Knowledge that Transforms

Recent public policy debate has focused concern on the equity dimensions of categorical discrimination based on sex, age, or race in insurance and similar markets. We consider the efficiency effects of such discrimination and establish that costless imperfect categorization always enhances efficiency. When categorization entails a non-negligible resource cost, however, no unambiguous efficiency ranking of informational regimes is possible. When categorization is costless, we demonstrate that government, having no better information than market participants, can effect redistribution without assuming dictatorial control of the market, implying that a market equilibrium with costless categorization is potentially Pareto superior to one without it. When categorization is costly, however, the market may categorize when Pareto improvements are not possible.

The difference between the forward rate of interest implicit in the term structure of interest rates and the expected future spot rate is usually referred to as a liquidity premium. This paper examines the determinants of the liquidity premiums implicit in the term structure of real interest rates using a three-date economy with production. The sign of the liquidity premium is characterized in terms of the parameters that describe the uncertainty in the economy. The results suggest that the liquidity premiums implicit in the real term structure of interest rates may sometimes be negative.

Our theory of costly contracts emphasizes the contractual rights can by of two types: specific rights and residual rights. When it is costly to list all specific rights over assets in the contract, it may be optimal to let one party purchase all residual rights. Ownership is the purchase of these residual rights. When residual rights are purchased by one party, they are lost by a second party, and this inevitably creates distortions. Firm 1 purchases firm 2 when firm 1's control increases the productivity of its management more than the loss of control decreases the productivity of firm 2's management.

This paper shows that the stabilization of the unemployment rate between the pre-1930 and post-1948 eras is an artifact of improvements in data collection procedures. Prewar methods are used to construct postwar unemployment data that are consistent with the historical data. The constructed postwar series is nearly as volatile as the pre-1930 unemployment data. The constructed postwar data are systematically more volatile than the actual postwar data because the cyclical behavior of the labor force and productivity are misspecified in the construction procedures. The relationship between the actual and constructed postwar unemployment series is used to construct new historical data.

The paper reexamines the question of the guilt of subordinates in large organizations, a question posed with special force by Hannah Arendt in her book on Adolf Eichmann. He consistently claimed innocence on the ground that he was only following orders. Arendt accepted this picture of the regime but nevertheless indicted him for "crimes against humanity." The paper suggests that this model of the Nazi bureaucracy is false: in the Nazi bureaucracy of murder, as in other large bureaucracies, subordinates competed with each other to advance the goals of superiors they trusted. In this context, their guilt is easily established.

This paper develops and applies a novel test of the Holt et al. linear quadratic inventory model. It is shown that a central property of the model is that a certain weighted sum of variances and covariances of production, sales, and inventories must be nonnegative. The weights are the basic structural parametersof the model. The model may be tested by seeing whether this sum is in fact nonnegative. When the test is applied to some nondurables data aggregated to the two-digit SIC code level, it almost always rejects the model, even though the model does well by traditional criteria.

This paper studies the processes of wage and employment dynamics within local labor markets. The theoretical context is a dynamic spatial equilibrium among locales that is supported by incentives to migrate to markets offering the greatest present value of future earnings. Thus costly migration arbitrages geographic wage differences. Using a time series of cross-sectional files from the Current Population Surveys of 1977-79, I find that wages are sensitive to interarea differences in market conditions. A positive relative shock to local labor demand increases relative wages within a locale, but expectations of future demand actually reduce current wages because of increased current migration. Thus wages are more flexible in response to transitory changes in local market conditions than to permanent ones. Consistent with theory, wages are most flexible among the least mobile demographic groups, who are inelastically supplied across geographic areas.

Empirical studies indicate that unconditional intergovernmental grants have a flypaper effect. Several authors have modeled recipient government spending under fiscal illusion to explain this phenomenon. In short, grants reduce the perceived marginal cost of recipient government output. This paper develops a more general model of illusion that incorporates the grantor government, thereby eliminating inconsistencies encountered in previous models. The more general model implies that grant finance increases the perceived marginal cost of grantor government output. Thus grant-induced illusion should have two effects: an increase in recipient output and a decrease in grantor output. The empirical work supports this hypothesis.

It is widely believed that one of the Federal Reserve's first important monetary policy achievements was the deseasonalization of interest rates. The Federal Reserve supposedly accomplished this by introducing appropriate seasonal movements into the supplies of currency and high-powered money. This view implicitly assumes that there was no interaction between American and foreign financial markets. Two findings are reported that challenge this conventional view. First, interest rate seasonals disappeared in the United States and other countries at approximately the same time. Second, interest rate seasonal ended approximately 3 years before the seasonal movements of currency and high-powered money changed.

In this paper a market where a buyer (job seeker) is searching in a known order among sellers (e.g., a motorist driving along a road looking for gasoline) is described. Both sellers and buyers are assumed to behave strategically. There are many types of buyers. The sellers know only the distribution of all possible buyers; similarly, buyers have imperfect information about sellers. The analysis is conducted by modeling the market as a game with incomplete information; the equilibrium is characterized. A central feature of the game is that both buyers and sellers rationally update their prior information about each other as the game unfolds sequentially. It is shown that prices need not vary monotonically along the search process.