Economic Inquiry articles from October 2001

Economic Inquiry archives from October 2001

Understanding investment irreversibility in general equilibrium.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... MIQUEL FAIG (*) I. INTRODUCTION Many forms of investment are irreversible. A growing body of literature (1) has shown that irreversibility is important for firms' investment decisions under uncertainty. However, we still know little...

Panel tests of okun's law for ten industrial countries.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... DONALD G. FREEMAN (*) I. INTRODUCTION "Okun's Law" describes an empirical regularity between unemployment and real output growth: "... each extra percentage point in the unemployment rate above four percent (i.e., full employment) has...

Risky arbitrage, limits of arbitrage, and nonlinear adjustment in the dividend-price ratio.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... MARK P. TAYLOR (*) I. INTRODUCTION The present value model of stock prices has generally been rejected on U.S. data, as in Campbell and Shifler (1987, 1988a, 1988b). (1) While this may be taken as evidence against the efficient markets...

Mixups in the warehouse: centralized and decentralized multi-plant firms.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... LYNN HUNNICUTT (*) I. INTRODUCTION All firms receive information and use it to make decisions. Multi-plant firms receive information at scattered locations and must choose how this knowledge will flow and how decisions will be made....

Independent service organizations and economic efficiency.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... DAVID E. MILLS (*) I. INTRODUCTION Many manufacturers of capital equipment provide maintenance service to their equipment users. Sometimes equipment and service are sold separately and at other times they are bundled (for example,...

Can high prices ensure product quality when buyers do not know the sellers' cost?(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... TIMOTHY J. PERRI (*) I. INTRODUCTION When consumers are unaware of product quality before they buy, producers can nonetheless be punished for providing low quality by losing repeat business. Klein and Leffler (1981) demonstrate that...

Consumer behavior in the United States: implications for social security reform.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... PAUL EVANS (*) I. INTRODUCTION The reform of the U.S. social security system is now attracting much attention. A wide range of proposals for reform have been put forward, ranging from modest modifications to complete privatization....

Measuring the economic effects of military base closures.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... MICHAEL M. KNETTER (*) I. INTRODUCTION Military spending in the United States has been reduced dramatically in recent years. Federal outlays on national defense fell from 6.2% of GDP in 1986 to 3.2% in 1998, a decline of about 25% in...

Racial discrimination in professional basketball: evidence from Nielsen ratings.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... JONAS P. FUNK (*) I. INTRODUCTION Are black professional athletes subject to racial discrimination? This question has received an enormous amount of popular and scholarly attention. However, despite numerous economic studies that have...

Payoff effects in information cascade experiments.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... LISA R. ANDERSON (*) I. INTRODUCTION This article examines payoff effects in "information cascade" experiments. (1) Cascade experiments provide a unique environment to study errors because decisions are made publicly and in sequence,...

Bargaining experiments with deadlines and random delays.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... OWEN R. PHILLIPS (*) I. INTRODUCTION Many bargaining situations involve deadlines and delays in the transmission of offers. Corporate takeovers, legal settlements, and labor union contracts are examples of bargains that can have random...

The effect of cocaine prices on crime.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... JEFF DESIMONE (*) I. INTRODUCTION It is undeniable that cocaine use is related to crime. In 1998, 32.9 percent of individuals aged 15 and above who were arrested for non-drug violent and property offenses and screened for illegal drug...

Tournaments as a worker discipline device.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... C. C. YANG (*) I. INTRODUCTION In the absence of unemployment, a worker caught shirking and subsequently fired could obtain a new job at the market wage without difficulty. As a result of this and the imperfect monitoring of workers'...

Declining share of small firms in U.S. output: causes and consequences.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... JANG-TING GUO (*) I. INTRODUCTION According to the Small Business Administration's (SBA) calculations, as shown in Table 1, the contribution of small firms to U.S. national income was 58% in 1958, which then declined steadily to 51%...

Reputational capital and academic pay.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... GEOFFREY K. TURNBULL (*) I. INTRODUCTION Economists continue to have a Strong interest in academic labor markets, as the steady stream of earnings studies over the past several decades readily attests. The academic labor market draws...

Strategic groups and rent dissipation.(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... SANGHACK LEE (*) I. INTRODUCTION A rent-seeking contest is a situation in which players compete with one another by expending outlays to win a rent. Examples abound. When a positive monopoly rent is secured under government protection,...

Editor's report. (Economic Inquiry).(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
October 1, 2001... The 2000 volume of Economic Inquiry consisted of 45 papers in a wide variety of fields. The techniques used in these papers ran the gamut from empirical studies to experimental studies to theoretical studies. The fields with the most papers...