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The Moral and Social Dimensions of 

Microeconomic Behavior In Low-Income Communities

Sponsored by the Christian Scholars Program at the University of Notre Dame

This program is supported by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts

Chris Barrett has a forthcoming book entitled The Social Economics of Poverty: Identities, Groups, Communities and Networks. Click the link for more information and downloadable chapters in PDF format.

 

PEW NEWS - April 2005

The Pew Project "Workshop on Social Dynamics and the Microeconomics of Poverty" will be held on March 30 April 1, 2005 at the Rockefeller Foundation Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy.

Special Issue of the Journal of Economic Inequality

PEW NEWS - February 2004

The Pew Project conference on "Theoretical Perspectives on Identity, Community and Economic Policy" will be held February 9-10, 2004 in Barcelona, Spain, at the Bank of Spain.

 

Please visit the Pew Conference Web Site for travel information, conference  program and papers.

In this project a team of fifteen economists explores the role of nonmaterial preferences and constraints – such as social norms, altruism, duty, trust, fidelity, solidarity, and identity – on behavior among or on behalf of the world’s poor. The existence of nonmaterial determinants of microeconomic behavior among the most materially deprived populations would signal the importance of such phenomena to economic behavior more broadly.

bulletTo what extent, therefore, can contemporary microeconomics explain, in a Friedmanite positivist sense, individual or group behavior using only the framework of material motivation presented in most, if not all, current graduate textbooks?
bulletDo we need models that explicitly accommodate moral or social dimensions to preferences, incentives, technologies, and constraints on individual choice?
bulletTo what extent do we find empirical evidence for or against the importance of nonmaterial preferences as conditioning factors in determining consumption, exchange or production behaviors among the poor?

In recent years, there has been much interest and notable advances in understanding the role of identity, conformity, generalized morality, and other such moral and social dimensions of individuals and their behaviors. Members of this team have contributed greatly to those advances. These not withstanding, the mainstream economic literature and the theory and methods on which it rests seem ill-equipped to understand how individuals perceive and adapt their identities and how these identities affect their consumption, production and exchange behaviors. This project aims to make a substantive contribution toward improving the economic literature on these important subjects.

Within this broad class of problems, this team focuses on three core topics:

  1. The social nature of investment and of learning about new opportunities, e.g., about new production technologies or prospective market opportunities that may improve well-being and fuel economic growth and improved livelihoods
  2. The functioning of solidarity and reciprocity arrangements to cushion the poor against adverse shocks
  3. The place of generalized morality, social identity, and socially exclusionary groupings on contracting and resource access

All documents on this site can be downloaded, read, and printed using free Adobe Acrobat Reader software, which you can download by clicking the icon at the left.

For more information contact:

Christopher B. Barrett, Professor

Department of Applied Economics and Management

Cornell University, 315 Warren Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-7801

Email: cbb2@cornell.edu, Telephone: 607-255-4489, Fax: 607-255-9984

 
 
Send mail to jbf26@cornell.edu with questions or comments about this web site.
Last modified: 10/24/2002