American Economist articles from March 1992

American Economist archives from March 1992

Institutions and economic theory.
March 22, 1992... It is surely appropriate that the John R. Commons lecture would someday be given on the subject of Institutions. Anyone who goes back to read The Legal Foundations of Capitalism (1924) will find that Commons anticipated much of the evolving...

Spillover asymmetries and a comparative technological advantage.
March 22, 1992... This paper offers a framework for examining technology spillovers extant between research teams. A policy-relevant finding is that firms' research organizations must strive to absorb foreign technology. The result of a technology spillover...

Slave labor as labor hoarding - input use inside the economic region of production.
March 22, 1992... If bound to daily labor while he lives, His is the daily bread that labor gives; Guarded from want, from beggary secure, He never feels what hireling crowds endure, Nor knows like them in hopeless want to crave, For wife and child, the comforts...

An estimation of target effective exchange rates: the case of the U.S.
March 22, 1992... This paper derives optimal effective exchange rates, via loss-function minimization, for the US economy. The results attract considerable research interest; although it is generally believed that policy makers intervene only in infrequent...

The publication incidence of replications and critical commentary in economics.
March 22, 1992... "That which isn't worth replicating isn't worth knowing." (Mittlestaedt and Zorn, 1984, p. 14.) In a recently published article, Dewald, Thursby, and Anderson (1986) drew attention to the critical role of replication in the development of...

Intersegment and racial differences in nonemployment mobility.
March 22, 1992... This paper is an exploration of intersegment and racial differences in job-leaving experience, which links ideas found in mobility studies of the labor market segmentation school and the literature which describes unemployment as a dynamic...

The efficient tariff: systematically balancing security and welfare concerns.
March 22, 1992... Imposing a tariff on imports of petroleum has two major effects that encourage conflicting public-policy responses. One effect is the well-documented welfare loss suffered by the domestic economy as a result of the tariff's distortional...

An economic approach to abortion demand.
March 22, 1992... This paper uses econometric multiple regression techniques in order to analyze the socioeconomic factors affecting the demand for abortion for the year 1985. A cross-section of the 50 states and Washington D.C. is examined and a household...

The effects of monopolization on newspaper advertising rates.
March 22, 1992... It is almost universally assumed that monopolization in an industry leads to higher prices and lower output. This paper, however, demonstrates, both intuitively and empirically, that advertisers actually benefit from the geographic...

Is capitalism kaput?
March 22, 1992... In this article, we examine metaphors in economics, specifically looking at the at the term capital and its family of metaphors, and investigate the role they play in a capitalist economy. Serving as a means of communicating complex ideas and...

The Soviet Union as a great power: the need for reform.
March 22, 1992... The reforms of perestroika took the western world by surprise. However, the application of economic analysis to the last half century of Soviet history reveals a country in economic decline. Additionally, while the country contracted...

The relationship between interest rates and bond prices: a complete proof.
March 22, 1992... An important theorem regarding the behavior of bond prices is lacking a complete proof. Malkiel (1962) compares a bond's coupon rate, r, to its yield to maturity, i, and he examines whether there exists a similar relationship between the price...