This paper shows that allowing wealthy individuals to influence the outcome of their trials through the purchase of legal services can be consistent with the optimal penalty literature. Using this analysis, the author reviews some of the advantages and disadvantages of varying the length of jail terms versus varying the probability of conviction. Finally, implications for the bail, prosecutorial, and plea bargaining systems are examined. Copyright 1987 by University of Chicago Press.

Governments use public education and public ownership of the media to control the information that their citizens receive. More totalitarian governments as well as those with larger wealth transfers make greater investments in publicly controlled information. This finding is borne out from cross‐sectional time‐series evidence acros countries and is confirmed when the recent fall of communism is specifically examined. My results reject the standard publicagood view linking education and democracy, and I find evidence that public educational expenditures vary in similar ways to government ownership of television stations. Country‐level data on the organization of families as well as data on South African public schools are also examined.

Previous literature has produced weak evidence to support the hypothesis that real economic news affects stock returns. This is, in part, attributed to the difficulty of measuring how investors interpret macroeconomic announcements in different economic environments. In this paper, we choose a different approach of measuring macroeconomic news to better estimate its effect on stock returns. Since newspaper stories provide an interpretation of the statistical releases, we choose newspaper stories as our measure of news. Our findings indicate that news about GDP and unemployment does affect stock returns.

This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross-sectional time-series data for 1870–1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did. More married women did not vote for Dole because of a widespread sense of societal insecurity: ‘‘It is not that they distrust their husband, but they have seen