nep-evo New Economics Papers
on Evolutionary Economics
Issue of 2022‒05‒16
six papers chosen by
Matthew Baker
City University of New York

  1. Within-Group Heterogeneity in a Multi-Ethnic Society By Artiles, Miriam
  2. The Economics of Fertility: A New Era By Doepke, Matthias; Hannusch, Anne; Kindermann, Fabian; Tertilt, Michèle
  3. Evolutionary Behavioural Finance: A Model with Endogenous Asset Payoffs By Igor V. Evstigneev; Mohammad Javad Vanaei
  4. Ethnic Enclaves and Cultural Assimilation By Achard, Pascal
  5. Data Production and the coevolving AI trajectories: An attempted evolutionary model. By Andrea Borsato; Andre Lorentz
  6. The fertility transition in Sub-Saharan Africa: The role of structural change By Büttner, Nicolas; Grimm, Michael; Günther, Isabel; Harttgen, Kenneth; Klasen, Stephan

  1. By: Artiles, Miriam
    Abstract: Is ethnic diversity good or bad for economic development? Most empirical studies find corrosive effects. In this paper, I show that ethnic diversity need not spell poor development outcomes–a history of within-group heterogeneity can turn ethnic diversity into an advantage for long-run development. I collect new data from a natural experiment regarding Peru's colonial history: the forced resettlement of native populations in the 16th century. This intervention forced together various ethnic groups into new jurisdictions. In those jurisdictions where colonial officials concentrated individuals with a history of within-group heterogeneity, who, prior to colonization, worked in complementary climates of the Andes, ethnic diversity results in systematically lower costs and may even become advantageous. Neither precolonial groups' political complexity nor their degree of economic development explain this result. The transmission of prosocial behavior is one likely channel. I also find evidence consistent with a positive role of economic complementarities between ethnic groups.
    Keywords: Ethnic Diversity, Within-Group Heterogeneity, Long-Run Economic Development
    JEL: J15 N16 O10 O12 Q56 Z10
    Date: 2022–04–16
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:112782&r=
  2. By: Doepke, Matthias (Northwestern University); Hannusch, Anne (University of Mannheim); Kindermann, Fabian (University of Bonn); Tertilt, Michèle (University of Mannheim)
    Abstract: In this survey, we argue that the economic analysis of fertility has entered a new era. First-generation models of fertility choice were designed to account for two empirical regularities that, in the past, held both across countries and across families in a given country: a negative relationship between income and fertility, and another negative relationship between women's labor force participation and fertility. The economics of fertility has entered a new era because these stylized facts no longer universally hold. In high-income countries, the income-fertility relationship has flattened and in some cases reversed, and the cross-country relationship between women's labor force participation and fertility is now positive. We summarize these new facts and describe new models that are designed to address them. The common theme of these new theories is that they view factors that determine the compatibility of women's career and family goals as key drivers of fertility. We highlight four factors that facilitate combining a career with a family: family policy, cooperative fathers, favorable social norms, and flexible labor markets. We also review other recent developments in the literature, and we point out promising new directions for future research on the economics of fertility.
    Keywords: fertility, family economics, marital bargaining
    JEL: D13 J13 J16
    Date: 2022–04
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15224&r=
  3. By: Igor V. Evstigneev; Mohammad Javad Vanaei
    Abstract: The paper explores financial market dynamics from evolutionary and behavioural perspectives. Most of the studies on this topic deal with models in which asset payo¤s are exogenous and depend only on the underlying stochastic process of states of the world. The present work proposes a model in which the payoffs of assets are endogenous: they depend on the share of total market wealth invested in the asset.
    Date: 2022–04
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:man:sespap:2202&r=
  4. By: Achard, Pascal (Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management)
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tiu:tiutis:306dc66a-300a-43c1-b7e9-c747c50b7b75&r=
  5. By: Andrea Borsato; Andre Lorentz
    Abstract: This paper contributes to the understanding of the relationship between the nature of data and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) technological trajectories. We develop an agentbased model in which firms are data producers that compete on the markets for data and AI. The model is enriched by a public sector that fuels the purchase of data and trains the scientists that will populate firms as workforce. Through several simulation experiments we analyze the determinants of each market structure, the corresponding relationships with innovation attainments, the pattern followed by labour and data productivity, and the quality of data traded in the economy. More precisely, we question the established view in the literature on industrial organization according to which technological imperatives are enough to experience divergent industrial dynamics on both the markets for data and AI blueprints. Although technical change behooves if any industry pattern is to emerge, the actual unfolding is not the outcome of a specific technological trajectory, but the result of the interplay between technology-related factors and the availability of data-complementary inputs such as labour and AI capital, the market size, preferences and public policies.
    Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Data Markets, Industrial Dynamics, Agent-based Models.
    JEL: L10 L60 O33 O38
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2022-09&r=
  6. By: Büttner, Nicolas; Grimm, Michael; Günther, Isabel; Harttgen, Kenneth; Klasen, Stephan
    Abstract: Despite relatively sustained economic growth in at least parts of Sub-Saharan Africa over the past twenty years, the fertility transition has not much advanced in most countries in that region. We explore whether the lack of structural change can explain this slow transition. For this end, we analyze the determinants of fertility transitions across the developing world using a novel regional level panel dataset created by matching Demographic and Health Surveys and Household Income Surveys from 60 countries over three decades. Our key hypothesis is that structural change, i.e. a shift of employment from subsistence agriculture to more skill-intensive services, accompanied by an increase in human capital accumulation, is a key driver of the fertility transition. Our results indicate that higher education of women, female employment in non-agricultural formal jobs and industrialization as measured by an increase in nighttime light intensity are indeed important determinants of the fertility transition. We also find suggestive evidence for a complementary role of access to health insurance. Simulations show that if high-fertility countries in Sub-Saharan Africa had experienced the same structural change as the most demographically advanced regions in our sample over the last twenty years, fertility levels would be up to 40% lower.
    Keywords: Demographic transition,Fertility,Structural change,Human capital,Sub-SaharanAfrica
    JEL: D13 J11 J13 J22 O12
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:upadvr:v9022&r=

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