The OMDS/VGSE Vienna Joint Economics seminar is held weekly on Thursdays during the term.
VJE-Seminars scheduled in March:
- Speaker: Kristof Madarasz (LSE)
- Title: Projective Thinking
- Time: Thursday, March 26, 1:15 – 2:45 pm
- Location: Lecture Hall 12 (2-floor), OMP-1
- Abstract: We offer a parsimonious model of egocentric thinking by postulating a link between the extent to which people project their beliefs onto others and to which they anticipate others’ projecting onto them. We provide evidence for this link in higher-order beliefs and derive predictions of such projective thinking. In torts, judges’ excessive liability judgments are conjoint with agents’ under-appreciation thereof. In dissent, people infer antagonistic preferences and the more costly dissent is, the more they conclude that the norm is genuinely popular. In trade, informed traders bluff too little, uninformed ones are cursed, and the predictions match the experimental evidence.
- Speaker: Felix Bierbrauer (University of Cologne)
- Title: Standard Economic Agents, Socially Responsible Consumers and the Political Economy of Climate Policy (joint with Mattias Polborn, Marten Ritterrath and Georg Weizsäcker)
- Time: Thursday, March 19, 1:15 – 2:45 pm
- Location: Lecture Hall 12 (2-floor), OMP-1
- Abstract: We study the political economy of Carbon taxes. We develop a model with an electorate that consist of two groups, standard economic agents and socially responsible consumers. As consumers, standard economic agents take overall Carbon emissions as given and their demand of dirty goods depends only on the tax-inclusive price of dirty goods. Socially responsible consumers, by contrast, internalize the damages associated with their Carbon footprints. We characterize the preferences overtaxes both for standard economic agents and socially responsible consumers and show that a median voter theorem applies. We clarify the conditions under which a political tragedy of the commons arises: Having more socially responsible consumers implies that political equilibrium taxes go down and overall Carbon emissions go up. We also study extensions in which socially responsible agents engage in moral activism and clarify the implications for political equilibrium taxes. Moral activism gives rise to equilibrium multiplicity. There is an equilibrium in which moral activism is rejected by some of the standard economic agents. This equilibrium can be Pareto-inferior to the one with nomoral activism.
