Knowledge that Transforms

We analyze a model of a hostile takeover attempt in which shareholders are free to sell common-share voting rights as well as the shares themselves. Without taxation, only welfare-improving take-overs succeed. Allowing vote sales has no effect on the success of attempted takeovers or the profits of incumbent management or raiders. When taxes are levied, however, an inefficiently small number of value-increasing takeovers succeed if vote sales are prohibited. Allowing vote sales facilitates such takeovers and raises welfare. With taxation, incumbents would never prefer to defend against take-overs by purchasing votes, but raiders might well prefer this method.

Interest-bearing checkable deposits are examined to test whether they should be included in measures of the U.S. money stock. Both Divisia and traditional simple-sum aggregates are constructed on the basis of tests for weak separability in a model of the demand for financial assets. Using nonparametric demand analysis, we find that several groups of assets are compatible with aggregation theory. We find empirical support for a narrow measure consisting of the components of current MIA. In tests based on a St. Louis equation and in terms of controllability, a Divisia aggregate performs better than the simple-sum MIA measure.

One difficulty confronting Harberger's celebrated model of the corporate income tax is how to treat noncorporate production in primarily corporate sectors and corporate production in primarily noncorporate sectors. The paper presents a two-good model with corporate and noncorporate production of both goods. The incidence of corporate tax in our mutual production model can differ markedly from that in the Harberger model. The difference between the two models in deadweight loss is also striking, with losses in the mutual production model many times larger than those in the Harberger model.

We consider six explanations for the positive relationship between employer size and wages: large employers (1) hire higher-quality workers, (2) offer inferior working conditions, (3) make more use of high wages to forestall unionization, (4) have more ability to pay high wages, (5) face smaller pools of applicants relative to vacancies, and (6) are less able to monitor their workers. We find some support for the first of these, but there remains a significant wage premium for those working for large employers.

We develop a multicountry, dynamic general equilibrium model of product innovation and international trade to study the creation of comparative advantage through research and development and the evolution of world trade over time. In our model, firms must incur resource costs to introduce new products, and forward-looking potential producers conduct R & D and enter the product market whenever profit opportunities exist. Trade has both intraindustry and interindustry components, and the different incentives that face agents in different countries for investment and savings decisions give rise to intertemporal trade. We derive results on the dynamics of trade patterns and trade volume and on the temporal emergence of multinational corporations.

The payment of child allowances to laborers with large families was widespread in early nineteenth-century England. This paper tests Thomas Malthus's hypothesis that child allowances caused the birth rate to increase. A cross-sectional regression model is estimated to explain variations in birth rates across parishes in 1826-30. Birth rates are found to be related to child allowances, income, and the availability of housing, as Malthus contended. The paper concludes by examining the role played by the adoption of child allowances after 1795 in the fertility increase of the early nineteenth century.

Traditional estimates of prewar GNP exaggerate the size of cycles because they are based on the assumption that GNP moves approximately one for one with commodity output valued in producer prices. This paper derives new estimates of GNP for 1869-1908 using an estimate of the actual relationship between GNP and commodity output. This estimated relationship is allowed to be time-varying and is derived from a regression covering the periods 1909-28 and 1947-85. The new estimates of GNP indicate that there has been much less stabilization between the prewar and postwar eras than is conventionally believed.

In this paper, I show the existence of stationary rational expectations equilibria in a simple two-island, overlapping generations model of the type first considered by Lucas, in which all uncertainty is endogenous. The result is obtained by first constructing "sunspot" equilibria on each island separately and then using the equilibrium pricing equations to eliminate the sunspot variable. In the resulting equilibrium, each island's prices serve as the sunspot for the other island. The constructed equilibrium is nontrivially stochastic.