Atlantic Economic Journal articles from September 1997

Atlantic Economic Journal archives from September 1997

On optimal growth when there are many goods and factors.
September 1, 1997... Introduction As someone interested in economic growth for some years, I should like to make a modest addition to the discussion with this paper. Over the past 50 years one of the important strands has been the observational one - Kuznets...

Economic growth and the human capital intensity of government spending.
September 1, 1997... Introduction This paper demonstrates a mechanism through which government spending may inadvertently affect long-run growth. The mechanism involves the effects of the skilled labor intensity of government purchases on skilled labor's relative...

Do guns cause crime? Does crime cause guns? A Granger test. (Granger Causality tests)
September 1, 1997... Introduction This paper looks at the issue of how gun availability affects crime and gun deaths in the U.S. It is alleged by both proponents and opponents of gun control that having more gun availability affects the amount of crime committed....

A simple model of crime waves, riots, and revolutions.
September 1, 1997... Introduction Crime costs Americans over $400 billion dollars a year, not including the misery caused by violent crime.(1) Understanding of the causes and consequences of crime has been greatly improved by the economic theory of criminal...

A difficulty in the search for Giffen behavior.
September 1, 1997... Introduction Recently, Gilley and Karels [1991] have analyzed Giffen behavior for a household whose choices of meat, M, and potatoes (spuds), S, are restricted by both a money income constraint and a minimum calorie constraint. Assuming that...

Borrowed reserves and deposit variation: the risks to monetary policy.
September 1, 1997... Introduction In 1982 the Federal Reserve made borrowed reserves its operating instrument, the indirect target through which it achieves its monetary policy target. It was believed that borrowed reserves would serve as a reliable overall...

Uncertainty and the arbitrage pricing theory.
September 1, 1997... Introduction Uncertainty is an important aspect of the aggregate economy. A variable growth path makes it difficult to plan investment and consumption. Keynes [1936] argued that increased uncertainty would lead to lower investment. More...

Existence and uniqueness of marginal cost pricing equilibrium.
September 1, 1997... Introduction It is now well known that, within the context of a regulated natural monopoly, when the regulatory agency is free to levy full variable lump-sum taxes, prices should equal marginal production cost [Boiteux, 1971; Hotelling, 1938]....

Validity, rationality definitions, and consumer sovereignty.
September 1, 1997... This paper proves that the leading definitions of rationality are invalid, explains the irrelevance of consumer sovereignty, and proposes a new definition for rationality. Rationality has been defined as: 1) maximization of one's self-interest...

Investment signaling in public goods experiments. (response to article by Andreoni, AER, vol. 85, September 1995, p. 891)
September 1, 1997... Experimental economic methods have often been used to study the provision of public goods and free-riding. Andreoni [AER, 85(4), Sept. 1995, pp. 891-904] has presented research results that focus on the difference between cooperative behavior in...

Is there a stylized fact about the cyclical behavior of price?
September 1, 1997... Economists engaged in business cycle research have concluded that prices are procyclical [Lucas, CRCSPP, 1977; Mankiw, JEP, Summer 1989]. However, more recent research has produced another stylized fact: prices were procyclical in the pre-war...

M1 velocity and the recognition lag.
September 1, 1997... The ability to predict same-quarter changes in V1 provides contemporaneous predictions of changes in nominal GDP. This can help reduce the recognition lag since most of the monetary data necessary for such predictions are available with just a...

Load and no-load mutual fund performance around the 1987 crash.
September 1, 1997... This note examines the behavior of load and no-load mutual funds before and during the 1987 stock market crash. The hypothesis is that performance differences exist between the two types of funds during periods of high market volatility. For...

The debt-growth nexus and poorer LDCs. (less developed countries)
September 1, 1997... The developing country debt crisis has received considerable attention in recent years. The crisis has set in motion various adverse effects that have hindered economic recovery of many developing nations. The pernicious impact of foreign debt on...

Impacts of the minimum wage increase on teenage employment.
September 1, 1997... The federal government recently approved an increase in the minimum wage from $4.25 to $4.75 effective on October 1, 1996 and to $5.15 on September 1, 1997. Some estimated that a total of 11.8 million workers may be affected directly or...