A general theory of voting, which explains under what conditions voting will be chosen as a means for allocating resources and how the constitution that governs the voting will be structured is presented. It is hypothesized that developers of voting organizations will structure their organizations in order to maximize the value of shares sold by minimizing the expected costs of wealth transfer and decision making in the voting organization. Implications regarding the allocation of votes and assessments within the organization, the domain of voting decisions, and the optimal voting rule are tested with data on the constitutional structure of condominium homeowner associations.

We analyze the impact of classroom peers' ability (measured by their individual fixed effects) on student achievement for all Florida public school students in grades 3-10 over a 6-year period. We control for both student and teacher fixed effects, thereby alleviating biases due to endogenous assignment of both peers and teachers. Under linear-in-means specifications, estimated peer effects are small to nonexistent, but we find some sizable and significant peer effects within nonlinear models. We also find that classroom peers, as compared with the broader group of grade-level peers at the same school, exert a greater influence on individual achievement gains.

The relationship between state-imposed advertising restrictions and state-level market concentration in the malt beverage industry is examined. The authors find that the presence of proscriptions on price advertising significantly increases market concentration at the state level, both absolutely and relative to a measure of national concentration. The evidence also indicates that banning local nonprice advertising in addition to price advertising yields no marginal significant change in either measure of state-level concentration. Analysis of individual brewers' market shares suggests that large national brewers gain at the expense of smaller brewers when price advertising is restricted. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Tim R. Sass, J. Paul Leigh, The Market for Safety Regulation and the Effect of Regulation on Fatalities: The Case of Motorcycle Helmet Laws, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 73, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 167-172

We analyze the relationship between charter high school attendance and educational attainment in Florida and in Chicago. Controlling for observed student characteristics and test scores, we estimate that among students who attended a charter middle school, those who went on to attend a charter high school were 7–15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who transitioned to a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school were 8–10 percentage points more likely to attend college. We find even larger effects when we treat high school choice as endogenous.