Marc T. Law

Evaluation systems often seek to reduce bias, prevent manipulation, preserve relevant information, maintain comparability, and treat candidates equally, but these fairness goals can conflict. This paper develops a framework for understanding such trade-offs in expert evaluation—including peer review, grant panels, academic hiring, and artistic competitions—where quality is multidimensional and legitimate disagreement among evaluators is possible. We treat the choice among evaluation procedures as a problem of constitutional design: rules must be selected before the specific candidates, evaluators, and circumstances that will test them are known. Classical music competitions are our primary analytical setting because their rules, scores, and controversies make these trade-offs unusually visible, but the framework applies to other settings in which expert judgments are aggregated under incomplete information. The framework highlights two core tensions: information control and outlier rules. First, when information is both quality-relevant and identity-revealing, procedures that suppress bias-relevant cues may also remove information with genuine evaluative content. Second, because sincere minority judgment and strategic manipulation can generate similar observed score patterns, score-based exclusion rules may reduce manipulation while limiting legitimate dissent. Two further trade-offs concerning transparency and standardization are developed as illustrations. The analysis shows that no procedure can eliminate all vulnerabilities at once. Beyond this design implication, the framework also helps explain why evaluation rules differ across stages and settings, and why well-intentioned reforms may create new vulnerabilities.

A central question in economics is how talent is allocated across elite professions and whether access is shaped by family ties or by open, standardized systems of selection. We study these questions in Western classical composition, a setting in which family background historically influenced entry through both inherited skill and inherited privilege, and where rich biographical records make it possible to trace selection over multiple centuries. Using data on more than 16,000 composers from 450 CE to the present, we identify dynastic ties from Grove Music Online and measure prominence by biographical entry length. Dynastic composers are 15–21 percent less prominent than non-dynasts, conditional on country and birth cohort, and this discount is driven by descendants: founders perform about as well as non-dynasts, while descendants perform significantly worse. Archival manuscript evidence from the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales yields similar results, suggesting that the pattern is not an artifact of editorial selection. In the twentieth century, however, the dynasty discount reverses, consistent with the transition from informal, family-based entry to more standardized selection through conservatory training. Consistent with this interpretation, dynasts are less likely to have formal training mentioned in their biographies, more likely to be described as advancing through family connections, and face a smaller dynasty discount in regions and periods with conservatories. Taken together, the findings suggest that expanded access to standardized training can weaken inherited advantage, reshape elite formation, and improve talent allocation, with broader implications for long-run innovation and economic performance.

Why do creators sometimes act as firms, internalizing the realization of their work, while in other settings they delegate realization to market intermediaries or operate under hierarchical employment? We develop an analytical framework in which creators choose how to organize realization when contracts are imperfectly enforceable and limits on contractual payments constrain transfers to creators. Delegation can reduce coordination burdens by shifting realization to established intermediaries, but may fail to meet creators’ participation constraints, making self-integration an endogenous response to contracting limitations. The framework highlights how organizational choice depends not only on coordination costs, but also on the feasibility of contractual transfer and the timing of diffusion. We illustrate the model using the history of Western classical music, where composition and realization are technologically distinct yet jointly required for value creation, yielding a transparent make-or-buy setting. The framework is consistent with the historical evolution from salaried employment under patronage, to entrepreneurial self-organization as markets expanded under weak copyright, and ultimately to delegation under mature intermediation and contracting. It also clarifies why composers sometimes sequenced dissemination—using performance before publication—when the timing of diffusion could not be governed through contract. Similar trade-offs shape creator-intermediary relationships in contemporary creative markets.

Why do some artists maintain a high level of productivity throughout their careers, while others experience bursts of creativity followed by burnout or stagnation? Existing explanations emphasize economic incentives and human capital but often overlook an artist’s ability to sustain effort over time. We introduce a conceptual framework centered on psychological capital—a stock of confidence, motivation, and resilience that accumulates in response to past creative work and evolves in response to emotional volatility, financial stress, and external feedback—as a dynamic factor in creative production that shapes long-term artistic productivity. By influencing the perceived effort cost of creative work, psychological capital helps explain why some artists enter self-reinforcing cycles of creativity while others disengage. While previous research has examined psychological capital in relation to workplace performance and well-being, its role in sustaining creative careers remains unexplored. We illustrate the framework’s predictions using historical case studies, offering insights for cultural policy and the economics of artistic labor. Although we focus on artists, our framework applies to other creative fields where motivation, external reinforcement, and financial stability shape long-term productivity.

We investigate the contemporaneous mortality consequences of alcohol prohibition laws introduced in America between 1900 and 1920. We improve on existing studies by constructing a time‐varying measure of prohibition at the state level that corrects for the timing of prohibition enforcement and accounts for the presence of dry counties. Using summary indices that aggregate alcohol‐related mortality due to disease and poor decisions, we find that prohibition significantly reduced mortality rates. These findings are corroborated with an area‐level analysis that exploits data on deaths in urban areas that were wet prior to statewide or federal prohibition and nonurban areas that were partially dry. (JEL I18, N4, K2)

We study the labor‐market impacts of occupational licensing laws on nursing, an economically important occupation. States adopted licensing of registered and practical nurses at different times, which allows us to estimate the effects of licensing on wages and participation for each nursing profession. We find that licensure raised wages by 5 to 10 percent but there is no evidence that it reduced overall participation. Additionally, we show that licensure equalizes wages within the occupation with minority wages rising faster than nonminority wages; however, licensing had a negative but not statistically significant impact on the participation of minorities in nursing.

Every nation, formally or informally, defines and establishes the lines of political and fiscal authority among its national, regional, and local governments. Historically, centralized governments tend to restrict the power and autonomy of provincial and local governments. In this paper, we exploit the quasi‐experimental distribution of political institutions in the Americas caused by variation in European colonial experience to examine the impact of institutions on urban and local development, specifically on the degree of urban primacy, the size distribution of cities, the number and density of local government units, and the fragmentation of metropolitan areas. We argue that centralization of political power at the national level, as experienced in many countries in Latin America, contributes to urban primacy and a size distribution of cities favoring large cities. Additionally, even in more politically decentralized countries such as Canada and the U.S., variance in political centralization at the provincial (state) level over local governments led to significant divergences in urban primacy, the distribution of city sizes, as well as the form, number, and density of local governments. While we cannot rule out the importance of other factors, our findings suggest that political centralization affects spatial economic development.

Economists have devoted relatively little attention to analyzing how government officials actually enforce regulation. This is a significant omission, since the efficacy of regulatory enforcement and the effects of regulation on economic outcomes may depend on how regulators regulate. This article sheds light on these issues by examining how the fledgling Food and Drug Administration (FDA) enforced the Pure Food and Drugs Act from 1907 to 1938. I argue that because the FDA's ability to enforce this law through deterrence was limited, effective enforcement could be obtained only in those instances where the agency had the capacity to offer benefits to compliant firms in the way of quality certification or direct assistance in improving product quality. The available evidence on the FDA's enforcement activities is consistent with this prediction. The analysis presented may help to explain why contemporary regulatory agencies spend considerable resources on advisory enforcement activities.