Knowledge that Transforms

The silver purchase program, initiated by President Franklin Roosevelt in late 1933 in response to the economically small but politically potent silver bloc, gave a large short-run subsidy to silver producers at the cost of destroying any long-run monetary role for silver. More important, it imposed severe deflation on China, the only major country still on a silver standard, and forced it off the silver standard and on to a fiat standard, which brought forward in time and increased in severity the subsequent wartime inflation and postwar hyperinflation. The silver purchase program thereby contributed, though perhaps only modestly, to the ultimate triumph of the Communists.

We argue that many goods and decisions are not allocated or made through markets. We interpret an agent's status as a ranking device that determines how well he or she fares in the nonmarket sector. The existence of a nonmarket sector can endogenously generate a concern for relative position in, for example, the income distribution so that higher income implies higher status. Moreover, it can naturally yield multiple equilibria. It is thus possible to explain differences in growth rates across countries without recourse to differences in underlying preferences, technologies, or endowments. Different social organizations lead to different reduced-form preferences, which lead to different growth rates.

This paper develops a two-sector neoclassical model of international trade with endogenous capital accumulation and intertemporal optimization. In contrast to the traditional "2 × 2 × 2" model, there is a Ricardian implication that countries specialize according to comparative advantage. Consequently, the theory predicts that government expenditure policies are unlikely to affect the established pattern of specialization and trade, but that changes in tax policies can result in a dramatic reorganization of world production. Further, the dynamic 2 × 2 × 2 model can explain many of the salient features of international trade that are problematic for the standard Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson model.

This paper examines the EPA's decision to cancel or continue the registrations of cancer-causing pesticides that went through the special review process between 1975 and 1989. Despite claims to the contrary, our analysis indicates that the EPA indeed balanced risks against benefits in regulating pesticides: Risks to human health or the environment increased the likelihood that a particular pesticide use was canceled by the EPA; at the same time, the larger the benefits associated with a particular use, the lower was the likelihood of cancellation. Intervention by special-interest groups was also important in the regulatory process. Comments by grower organizations significantly reduced the probability of cancellation, whereas comments by environmental advocacy groups increased the probability of cancellation. Our analysis suggests that the EPA is fully capable of weighing benefits and costs when regulating environmental hazards; however, the implicit value placed on health risks--$35 million per applicator cancer case avoided--may be considered high by some persons.

We devise tests that distinguish between competitive (Walrasian), fully revealing rational expectations and noisy rational expectations equilibria based on their predictions concerning trading volume around public information signals. Empirical results strongly support the noisy rational expectations hypothesis. This indicates that a significant amount of noise exists (so that private information has value), but not enough to obfuscate entirely the information content of price. Our analysis also indicates that the dispersion of private information across traders has an impact on trading volume, but not on price.

Sanctions are measures that one party (the sender) uses to influence another (the target). Sanctions, or the threat of sanctions, have been used by governments to alter the human rights, trade, or foreign policies of other governments. We develop notions of the sender's and target's toughness that depend on their patience and on the extent of their suffering from sanctions. How much a sender can exact from the target depends on the relative toughness of the two. Sanctions that impose less harm on the target can sometimes be more effective than those that impose greater harm.

In a long-standing controversy over monetary experiences in colonial America, the main substantive issue concerns large and rapid increases in stocks of paper currency that were followed by negligible changes in price levels. The "backing theory" or anticlassical interpretation is that prices failed to respond to major increases in total money supplies. The "quantity theory" or classical hypothesis, by contrast, is that specie was exported in amounts that left total money stocks approximately unchanged. This paper develops and applies a strategy for resolving this fundamental disagreement despite the absence of data on stocks and flows of specie.