Economic Inquiry articles from April 1994

Economic Inquiry archives from April 1994

Territorial restrictions in franchise contracts.
April 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION Efficient contracts establish the incentives for contractual parties through the assignment of rights or authority over decisions, as well as shares of profit. This insight has been widely used to explain the nature of the...

How inefficient are multiple in-kind transfers?
April 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION The anti-poverty system in the United States is a patchwork of programs: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing, Medicare, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), to name only the...

Asymmetric information and the excess volatility of stock prices.
April 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION We propose an explanation of fluctuations in stock prices that does not require fluctuations in aggregate dividends or aggregate consumption. Our explanation is based on changes in the amount of publicly available information...

The distribution of political power, the costs of rent-seeking, and economic growth.
April 1, 1994... The CEO of the Argentine firm is so busy he has no time to work.(1) I. INTRODUCTION Most of the recent growth literature has developed in a representative agent-social planner framework, with little role for political institutions. This...

Are public goods really common pools? Considerations of the evolution of policing and highways in England.
April 1, 1994... [FIGURES OMITTED] A series of property rights alterations made by the English government undermined individuals' incentives to cooperate in the production of both policing and road maintenance, ultimately leading to government production....

Price flexibility and aggregate stability: new evidence and implications.
April 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION Is increased price flexibility stabilizing? The importance of this question can be easily established by observing the number of recently published papers in which this question, or a slight modification of it, has appeared in...

Capital market imperfections, labor market disequilibrium and migration: a theoretical and empirical analysis.
April 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION In a thoughtful and pioneering work, Katz and Stark [1986] suggest that capital market imperfections may be an important cause of migration in less developed countries. Their model is important because it provides an...

Empirical evidence on vertical foreclosure.
April 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION Prior to the 1980s, the United States Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission actively challenged vertical mergers, on the theory that such mergers foreclosed unintegrated rivals in the downstream market from...

Strategic complementarity slows macroeconomic adjustment to temporary shocks.
April 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION Starting with the work Of Diamond [1982], Hart [1982], and Bryant [1983], a number of authors have employed models which use potential coordination failure to show that many features of the Keynesian framework can be captured...

Labor supply constraints, profit-sharing and volatility rents in an unstable economy.
April 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION Since the end of the 1930s, the portion of U.S. national income claimed by wages and salaries has been in the low sixty percents, fluctuating between a low of 60.3 percent in 1942 and a high of 66.2 percent in 1970. The average...

Stochastic evolutionary dynamics in the repeated prisoners' dilemma.
April 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION The prisoners' dilemma is perhaps the most widely studied of all game theory applications: it is commonly employed in such diverse fields as economics, political science, and biology. The literature primarily explores how the...

Teaching tools: cooperative learning in economics.
April 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION Cooperative learning, an instructional technique in which students work together in small groups, has received much attention recently as an alternative to the lecture format in college classrooms. There is growing recognition...