Knowledge that Transforms

With asymmetric information, full commitment to long-term contracts may permit markets to approach first-best allocations. However, commitment can be undermined by opportunistic behavior, notably renegotiation. We reexamine commitment in insurance markets. We present an alternative model (which extends Laffont and Tirole's procurement model to address uncertainty and competition), which involves semipooling in the first period followed by separation. This and competing models (e.g., single-period models and no-commitment models) have different predictions concerning temporal patterns of insurer profitability. A test using California data suggests that some automobile insurers use commitment to attract selective portfolios comprising disproportionate numbers of low risks.

We develop an ordinal approach to comparing the equilibria of economic models. Its main advantages over the traditional approach based on signing derivatives are that (i) it utilizes only a subset of the assumptions, resulting in a simpler theory that facilitates focusing attention on the economics rather than the mathematics, (ii) it applies to discrete changes, even when there are multiple equilibria and when some equilibria do not vary smoothly with the parameters, and (iii) it incorporates a formal theory of the robustness of conclusions to assumptions, which helps modelers distinguish which assumptions are "critical" to their comparative-statics conclusions.

It is currently popular to identify monetary policy shocks with innovations in some measure of reserves or in the federal funds rate. These assumptions about the interest elasticity of the supply of or demand for reserves imply monetary policy shocks that produce dynamic responses of macroeconomic variables that are anomalous relative to traditional monetary analyses. This paper tentatively identifies supply and demand shocks in the markets for reserves and M2 for the 1980s and contrasts them with results for the 1970s. In the later period, identified monetary policy shocks have dynamic impacts that are fully consistent with traditional analyses.

There is evidence from several sources that one cannot treat many-person households as a single decision maker. If this is the case, then factors such as the relative incomes of the household members may affect the final allocation decisions made by the household. We develop a method of identifying how "incomes affect outcomes" given conventional family expenditure data. The basic assumption we make is that household decision processes lead to efficient outcomes. We apply our method to a sample of Canadian couples with no children. We find that the final allocations of expenditures on each partner depend significantly on their relative incomes and ages and on the level of lifetime wealth.

The late nineteenth century saw international mass migrations of capital and labor from the Old World to the New. Factors chased each other and the abundant resources at the frontier. Demographic structure also contributed to the massive capital flows from Britain to the New World. The dependency hypothesis is confirmed by estimation of savings functions in three New World economies (Argentina, Australia, and Canada) in which high dependency rates may have significantly depressed domestic savings rates and pulled in foreign investment: in effect an intergenerational transfer from old savers in the Old World to young savers in the New.

Tax-supported churches were established in most American colonies. Public Congregationalist churches in New England were not privatized until the early nineteenth century. After privatization, demand for preachers rose rapidly. There is weaker evidence that church membership also rose quickly. The increase in preachers came almost totally from private denominations. The privatization of religion was further accompanied by a change in methods of finance.

Previous studies of congressional spending have typically found a large positive effect of challenger spending but little evidence for effects of incumbent spending. Those studies, however, do not adequately control for inherent differences in vote-getting ability across candidates. "High-quality" challengers are likely to receive a high fraction of the vote and have high campaign expenditures, even if campaign spending has no impact on election outcomes. To avoid that bias, this paper examines elections in which the same two candidates face one another on more than one occasion; differencing eliminates the influence of any fixed candidate or district attributes. Estimates of the effects of challenger spending are an order of magnitude below those of previous studies. Campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes, regardless of who does the spending. Campaign spending limits appear socially desirable, but public financing of campaigns does not.

We focus on the effect of state versus private ownership on the rates of firm-specific productivity growth and cost decline by developing a model of endogenous, firm-specific productivity growth and testing its implications against panel data on 23 international airlines of varying levels of state ownership over the period 1973-83. Our model and empirical results show that state ownership can lower the long-run annual rate of productivity growth or cost decline, but not necessarily their levels in the short run. Observed level differences in productive efficiency across private and state-owned firms may thus be a function of the age distribution of the firms being compared. These results appear to be independent of whether the firms operate under apparently more or less competitive or regulated markets and whether they differ in production scales. The analysis offers new insights concerning the recent trend toward privatizing state-owned enterprises that has been observed in many countries.

The configuration of equilibrium in the market for automobile collision insurance is examined empirically by representing the premium-deductible menu and the demand function as a standard hedonic system. Using contractual data from a representative insurer, we estimate a reduced-form hedonic premium equation and the inverse of the marginal bid equation for insurance coverage. The data reveal an equilibrium with adverse selection and market signaling but lead us to reject the hypothesis that high risks receive contracts subsidized by low risks.

College enrollment of black 18-19-year-old high school graduates declined from 1980 through 1984 and then rebounded after 1984. This paper presents data from a time series of cross sections of 18-19-year-old youths from 1973 through 1988 to test the role of family background, direct college costs, local economic conditions, and returns to college in driving these trends. The evidence suggests that, on the one hand, increases in direct college costs were driving enrollment rates downward throughout the eighties. On the other hand, dramatic increases in average parental education for black youths exerted upward pressure on college enrollment by blacks, particularly in the latter half of the decade. The net effect of these two factors contributed to the pattern of decline and recovery observed during the eighties.