Quarterly Journal of Economics articles from May 1998

Quarterly Journal of Economics archives from May 1998

Recombinant growth. (combinatorial feedback process for economic growth)
May 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION As has generally been recognized for some time now, the long-term growth of an advanced economy is dominated by the behavior of technical progress. This elusive factor has variously been labeled the "stock of knowledge," the...

Does asset ownership always motivate managers? Outside options and the property rights theory of the firm.
May 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION In a pair of influential articles and a more recent book, Oliver Hart (along with coauthors Sanford Grossman and John Moore) has proposed a radically new approach to the theory of the firm [Grossman and Hart 1986; Hart and...

Power in a theory of the firm.
May 1, 1998... Coase [1937] suggested that transactions that are typically conducted within the firm are not governed by the price mechanism but by a power relationship. Citing Robertson, Coase compares firms to "islands of conscious power in this ocean of...

Paying for health insurance: the trade-off between competition and adverse selection.
May 1, 1998... Governments are increasingly turning to market forces as a way to limit the cost of social insurance. Traditionally, social insurance programs were operated as nonmarket goods; governments mandated participation in a central program, collected...

Insecure property rights and government ownership of firms.
May 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION For the past two decades China's transition to a market economy occurred in an environment without the rule of law to constrain the state. In particular, there was no commitment based on law and institutions designed to prevent...

Ideology, tactics, and efficiency in redistributive politics.
May 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Normative analyses of taxation focus on the optimal balance between equity and efficiency according to some postulated social welfare function. Informal discussions of this trade-off have a long history, but formal modeling...

Are internal capital markets efficient?
May 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION The internal capital markets of diversified firms enable them to fund profitable projects that, because of information asymmetries and agency costs, the external capital market would not be able to finance. Consequently, one...

Private school vouchers and student achievement: an evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
May 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION At the cornerstone of many school reform proposals lies the premise that private schools are more efficient than public schools. This premise is particularly prominent in the current "school choice" debate. Proponents of school...

Consumption inequality and income uncertainty.
May 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION The use of current income in studies of inequality is open to the obvious criticism that current income may not reflect the longer run level of resources available to a household or an individual. Temporarily high or low incomes...

Openness and inflation: a new assessment.
May 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Romer [1993] uses a Barro-Gordon-type model(1) to argue that openness puts a check on the government's incentive to engage in unanticipated inflation, because of induced exchange rate depreciation.(2) Therefore, in the absence...

A new assessment of openness and inflation: reply. (response to Cristina T. Terra, in this issue, p. 641)
May 1, 1998... Terra [1998] argues that my finding [Romer 1993] of a negative relationship across countries between openness and inflation is "actually caused by the severely indebted countries, over the debt crisis period." She proposes an explanation of the...