Most of my research has dealt, in one way or another, with the organization of economic activity, especially production, and particularly from the standpoint of incentives, motivation, and property rights, with an eye to consequences for income distribution and well-being. My doctoral thesis, completed in 1980, focused on the reaction of farmers in Tanzania to that country's 1970s policy of promoting collective agricultural production. My early research branched out from that problem in several directions, treating (a) problems of work incentives in teams, and the literatures on profit-sharing, employee ownership, and labor-managed firms; (b) how firms are organized in market economies; (c) various aspects of the economics of development, especially rural development; and (d) the comparison of socialist and capitalist economies, especially microeconomic aspects and issues of property rights.
In 1983, I completed a book on Tanzanian peasants ( Peasants, Collectives and Choice ) and visited China to study its collective agriculture and the de-collectivization process which was then under way. Work on China 's rural economy was a major focus until I completed Continuity and Change in China's Rural Development , published in 1993. I also worked on work incentive and firm organization issues, and on labor-managed firms, publishing a variety of papers, co-writing with John Bonin the book Economics of Cooperation and the Labor-Managed Economy (1987), and I wrote a book on economic systems, Division of Labor and Welfare (1990). Since 1993, my work on China 's economy has focused on industrial enterprises, their productivity, employment, and wages. Most of this is joint work with Xiao-Yuan Dong of the University of Winnipeg .
In 1993, I also began a new research program on the role of preferences and values in supporting economic institutions. This led first to a conference and edited book, Economics, Values and Organization (1998), and to articles arguing for a model of preference formation drawing upon evolutionary psychology, co-authored by Avner Ben-Ner of the University of Minnesota . Since the late 1990s, I have been pursuing these interests mainly by following literature on human evolution and behavioral experimental economics, and by designing and conducting economics experiments, including a large number of public goods or collective action experiments that have generated a series of papers with my colleague Toby Page and a number of our graduate students, and some joint experiments with Ben-Ner, including a series done circa 2005 on trust and communication. Several other projects of experimental research are underway or in the writing phase.
A second new research program grew out of time spent in Tanzania and China in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I began investigating how very long run historical processes may have helped to determine the differences in modern economic growth performance of East Asian versus sub-Saharan African countries, and by extension, of different developing countries more broadly. This work has led to a number of papers with several co-authors, including Areendam Chanda. I've also continued to write on old interests, including the contractual structure of firms, profit-sharing, income and wealth distribution, and incentive problems of market socialism. In early 2000, I completed a general book, Dollars and Change , which puts economics in a broad social and historical context; it was published in 2001 by Yale University Press. I was president of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies for the year 2000.
My papers and books are listed by subject in other links to my web page, and a few of my working papers can be downloaded from the "Working Papers" link. Other papers are accessible via RePAc.
I've taught economics at Brown since 1980. Initially, I taught intermediate microeconomics, development economics, and comparative economic systems. From the mid-1980s, I taught regularly in three areas: comparative economic systems and the economy of China , theories of firms (focusing on internal organization, incentives, and contractual structure), the history of economic thought, and intersections of economics and philosophy. In more recent years, I've returned to teaching development economics, and have been revising a graduate course on nonmarket institutions to include more behavioral and experimental material. I've advised undergraduate and graduate theses on various topics, including China and other Asian and developing economies, firm and incentive problems, and experimental economics. I assist in the Development Studies undergraduate concentration and master's degree programs at Brown; since 2000 I've been director of the masters program and since 2006, of the undergraduate concentration as well. I've also worked with the International Relations Program, and am a Faculty Associate of the Watson Institute for International Studies.
I grew up in Great Neck, Long Island , New York , one of six children. At the age of eighteen, I joined a group of young people trying to establish a community at Kibbutz Gezer, Israel, and I lived and did agricultural work there and on another kibbutz for three years. I returned to the U.S. to complete my B.A. in Economics (minor: Anthropology) at Columbia University and my M.A.in International Relations and Ph.D. in Economics at Yale University . I am married and have three children. My interests include the evolutionary bases of human behavior, history, psychology, and religion. I love music and my hobbies are playing piano, and discussing music, playing ping-pong and playing chess with my kids.
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