Quarterly Journal of Economics articles from August 1995

Quarterly Journal of Economics archives from August 1995

Social mobility and redistributive politics.
August 1, 1995... I. INTRODUCTION This paper develops a rational-learning theory(1) of redistributive politics seeking to explain important stylized facts concerning the effect of social mobility on both individual political attitudes and aggregate...

Ambiguity aversion and comparative ignorance.
August 1, 1995... I. INTRODUCTION One of the fundamental problems of modern decision theory is the analysis of decisions under ignorance or ambiguity, where the probabilities of potential outcomes are neither specified in advance nor readily assessed on...

Case-based decision theory.
August 1, 1995... In reality, all arguments from experience are founded on the similarity which we discover among natural objects, and by which we are induced to expect effects similar to those which we have found to follow from such objects.... From causes which...

The tyranny of numbers: confronting the statistical realities of the East Asian growth experience.
August 1, 1995... I. Introduction This is a fairly boring and tedious paper, and is intentionally so. This paper provides no new interpretations of the East Asian experience to interest the historian, derives no new theoretical implications of the forces...

Corruption and growth.
August 1, 1995... I. Introduction Many economists argue that malfunctioning government institutions constitute a severe obstacle to investment, entrepreneurship, and innovation. North [1990] emphasizes the importance of an efficient judicial system to...

Did workers pay for the passage of workers' compensation laws?
August 1, 1995... [T]hey were working a hardship on the laboring man, because this 2 cents that the employer is supposed to pay will not eventually come from the employer, but will come from the laboring man by necessary reduction of wage scale . . . Competition...

Is the behavior of hours worked consistent with implicit contract theory?
August 1, 1995... This paper examines the determinants of hours worked when employment relationships are influenced by risk-sharing considerations. The environment considered is an extension of the standard symmetric-information risk-sharing model that allows...

Does electoral accountability affect economic policy choices? Evidence from gubernatorial term limits.
August 1, 1995... I. INTRODUCTION The desire to maintain a reputation is often thought to be the mechanism that keeps politicians in check. Officials who care to run again for office must act sufficiently often in the voters' interest to merit...

Monopolistic competition and international trade: reconsidering the evidence.
August 1, 1995... I. Introduction This paper is about testing a relatively new theory of international trade. The life cycle of trade theories seems to progress in the following three steps. In an effort to explain observed trade flows, theorists arrive...

The long side of the market and the short end of the stick: bargaining power and price formation in buyers', sellers', and balanced markets.
August 1, 1995... I. Introduction Few concepts in economics are as intuitive as the idea that traders on the long side of a market wind up holding the short end of the stick. That is, they receive little or none of the gains from trade. Consider, for...