Knowledge that Transforms

The paper incorporates the formation of human capital into the two-factor, two-good model of international trade. Workers can choose between being unskilled and earning the corresponding wage or obtaining an education that enables them to earn a higher wage. The wages of skilled and unskilled labor and the direct and indirect costs of education are all determined endogenously, along with the terms of trade and the pattern of comparative advantage. The implications of the model are consistent with the extensive empirical research on the role of human capital in explaining patterns of comparative advantage.

This paper develops a technique for extracting the expectations embedded in the current prices of energy-using durable goods and applies it to used car markets during the two energy "crises" of the 1970s. The resulting estimates indicate that consumers took the energy crises seriously and formed expectations about future gasoline prices that appear rational when compared with the historical gasoline price series, with the forecasts of specialists and experts, or with the actual postsample behavior of gasoline prices. The evidence therefore supports the view that consumers are able to make rather complex choices with a great deal of rationality and casts doubt on the wisdom of policies based on assumptions to the contrary.

This paper reevaluates the concept of unemployment in the context of differing labor market and nonmarket opportunities for men and women, discussing common fallacies in female to male unemployment rate comparisons and their use as an indicator of labor market equality. Suggestive empirical evidence is presented for an alternative unemployment rate concept for women, for interpreting the procyclical variation in female to male unemployment rate differentials, and for decomposing unemployment differences into differences in labor market characteristics and in behavioral coefficients for the two sexes. The paper concludes that a large part of the observed unemployment rate differential may be attributed to the definition and methodology used in deriving unemployment statistics rather than to discrimination in productive opportunities.

In this paper we demonstrate how certain very ordinary economic principles lead maximizing individuals to choose consumption-production plans that display many of the characteristics commonly associated with business cycles. Our explanation is entirely consistent with (i) rational expectations, (ii) complete current information, (iii) stable preferences, (iv) no technological change, (v) no long-lived commodities, (vi) no frictions or adjustment costs, (vii) no government, (viii) no money, and (ix) no serial dependence in the stochastic elements of the environment. We also provide a completely worked out example of the type of artificial economy we have in mind. The time-series properties of the example exhibit some major features of observed business cycles. Although this type of model may not be capable of explaining all of the regularities in actual business cycles, we believe that it provides a useful, well-defined benchmark for assessing the relative importance of factors (e.g., monetary disturbances) that we have deliberately ignored.

We analyze the individual's demand for insurance as a special case of general portfolio hedging activity. The demand for insurance contracts is determined simultaneously with the demands for other assets in the portfolio. We demonstrate that when the payoffs of the policy are correlated with the payoffs to the individual's other assets, the demand for insurance contracts is generally not a separable portfolio decision. We argue that this separability condition is not generally met because of significant interdependence of claims across different insurance policies. Furthermore, our generalizations can reverse the standard prediction that wealthier individuals will demand less insurance.

The paper examines the effect of terms-of-trade changes on a small country's spending and current account, assuming optimizing behavior in an intertemporal framework with perfect international capital mobility. A temporary (future) terms-of-trade deterioration implies a deterioration (improvement) of the trade balance, whereas a permanent terms-of-trade deterioration has an ambiguous effect, depending on the rate of time preference. Nominal and real variables are considered via exact price indexes. Two periods and an infinite horizon are examined.

The household production literature emphasizes that technical or biological processes condition input selection by households in their production activities, along with prices and income. Exogenous variations in health, to the extent that they are perceived by individuals (heterogeneity), lead to correlations between inputs and health outcomes that cannot be used to derive causal conclusions. Therefore, estimates of health technology must be obtained from a behavioral model in which health inputs are themselves choices. Consistent estimates are reported of the effect of endogenous inputs, such as medical care, smoking, and fertility, on birth weight and fetal growth in the presence of health heterogeneity.

This paper uses an infinite-horizon model based on individual maximizing behavior to study whether explosive price-level paths unrelated to monetary growth--speculative hyperinflations--can be equilibrium paths under rational expectations. In a pure fiat money regime, speculative hyperinflations can be excluded only through severe restrictions on individual preferences; but when the government fractionally backs the currency by guaranteeing a minimal real redemption value for money, speculative hyperinflations are impossible, even if agents are not completely certain that they can redeem their money in any given period. The analysis also confirms that implosive price-level paths and divergent paths for capital asset prices are not equilibria under either monetary regime.