The February 2013 issue of
the profession's flagship journal, American Economic Review, highlights the work of two members of the BC Economics faculty. "School Admissions Reform in Chicago and England: Comparing Mechanisms by their Vulnerability to Manipulation," by Parag Parthak of MIT and BC's Tayfun Sönmez, discusses an important issue first raised by earlier research on the "Boston mechanism", used to assign students to schools.
Their work formally addresses the analysis of weaknesses in mechanisms of this sort in terms of their vulnerability to being manipulated by participants. This line of research is closely related to that cited in the award of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics to Alvin Roth, a frequent coauthor of Sönmez, and Lloyd Shapley.
The same issue of the AER contains Roche Professor Arthur Lewbel's work with Geoffrey Dunbar and Krishna Pendakur, both of Simon Fraser University: "Children's Resources in Collective Households: Identification, Estimation, and an Application to Child Poverty in Malawi." They consider the difficulty in identifying resources available to children in a family unit when consumption is only measured at the level of the household. They develop ways of identifying how household resources are shared within the family from available information on 'private' goods purchased by individual family members. Their empirical work, applied to a household survey of the African nation of Malawi, concludes that standard poverty indices, based on family resources, may understate the incidence of child poverty.