de aula:

- Bons professores estão animados com o assunto:
Gates says he loves the way Feynman's face lit up when he explained how fire works. He radiated an obvious love of knowledge, and it made the students excited about science too.
"In that sense, Feynman has a lot in common with all the amazing teachers I’ve met in schools across the country," Gates writes. "You walk into their classroom and immediately feel the energy — the way they engage their students — and their passion for whatever subject they’re teaching."

Podem transforar assuntos difíceis em tópicos de fácil aprendizado:
Physics can seem complicated and abstract, but Gates says the best teachers make difficult subjects relatable.
Feynman once did a series of lectures at California schools for people who didn't specialize in physics, and made the topic digestible for everyone. You can now watch those lessons online for free.
"He's taking something that's a little mysterious to most people and using very simple concepts to explain how it works," Gates says. "He doesn't even tell you he's talking about fire until the very end, and you feel like you're figuring it out with him."
- Os alunos se tornam comprometidos
Like all great teachers, Feynman engaged his students and made physics fun.
"Feynman made science so fascinating," Gates says. "He reminded us how much fun it is, and everybody can have a pretty full understanding.

They have a complex range of interests.
Feynman wasn't just a great teacher and renowned scientist — he was apparently also quite the character. He knew a lot about a bunch of different disciplines, from translating Mayan hieroglyphics to playing the bongo, and he brought that energy for learning into the classroom.

Para mais:

20 outubro 2015

Lista: Prêmio Nobel de Economia


Past Winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science

Compiled: The New York Times, October 12, 2015

The economics prize was established in 1968 in memory of Alfred Nobel, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Sweden’s central bank, the world’s first. Below is a complete list of winners, according to Nobelprize.org:

2015Angus Deaton
“For his analysis of consumption, poverty and welfare.”

2014Jean Tirole
“For his analysis of market power and regulation.”

2013Eugene F. Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert J. Shiller
“For their empirical analysis of asset prices.”

2012Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley
“For the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.”

2011Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims
“For their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy.”

2010
Peter A. Diamond, Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides
“For their analysis of markets with search frictions.”

2009
Elinor Ostrom
“For her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.”
Oliver E. Williamson
“For his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm.”

2008
Paul Krugman
“For his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity.”

2007
Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson
“For having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.”

2006
Edmund S. Phelps
“For his analysis of intertemporal trade-offs in macroeconomic policy.”

2005
Robert J. Aumann and Thomas C. Schelling
“For having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.”

2004
Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott
“For their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles.”

2003
Robert F. Engle III
“For methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility (ARCH).”
Clive W. J. Granger
“For methods of analyzing economic time series with common trends (co-integration).”

2002
Daniel Kahneman
“For having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision making under uncertainty.”
Vernon L. Smith
“For having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms.”

2001
George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz
“For their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.”
2000

James J. Heckman
“For his development of theory and methods For analyzing selective samples.”
Daniel L. McFadden
“For his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice.”

1999
Robert A. Mundell
“For his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange-rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas.”

1998
Amartya Sen
“For his contributions to welfare economics.”

1997
Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes
“For a new method to determine the value of derivatives.”

1996
James A. Mirrlees and William Vickrey
“For their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information.”

1995
Robert E. Lucas Jr.
“For having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy.”

1994
John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash Jr. and Reinhard Selten
“For their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of noncooperative games.”

1993
Robert W. Fogel and Douglass C. North
“For having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change.”

1992
Gary S. Becker
“For having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including nonmarket behavior.”

1991
Ronald H. Coase
“For his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy.”

1990
Harry M. Markowitz, Merton H. Miller and William F. Sharpe
“For their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics.”

1989
Trygve Haavelmo
“For his clarification of the probability theory foundations of econometrics and his analyses of simultaneous economic structures.”

1988
Maurice Allais
“For his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources.”

1987
Robert M. Solow
“For his contributions to the theory of economic growth.”

1986
James M. Buchanan Jr.
“For his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision making.”

1985
Franco Modigliani
“For his pioneering analyses of saving and of financial markets.”

1984
Richard Stone
“For having made fundamental contributions to the development of systems of national accounts and hence greatly improved the basis for empirical economic analysis.”

1983
Gérard Debreu
“For having incorporated new analytical methods into economic theory and for his rigorous reformulation of the theory of general equilibrium.”

1982
George J. Stigler
“For his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets, and causes and effects of public regulation.”

1981
James Tobin
“For his analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production and prices.”

1980
Lawrence R. Klein
“For the creation of econometric models and the application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies.”

1979
Theodore W. Schultz and Sir W. Arthur Lewis
“For their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries.”

1978
Herbert A. Simon
“For his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations.”

1977
Bertil Ohlin and James E. Meade
“For their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements.”

1976
Milton Friedman
“For his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.”

1975
Leonid V. Kantorovich and Tjalling C. Koopmans
“For their contributions to the theory of optimum allocation of resources.”

1974
Gunnar Myrdal and Friedrich August von Hayek
“For their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.”

1973
Wassily Leontief
“For the development of the input-output method and for its application to important economic problems.”

1972
John R. Hicks and Kenneth J. Arrow
“For their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory.”

1971
Simon Kuznets
“For his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth, which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development.”

1970
Paul A. Samuelson
“For the scientific work through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science.”

1969
Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen
“For having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes.”


Por que Angus Deaton mereceu o Nobel em Economia?

EMPIRICAL FOCUS

Why Angus Deaton Deserved the Economics Nobel Prize

The New York Times, October 12, 2015






The central contribution of Angus Deaton, the latest winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, has been to shift the gaze of his fellow economists beyond measures of income, to broader measures of well-being.

Much of his research has focused on consumption — measures of the food people eat, the condition of their housing, and the services they consume. And he has been a trailblazer in shifting the attention of economists away from the behavior of economywide aggregates such as gross domestic product, and toward the analysis of individual households.

This is also the first Nobel to acknowledge explicitly the increasingly empiricalnature of modern economic research. There are probably more such Nobels to come.

Yet for all the power that modern statistics brings, Mr. Deaton has argued forcefully that it is neither a panacea nor a substitute for economic theory.

He has been an influential counterweight against a popular strand of econometric practice arguing that if you want to know whether something works, you should just test it, preferably with a randomized control trial. In Mr. Deaton’s telling, the observation that a particular government intervention worked is no guarantee that it will work again, or in another context. By this view, theory is a complement to measurement, and generalizable insights arise only when the underlying economic mechanisms are elucidated and tested.

Angus Deaton was greeted by his colleagues at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., after he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science.CreditPeter Foley/European Pressphoto Agency

His method of careful analysis of data from household surveys has transformed four large swaths of the dismal science: microeconomics, econometrics, macroeconomics and development economics.

He has brought microeconomics — traditionally a field populated by theorists — into closer connection with the data. Partly because of his influence, modern microeconomists are more likely to spend their days knee-deep in large-scale data sets describing the real-world decisions made by millions of people, and less likely to be mired in Greek-letter abstractions.

Much of the empirical revolution in economics has been enabled by the tools that Mr. Deaton developed. These tools reimagine the role of economic theory, using it to organize and interpret the tidal wave of data coming from the hundreds of household surveys conducted around the world each year.

This focus on empirics has been a boon for the field of econometrics, which is the application of statistical methods to economic problems. Mr. Deaton’s signature achievement in this area has been in forcing empirical researchers to pay closer attention to questions of measurement. For too long, econometric analysis had proceeded as if data were simply handed down from a statistician-loving higher power. The reality is far uglier: Data are imperfect, surveys can be unrepresentative, people misreport, and attempts to recontact survey participants often fail. Mr. Deaton confronts these issues head-on, and he has taught economists how to extract meaning from imperfect data.

For an economist focused on big-picture questions — issues of global poverty — Mr. Deaton remains remarkably grounded in these smaller details. As the Nobel committee put it, Mr. Deaton’s “work covers a wide spectrum, from the deepest implications of theory to the grittiest detail of measurement.”

More than any other economist I know, he understands that to get the big picture right, you’ve got to get all the small details right, too.
This is a lesson that I learned firsthand, as my co-author (and significant other) Betsey Stevenson and I were puzzling over some data that appeared to show that people in certain low-income countries nonetheless reported high levels of life satisfaction. Mr. Deaton, who was equally perplexed, suggested that we dig a little deeper, as he recalled that some of the surveys were not representative samples of the entire population. Sure enough, several weeks of digging through the archives and sifting through the appendices to old codebooks revealed Mr. Deaton to be correct, and those puzzling observations to be simply the result of pollsters surveying only richer (and therefore probably happier) people in those poor countries. These statistical anomalies had partly hidden the strong link between life satisfaction and average incomes.

Mr. Deaton has also made important contributions to macroeconomics, which is the study of the economy as a whole. An earlier generation of macroeconomists had focused on aggregate measures, such as the total levels of consumption or income in the economy. Mr. Deaton turned instead to the behavior of individual households. He was a leader among those rejecting the prevailing fiction that the behavior of the whole economy could be treated as if it were the result of choices made by a single representative consumer.

This distinction between individual and aggregate behavior is particularly important to the study of consumption. While macroeconomists had been satisfied that their theories could explain the relationship between the total level of consumption and total income in the economy, Mr. Deaton showed that those same theories struggled to explain what individual households were doing. This has spawned a large and productive continuing research program trying to understand the spending patterns of actual households.

In 1992, Mr. Deaton argued that further progress on difficult economic questions would be likely “when macroeconomic questions are addressed in a way that uses the increasingly plentiful and informative microeconomic data.” He was right, and newly available “big data” describing the individual saving, spending and investment decisions of thousands and sometimes millions of people are fueling some of the most important work in macroeconomics today.

But perhaps Mr. Deaton’s most important effect has been within the field of development economics, which focuses on the economies of poor countries. This is a research program born of deep personal conviction. As he recently wrote, “Those of us who were lucky enough to be born in the right countries have a moral obligation to reduce poverty and ill health in the world.”
A generation ago, development economics was a field populated by “country doctors” — globe-trotting macroeconomists willing to make house calls to any country willing to provide them with a first-class ticket, so that they could proffer their preferred prescription, be it a more muscular industrial policy, a big push of infrastructure development, increased national savings or a faster shift to a market economy. The countries varied, but the prescriptions rarely did.

Today, development economics is a far more interesting and nuanced field, with practitioners focused on understanding the lives of the poor, and in uncovering the subtle ways in which immature economic institutions hinder their development. Rather than studying a few dozen countries, modern development economists are likely to pore over data describing the economic lives of thousands of families within each country. And much of that data comes from his decades-long collaboration with the World Bank, as his work has inspired much of its recent work on measuring and assessing poverty. The result is a sharper picture of the incidence and causes of global poverty.

More recently, Mr. Deaton has turned his attention to measures of subjective well-being, including happiness. In his 2010 Presidential address to the American Economic Association, Mr. Deaton highlighted the problems in constructing coherent measures of global poverty. Measures of income don’t offer much insight unless they can be thought of in terms of differences in purchasing power. But it is impossible to assess who has more or less purchasing power when people in different countries face different prices and choose to buy different goods. Given this problem, Mr. Deaton makes the radical suggestion that economists just ask people about their well-being instead.

Many of the most important findings on subjective well-being reflect new sources of data that Mr. Deaton — together with the psychologists Ed Diener, Arthur Stone and Daniel Kahneman, a fellow Nobel laureate — have helped create through their role as a senior scientists at Gallup. (Disclosure: I also serve as a senior scientist there.)

The award for Mr. Deaton continues an extraordinary run for Princeton, whose other recent winners include the game theorist John Nash; Mr. Kahneman; the economic theorist Eric Maskin; the trade economist Paul Krugman, who is also a New York Times columnist; and the macroeconomist Chris Sims. Mr. Krugman has since moved to the City University of New York, while Mr. Maskin has returned to Harvard. Even with these departures, Princeton is close to drawing even with the University of Chicago, which still lists five economics laureates on its faculty. There’s a pretty good chance that may happen, as several of Mr. Deaton’s colleagues often feature on Nobel shortlists.

I spent a lovely year at Princeton as a visiting professor in 2012 and can attest that no one commands greater respect among his colleagues than Mr. Deaton. He’s an imposing presence, a man with a giant intellect and an extraordinary breadth of knowledge, who holds all economists to his exacting — indeed, intimidating — standards.

More than that, he’s motivated by the questions that really matter, he is intellectually relentless, he has enormous integrity and he has devoted his life to understanding and improving the lot of the poor. He’s the perfect role model for any young economist.

Justin Wolfers is a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.

13 agosto 2015

Lista: Universidades no Nobel

A Lista das universidades que mais venceram o Prêmio Nobel no século

1) Stanford - Estados Unidos
2) Columbia - EUA
3) California - Berkeley - EUA
4) Princeton - EUA
4) Chicago - EUA
6) Howard Hughes Medical Institute - EUA
7) California, Santa Barbara - EUA
8) MIT - EUA
8) Technion Israel Institute of Technology
10) Max Planck Institute- Alemanha

Por Países

1) EUA
2) Reino Unido
3) Japão
4) Alemanha
5) Israel
6) França e Rússia
8) Austrália
9) Noruega
10) Bélgica, China e Itália

Fonte: Aqui

19 junho 2015

Entrevista com Alvin Roth


(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Stanford University’s Alvin Roth is a very rare thing: An economist who saves lives.
The co-recipient of the 2012 economics Nobel got his prize, in part, for helping to fix a long-standing problem with the market for kidney donations. Often family and friends were willing donors for someone who needed a kidney. But for medical reasons they weren’t a compatible match.

Building on previous work in which he had reshaped the National Resident Matching Program, which matches medical-school graduates with hospital internships, Roth devised an algorithm that would help match willing kidney donors to compatible recipients with whom they had no other connection.

That system became the cornerstone of one of the country’s first kidney exchange clearinghouses. Roth estimates his work has resulted in roughly 4,000 kidney transplants that might never had happened if not for the system he worked to build.
The market for donated kidneys is an example of what economists call a “matching market.” These markets govern everything from corporate hiring decisions to how we meet spouses, but they obey laws more complex than the simple balancing of supply and demand with prices.

While Roth’s early research focused on somewhat abstract areas of economics including game theory, over time he has transformed himself into something of a matching market guru. Roth swung by Quartz’s New York offices recently to chat about his new book, Who Gets What—and Why, which explains how matching markets work, why almost everyone makes it illegal to buy kidneys, and why it’s increasingly rare for people to marry their high-school sweethearts. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation.

Quartz: One of the ways we usually think about markets is in terms of the market for, say, crude oil or Apple stock. But you deal with “matching markets.” Can you briefly explain what those are?

Alvin Roth: Once you start looking at marketplaces one of the things you notice is that not all marketplaces are set up so that their job is merely to find a price at which supply equals demand. Those are the commodity markets. But lots of markets, even when they have prices as very important parts of the market, don’t set the price so that supply equals demand.
Labor markets don’t do that. Quartz doesn’t hire people by lowering the wage until [only] just enough people want to come work here. Instead, presumably you get to interview bunches of people who would like to work here and you get to hire some of them. But you have to compete.

The name of the book is Who Gets What—and Why. After reading it, I thought you could have added “and When” to the title. There’s this timing component of markets that’s really fascinating. You spend a lot of time on it.

Lots of markets clear very early—before lots of information is available. Book publishing is a good example. Publishers buy books before the books are written and they don’t really know what they’re getting.

If you’re graduating from law school, you get hired long before you graduate. Before firms really know what they’re getting. Before you might know what kind of law you really want to do.
Doctors used to be hired two years before graduation and that’s eventually one of the things that eventually led to the centralized clearinghouse for doctors [in the US], the National Resident Matching Program.

[...]
 

You started in a sort-of arcane area of economics, game theory. But it seems that early on you also start looking for opportunities to put these ideas into practice. You seem really interested in finding ways to help people. And I’m wondering if you think that should be the goal of economics? And, if so, what are the value of abstract models?

 Abstract models are very, very useful for organizing your thoughts and learning some things that you can’t learn without them. So I wouldn’t want to say that the goal of economics should be building concrete [things] in the world. But that should certainly be one of the goals.

Think about biology, broadly, with medicine as one part. Not all biologists should be doctors. But it is important to have doctors too.
And it’s important to have medicine that learns from biology. And you want biology and medicine to work together so that abstract, abstruse concerns with things like genes and DNA and proteins should eventually be translated into medical care and better health.

 

Continua aqui

 


27 abril 2015

Roland Fryer ganha a medalha John Bates Clark




Harvard professor Roland Fryer, an economist who has done pioneering work on the sources and magnitude of racial inequality, won the John Bates Clark medal, which is given to the most promising American economist under 40 years old.

The American Economic Association, which announced the prize on Friday, said Mr. Fryer’s work made him “a major figure in the evaluation of education policies to narrow the racial achievement gap.”

Mr. Fryer, 37, founded Harvard’s Education Innovation Laboratory, known as EdLabs, in 2008 and serves as its director. From 2007 to 2008, he served as the chief equality officer for New York City’s Department of Education. In a 2013 paper, Mr. Fryer examined the benefits of high-achieving charter school that extend beyond the classroom, studying Harlem’s Promise Academy in New York City.
Mr. Fryer is the first African-American to win the medal. At 30, he became the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard.

The Clark medal is often referred to as the “Baby Nobel” because many of its winners have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, including Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman. The medal doesn’t come with a monetary prize. It has been awarded every other year since 1947; since 2010, it has been awarded annually.

Fonte: aqui

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Roland Fryer is an influential applied microeconomist whose work spans labor economics, the economics of education, and social problems and social interactions.  His innovative and creative research contributions have deepened our understanding of the sources, magnitude, and persistence of U.S. racial inequality.  He has made substantial progress in evaluating the policies that work and do not work to improve the educational outcomes and economic opportunities of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.  His theoretical and empirical work on the “acting white” hypothesis of peer effects provides new insights into the difficulties of increasing the educational investments of minorities and the socially excluded.  Fryer is the leading economist working on the economics of race and education, and he has produced the most important work in recent years on combating the racial divide, one of America’s most profound and long-lasting social problems.

He has mastered tools from many disciplines to tackle difficult research topics.  Fryer has developed and implemented compelling randomized field experiments in large U.S. urban school districts to evaluate education interventions.  He founded EdLabs (the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University) in 2008 to facilitate such efforts and continues as its director.  He has incorporated insights from psychology to formulate a new model of discrimination based on categorization, and he has used detailed historical archival research to understand the origins and spread of the Ku Klux Klan.

Fonte: aqui

20 janeiro 2015

Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen e Robert Shiller

Abstract:

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 2013 was awarded to Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert Shiller for their contributions to the empirical study of asset pricing. Some observers have found it hard to understand the common elements of the laureates' research, preferring to highlight areas of disagreement among them. This paper argues that empirical asset pricing is a coherent enterprise, which owes much to the laureates' seminal contributions, and that important themes in the literature can best be understood by considering the laureates in pairs. Specifically, after summarizing modern asset pricing theory using the stochastic discount factor as an organizing framework, the paper discusses the joint hypothesis problem in tests of market efficiency, which is as much an opportunity as a problem (Fama and Hansen); patterns of short- and long-term predictability in asset returns (Fama and Shiller); and models of deviations from rational expectations (Hansen and Shiller). The paper concludes by reviewing ways in which the laureates have already influenced the practice of finance, and may influence future innovations.

Fonte: John Campbell -Empirical Asset Pricing: Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert Shiller

01 dezembro 2014

Jean Tirole e a economia brasileria



Amigos e colegas de academia de Jean Tirole, professor francês que levou o Nobel de Economia nesta segunda-feira, afirmaram que não se surpreenderam com a premiação — e que muitas de suas pesquisas acabaram influenciando o mercado brasileiro. Tirole é acadêmico da Universidade de Toulouse e é considerado um dos grandes pesquisadores no campo da concorrência e competitividade.

Ao site de VEJA, Patrick Rey, também professor do Instituto de Economia da Universidade de Toulouse, disse que Tirole sempre foi um professor excepcional e que não é de hoje que o colega era um dos favoritos a vencer o Nobel de Economia. Os dois escreveram juntos artigos na área de regulação e competição de mercado, incluindo um voltado ao setor de telecomunicações. Rey mencionou a gratificação que é ter um francês faturando o prêmio, tradicionalmente vencido por americanos, e lembrou o nome dos outros dois compatriotas vencedores: Gérard Debreu, em 1983, e Maurice Allais, em 1988.

Glen Weyl, pesquisador do Microsoft Research New England, falou com entusiasmo sobre a premiação e destacou a contribuição dos estudos de Tirole também para o Brasil. "À medida que o Brasil se desenvolve, ele vai se tornando um dos mais ativos países em questões antitruste, impedindo fusões entre grandes multinacionais e empresas brasileiras. Os princípios por trás dessa política pró-competitividade vêm dos trabalhos de Jean. Muitas reformas dos governos de Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula e Dilma também se beneficiaram de suas pesquisas", disse Weyl. "Olhando por este lado, Jean fez uma contribuição fundamental para a política econômica e economia do Brasil", completou.

[...]

O professor da FGV e do Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (Impa), Aloisio Araújo, citou a influência dos trabalhos de Tirole na abertura do setor elétrico brasileiro à iniciativa privada e a divisão entre geradoras, distribuidoras e transmissoras. O Brasil baseou-se, segundo ele, no modelo inglês, que, por sua vez, foi inspirado pelas pesquisas de Tirole e Jean-Jacques Laffont, seu parceiro de trabalhos sobre regulação.

"Ainda há muito para o Brasil aprender com suas pesquisas, especialmente na área de competição. A pergunta que deveria ser debatida é se o Brasil tem um índice de concentração muito elevado em alguns setores, como o de telefonia celular", disse ao site de VEJA. O estudioso afirma que o tema é pouco discutido no Brasil. Exemplo disso, segundo Araújo, é a inexistência das discussões sobre regulação no debate eleitoral.

Fonte: aqui