Bulletin September 2007

IN THIS ISSUE...

Game, set and match to men?
Every avid sports fan knows the experience of watching their hero choke at the worst possible moment in a match, just as the pressure is at its most intense. In a new Discussion Paper, CEPR Research Affiliate Marco Daniele Paserman examines whether this phenomenon can tell us something about how men and women perform in fiercely competitive environments.

The rise and fall of the clerk
When Adam Smith used pin-makers to illustrate his powerful insight that splitting a job into separate, specialist tasks got it done more efficiently, he could already identify 18 separate processes involved. More than two centuries later, when factories make products as diverse and complex as computers and pharmaceuticals, there are many thousands of different tasks - and someone has to keep track of them all. CEPR Research Affiliate Guy Michaels analyses more than a century's worth of data to show that this ever more complex division of labour led to the rise of a new breed of worker - the clerk.

What's in a name?
When parents lovingly bestow a name on their new-born child, economics is presumably among the last things on their minds; but in a new CEPR Discussion Paper, Research Affiliate Thierry Mayer and his co-author Keith Head argue that trends in name-choices - in this case, in France - have much to tell us about social interactions and influences that have profound effects in the world of markets.

Getting down to the business of corruption
Fighting bribery and corruption is one of the toughest challenges facing governments in many developing countries, but CEPR Research Affiliate Benjamin Olken and his co-author Patrick Barron believe economics can help. They have conducted an extraordinary experiment in Indonesia to prove that although corrupt officials may be outside the law, they are not beyond the reach of market forces. In fact, Barron and Olken found that individual bribe-takers seem to behave rather like firms operating in a market, trying their best - sometimes in quite sophisticated ways - to maximize their 'profits'.