Economic Inquiry articles from April 1998

Economic Inquiry archives from April 1998

Computers, productivity, and input substitution.
April 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION The last two decades has been a puzzling time for many productivity analysts. While computer prices fell at extraordinary rates and firms invested hundreds of billions of dollars in new computer equipment, aggregate...

Hedonics and demand analysis: the implicit demand for player attributes.
April 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Hedonic analysis is the standard technique of applied econometrics for modeling differentiated products. A hedonic price function relates the observed price of a differentiated good to the bundle of characteristics of which the...

Liquidity constraints and the substitutability between private and government consumption: the role of military and non-military spending.
April 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Using data for a number of economies, we investigate (i) the relationship between private consumption and two types of government spending (military and non-military), and (ii) the severity of liquidity constraints. Because of...

Inflation and asymmetric output adjustments by firms.
April 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Recent empirical research has rejuvenated interest in the idea that output responds asymmetrically to monetary shocks. Cover [1988] found that in the USA during the post-WWII period positive shocks to the money supply had no...

The long-run link between money growth and inflation.
April 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Post-war U.S. inflation has fluctuated considerably. This variability in inflation has generated a large literature on the causes and effects of inflation. There is little doubt that volatile inflation affects the real economy...

Estimating the liquidity of M2 components in the post-DIDMCA era. (Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980)
April 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 (DIDMCA), together with the Garn St. Germain Act and related Federal Reserve actions, resulted in a thorough redefinition of the money stock measures, as...

The effect of concealed weapons laws: an extreme bound analysis.
April 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION In a recent paper, Lott and Mustard [1997] provide evidence on the relationship between concealed handgun laws (often called "right-to-carry" or "shall issue" laws) and crime. They examine 16 years (1977-1992) of county-level...

Optimal punishment schemes with state-dependent preferences.
April 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION It is well known in the economics of crime literature that both the certainty and severity of punishment can be manipulated to deter criminal behavior. As Polinsky and Shavell [1979] show, when punishment takes the form of a...

Payoff dominance vs. cognitive transparency in decision making.
April 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION There is a general question about how well laboratory markets work in eliciting true preferences given the low opportunity costs of making errors as in Harrison [1989]. Vernon Smith [1982] set out a series of conditions that...

Profit-shares, bargaining, and unemployment.
April 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Weitzman [1987] has argued that in an economy with long term unemployment due to extra-competitive wages, profit sharing can eliminate this unemployment by lowering the marginal cost of labor. Jackman [1988] provides additional...

Market power and collusion in the ocean shipping industry: is a bigger cartel a better cartel?
April 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION The ocean shipping industry enjoys certain conditions that are extremely favorable for collusion, such as antitrust immunity for explicit pricing agreements, known as conference agreements, and enforcement of those agreements...

Environmental protection in the federalist system: the political economy of NPDES inspections. (National Pollution Discharge Elimination System)
April 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Federal regulatory programs, from occupational safety to protection of the environment, are implemented jointly by national and state agencies. More broadly, almost all regulatory programs involve some delegation to branch...

Women and tariffs: testing the gender gap hypothesis in a Downs-Mayer political-economy model.
April 1, 1998... "I am convinced that at least two out of every three women have a grudge against the tariff, and a grudge which is all too frequently increased to an indignation by the subtle suggestion, on the part of importers and retailers, that the tariff...