American Economist articles from September 1992

American Economist archives from September 1992

The economic transformation of Eastern Europe: the case of Poland.
September 22, 1992... The East European economies are digging out from the rubble of 45 years of communist rule. In virtually every aspect of economic life, the communist legacy is adverse. Normal market institutions were destroyed by the communist rulers in the early...

Poverty and health: asking the right questions.
September 22, 1992... Gertrude Stein, confidante of the leading writers, artists, and intellectuals of her time, lay dying. Her closest friend and lifetime companion, Alice B. Toklas, leaned forward and said, "Gertrude, what's the answer?" Gertrude looked up and with...

A daily inflation index.
September 22, 1992... "Inflation," according to authority, "is characterized by a general and widely diffused rise in prices and costs."(1) The objective of this study was to capture this attribute in a daily inflation index that could be constructed from data...

Bank's portfolio management under uncertainty.
September 22, 1992... I. Introduction Optimal bank-management is a continuous struggle of maintaining a balance between liquidity, profitability and risk. Banks need liquidity because such a large portion of their liabilities are payable on demand but typically an...

Persuasive advertising and market competition.
September 22, 1992... 1. Introduction The basic decisions that an industrial organization has to face include price, output (quality as well as quantity), advertising, R & D expenditure, and so on. If the profit function is to be maximized in a global sense, these...

Optimal rent-seeking group.
September 22, 1992... Introduction Following the seminal works of Posner (6) and Tullock (8,9) many authors have extended the theory of rent seeking in several directions. |For a survey of the literature, see Tollison (7) and Brooks and Heijdra (2).~ The received...

Working capital finance and the balanced budget multiplier.
September 22, 1992... I. Introduction The macroeconomic literature has long agreed that the balanced budget multiplier is positive. More specifically, the standard belief |Wallich (1944), Haavelmo (1945), Dornbusch and Fischer (1990)~ indicates that an increase in...

Economic education, experimental methods and the structure-conduct-performance paradigm.
September 22, 1992... Introduction The traditional view of student learning in the economic education literature places the teacher and/or school in the role of producer while students are seen as inputs to which value is added. Empirical models of economic...

Tariffs, quotas and the terms of trade.
September 22, 1992... The differences between tariffs and quotas in their economic effects have been extensively discussed in the literature. One of them is that tariffs could lower the domestic relative price of the importable good (This is known as the Metzler...

More on misery: how consistent are alternative indices? A comment.
September 22, 1992... A series of comments in this journal (cited below) addresses the appropriateness of the "misery index," attributed to the late economist Arthur Okun, which is popularly reported as a general indicator of the state of health of the macro-economy....

Optimality on the short-run Phillips curve revisited.
September 22, 1992... Introduction Golden, et al. (1987) noted that in post World War II elections in which an incumbent president won by a decisive margin, the inflation rate was lower than the unemployment rate by 2 to 4 percent.(1) To explain this phenomenon the...

Essentials of Econometrics.
September 22, 1992... In the preface of this book, the author states that it is intended to be "user-friendly", by providing a brief, clear, applied, and nonthreatening introduction to econometrics. Indeed, there is long been an urgent need on the part of students at...

Antitrust Economics on Trial.
September 22, 1992... Economics as a science relies upon a subtle balance between progress in economic theory and empirical evidence on the validity of hypotheses deduced from theory. Antitrust Economics on Trial is an excellent book for judges, policy makers in...

The S & L Debacle: Public Policy Lessons for Bank and Thrift Regulation.
September 22, 1992... The savings and loan crisis is one of the most poorly understood economic problems that we face today. It has been misconstrued by economists, by politicians, and by the general public. Economists with a conservative bent have tended to blame the...

The Good Society.
September 22, 1992... On a recent Sunday morning news program, Representative Newt Gingrich was asked by a reporter to distinguish between the platform of the conservative wing of the Republican party and the platform of Louisiana politician David Duke. Gingrich's...

Paying for Productivity: A Look at the Evidence.
September 22, 1992... This volume is a comprehensive collection of empirical literature on the various incentive payment plans in the U.S. Alan Blinder does a masterful job of introducing the papers by raising the major issues studied in this volume; namely, the...

Management in the Socialist Countries: USSR and Central Europe.
September 22, 1992... Over the past years since 1917, management has been developing as theory and practice in the socialist countries as well as in the West. This development has taken a much different path in the socialist countries and this book deals specifically...