Past Events
February 2019
Ernesto Dal Bo: Government Decentralization Under Changing State Capacity
4:30pm, February 26th, 2019
Strand Building S3.30
How does monitoring technology reduce shirking in the public sector? In this seminar, Ernesto Dal Bo (University of California, Berkeley) presents new experimental evidence from rural Paraguay. Check out the full NBER paper and join the discussion.
March 2019
What Kind of Puppet Are You? Mario Rizzo on Rationality and Behavioral Economics
4:30pm, March 19th, 2019
Strand Building S3.30
The standard rationality assumptions of neoclassical economics were consciously adopted as unrealistic. They were designed to create “puppets” that would give utility functions a firm axiomatic foundations and generate determinate market behavior. Behavioral economics treats these puppet characteristics as a normative ideal by which the behavior of real-world individuals is to be judged.
On Morality and Street-Level Bureaucracy: A Perspective From Political Theory
4:30pm, March 26th, 2019
Strand Building S3.30
When citizens interact with the state, they encounter street-level bureaucrats—the welfare workers, police officers, counselors and educators responsible for implementing public policy and enforcing the law. By combining political theory with participant observation in a public service agency, Bernardo Zacka (MIT) argues that street-level bureaucrats are caught in a troubling predicament.
