Knowledge that Transforms

Evaluating official foreign exchange intervention during the 1970s using Friedman's profit criterion shows that central banks have failed to stabilize the exchange markets and have lost billions of dollars. The monetary authorities have resisted rate movements, which results in a misallocation of resources when there is a shift in the equilibrium exchange rate. Counterspeculation by exchange traders reduces the destabilizing effect of central-bank intervention and the consequent loss in economic welfare.

The study reports on the ability of competing models of market information integration and dissemination to explain the behavior of simple laboratory markets for a one-period security. Returns to the security depended upon a randomly drawn state of nature. Some agents (insiders), whose identity was unknown to other agents, knew the state before the markets opened. With replication of market conditions the predictions of a fully revealing rational-expectations model are relatively accurate. Prices adjusted immediately to near rational-expectations prices; profits of insiders were virtually indistinguishable from noninsiders; and efficiency levels converged to near 100 percent.

This paper develops a general preference model for analyzing parental allocations of resources among their progeny. The implications fro this model for the distribution of educational resources and earnings potentials among siblings are examined. A particular version of the preference model is estimated using data on the education and earnings of adult male twins. The estimates imply that parents care about offsprings' earnings inequality and provide more (less) resources to the less (more) able than is consistent with an investment model.

This article provides quantitative estimates from an econometric model of the output, price, interest rate, and exchange rate linkages among a number of countries. The linkages are examined by changing various policy variables and observing the resulting changes in the endogenous variable. The model is also used to estimate what is called the "exchanging rate effect" on inflation. One of the ways in which monetary and fiscal policies may affect a country's inflation rate is by first influencing its exchange rate, which in turn influences import prices, which in turn influence domestic prices. The model allows this exchange rate effect on inflation to be estimated.

Why should a rationally motivated political decision process generate an inverse relationship between tax rates and tax revenues? There would never seem a logical reason for increasing tax rates beyond maximum revenue limits. In this note, we explain how such a position can emerge and show why, once in such a position, political decision makers may find it difficult to escape.

If prizes are to be awarded simultaneously at a specified time on a first-come- first-served basis, then individuals who queue for them will choose different waiting times through their arrivals at the queue. This choice of arrival time at a queue is similar to the choice of a sealed tender in an auction. An equilibrium for this "waiting-line auction" is obtained here using methods for analyzing sealed-tender auctions. When individuals are risk neutral it is shown that several alternative waiting-line allocation procedures result in the same transactions cost associated with waiting in line.

[Noting that a suggested measure of natural resource scarcity, resource rent, is unobservable, we show that rent is linked to (observable) marginal exploration cost. A two-period model of extraction and exploration reveals that rent is equal to this cost when discovery is certain. Under risky exploration, cost data can be used to bound rent. The model also indicates how exploration uncertainty affects the competitive firm's extraction and exploration decisions. Finally, the behavior of U.S. oil and gas exploration costs suggests that these costs were rising in the postwar era, which has different implications for scarcity than indicated by other measures of scarcity.]

Durable-goods monopolists face special problems because the sale of their products creates a secondhand market not controlled by the monopolist. To the extent the monopolist is able to rent his product rather than sell it, or to make binding promises about his future production, such problems are ameliorated. Given the inability to do the above, the monopolist is led to producing goods less durable than those produced by either competitive firms or monopolist returns. A reverse Averch-Johnson result--that monopolist sellers may invest less in fixed costs (including plant modernization and research and development) than would the renters--is shown. It is also shown that, even though sellers have less monopoly power than renters and nondurable-goods monopolists, it is possible that the seller will cause a greater deadweight loss than the other types of monopolies.