Reckless behavior by business leaders can be a systemic risk for individual firms and the economies in which the firms exist. We propose that a synthesis of behavioral economics, in particular prospect theory, and the study of psychopathy may help researchers better understand why some business leaders engage in high-risk criminal activity. We propose that psychopathy is associated with an abnormal response to negative consequences. Where traditional Prospect Theory proposes that people are loss avoidant, we propose that people high on the trait of psychopathy may be more motivated by gains and will be risk seeking in high reward/high risk situations for which most people will avoid risk. We propose two empirical study designs that may be used to test the framework in the future.

I will show that if the propensity to consume from savings satisfies appropriate conditions, the debt-GDP ratio will not grow infinitely large and fiscal collapse will not occur. Using a basic macroeconomic model, with an overlapping generations model in mind, we show the following results: 1) The budget deficit including interest payments on the government bonds equals an increase in the savings from a period to the next period. 2) If the savings in the first period is positive, we need budget deficit to maintain full employment under constant prices or inflation in the later periods. 3) Under an appropriate assumption about the propensity to consume from savings, the debt-GDP ratio converges to a finite value. It does not diverge to infinity. The larger the propensity to consume from savings, the smaller the budget deficit required to achieve full employment. The larger the propensity to consume from savings, the less likely it is that the debt-GDP ratio will become large.

This paper analyses a model of private value auctions with symmetric risk-neutral bidders, where bidders' private values of an indivisible good are fuzzy. The auction is studied as a game with incomplete information. Fuzzy random variables, their quantile functions, and expressions for expectations through quantile functions are used. An explicit expression for the solution is found. Also, expected bidders' payments are studied.

Since the establishment of neoclassical economics in the nineteenth century, there has been a debate in the economics profession over the role played by mathematics. Mathematics can add precision to discussion of real-world empirical problems in economics, but care needs to be taken when formalizing a problem to ensure that errors of translation are not made. Formalism allows one to be sure that a chain of reasoning is correct but applying conclusions back to an empirical science problem is fraught if an error of translation has been made. We illustrate such a difficulty in the context of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, specifically the mistranslation of the non-dictatorship condition. The notion of dictatorship entails causality, but causality does not correspond to the usage of the implication sign in mathematics or logic. We use the rules of logic to illustrate that the way that dictatorship is rendered mathematically in the impossibility theorem makes the existence of a dictator (or dictators) not only reasonable but likely.

In his 1922 review for Cambridge Magazine of Keynes's A Treatise on Probability, and again in his 1926 review "Truth and Probability" (published in 1931 and republished in Kyburg and Smokler's 1980 edition), Ramsey provided examples critiquing Keynes's logical theory of probability. However, these examples do not disprove Keynes's theory as all of them are flawed. The flaws arise because all the pairs of propositions that Ramsey used to substantiate his criticisms are irrelevant to each other. Such irrelevant propositions are explicitly excluded from Keynes's theory in pages 4-6 of his A Treatise on Probability. This paper highlights that Ramsey's examples, which involve irrelevant propositions, do not disprove Keynes's Boolean, relational logic. The only other defense of Keynes's theory, put forth by Watt in 1989, was found to be deficient by Brady in 2022.

Spence’s signaling model (Spence, 1973) suggests that education can signal workers’ unobserved ability to employers thereby mitigating discrimination. There have been several studies concerning education’s impact on labor market discrimination against minority or disadvantaged groups. Our approach in this inquiry is unique in that we utilize the data of PhD recipients, a group of people with the highest education attainment, to test Spence’s theory. Another novelty of this paper is that in addition to examining possible discrimination against women and foreign-born, as has been done in previous studies, we further explore possible discrimination against the physically challenged individuals. Our baseline results show conflicting results that Ph.D. education can reduce discrimination against disability and foreign-born but not against gender. Further analysis by the Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition shows that the wage gaps of gender and disability come more from the unobserved part than the explained part, while the foreign-born wage gap come more from the observable human capital differences. Since prejudice is an unobserved factor and we know that the disadvantaged groups are likely to suffer from prejudice (Oaxaca, 1973; Blinder, 1973; Montes-Rojas et al., 2017; Deshpande and Khanna, 2018), we conjecture that prejudice might be attributable to the unexplained part of the wage gaps. Furthermore, prejudice might be deeply rooted in one’s mind, thus difficult to remove even with the influence of education. Hence, our results reveal that it would be hard for Ph.D. education to eradicate the discrimination against gender and disability, but not against foreign-born.