Some technologies save lives—new vaccines, new surgical techniques, safer highways. Others threaten lives—pollution, nuclear accidents, global warming, and the rapid global transmission of disease. How is growth theory altered when technologies involve life and death instead of just higher consumption? This paper shows that taking life into account has first-order consequences. Under standard preferences, the value of life may rise faster than consumption, leading society to value safety over consumption growth. As a result, the optimal rate of consumption growth may be substantially lower than what is feasible, in some cases falling all the way to zero.

We document the growth in higher education costs and tuition over the past 50 years. To explain these trends, we develop a general equilibrium model with skill- and sector-biased technical change. Finding the model’s parameters through a combination of estimation and calibration, we show that it can explain the rise in college costs between 1961 and 2009, along with the increase in college attainment and the change in the relative earnings of college graduates. The model predicts that if college costs had ceased to grow after 1961, enrollment in 2010 would have been 3%–6% higher.

Since 2012, all European Union countries have required disclosure of large short positions. This reduces short interest, bid-ask spreads, and the informativeness of prices. After specific disclosures, short-run abnormal returns are insignificantly negative, but 90-day cumulative abnormal returns are a statistically significant −5.23%. We find disclosures are likely to be followed by other disclosures, especially when the initial discloser is large or centrally located. However, there is no subsequent increase in short interest, and prices do not subsequently reverse. These results indicate that large short sellers are well informed, and that disclosures are not being used to coordinate manipulative attacks.

mandatory retirement for tenured faculty (uncapping) which was enacted in the 1986 amendments to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) will take effect. This grace period between enactment and effective dates was a response to the concerns that have been regularly expressed by educational administrators such as Rosovsky. In the congressional debate concerning the impact of uncapping on the retirement behavior of tenured faculty and the implications of any behavioral changes for the vitality of higher education, it was concluded that this delay would allow time for study, adjustment, and the opportunity to request a permanent exemption, if necessary.

To arrive at a tenable interpretation of black history, it is important to resolve the conflict between my measure-retrospective years of schooling completed-and Robert Margo's measure-prospective accumulation across ages of cohort-specific attendance rates. My series reconciled the apparent inconsistency between the stagnant pre-1940 black-white income ratios and what scholars had previously thought was a steady narrowing of racial education differences. Margo's series not only would restore that incon

Twenty years have passed since President Kennedy declared that action was needed to assure that pay rates be comparable with private enterprise rates for the same level of work. Because there are no profit considerations in government and powerful political influences affect all decisions, special guidelines are needed for wage determination. During the subsequent years, the doctrine became the guiding principle in federal pay policy for both bluecollar and white-collar workers. Over time, however, the implementation of full comparability adjustments have more often been downgraded to satisfy other national policy goals. A major reform bill is now under consideration in Congress. Therefore, it is appropriate at this time to examine where we are in terms of achieving and maintaining and consider the prospects for reform.

We propose a summary statistic for the economic well-being of people in a country. Our measure incorporates consumption, leisure, mortality, and inequality, first for a narrow set of countries using detailed micro data, and then more broadly using multi-country datasets. While welfare is highly correlated with GDP per capita, deviations are often large. Western Europe looks considerably closer to the United States, emerging Asia has not caught up as much, and many developing countries are further behind. Each component we introduce plays a significant role in accounting for these differences, with mortality being most important.

Using US Department of Justice data on local political corruption, I find that firms in more corrupt areas hold less cash and have greater leverage than firms in less corrupt areas. The results are robust to including a range of controls and to using an instrumental variable approach, two alternative survey measures of corruption, and propensity score matching. Further, the association between corruption and leverage is largest among firms that operate primarily around their headquarters. Overall, the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that firms manage liquidity downward and debt obligations upward to limit expropriation by corrupt local officials.

Empirical research has struggled to show that variation in corporate capital structure arises from variation in estimated corporate income tax rates. We argue that, in previous studies, both the tax rates applied to multinational corporations and the taxable income earned have been mismeasured. Using the Bureau of Economic Analysis annual survey sample combined with each firm's income and country specific tax rate, we find that firms do have higher leverage ratios and lower interest coverage ratios when they operate in countries with higher tax rates, as theory would suggest. The trade-off theory of capital structure continues to have empirical support.

Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, and John Stuart Mill shared in common essentially one dynamic model of equilibrium, growth, and distribution. When the limitation of land and natural resources is added to the model of Karl Marx, he also ends up with this same canonical classical model. In its present version the model is stripped down to its minimal essentials. For brevity I employ modern mathematical tools, but only to characterize in modern terms the relations that were actually common to all these writers. The reader should of course be warned that any simple codification of the classical economists' discursive writings must be an oversimplification: in some of their passages they qualify what they have written elsewhere; in some they provide negations and contradictions. Not a few of the stereotypes about the classical writers are, to paraphrase Voltaire, myths agreedupon by later commentators-distortions that both improve and libel the originals. The relevant object of study for a modern scholar is the corpus of original texts and the commentaries on them, the latter not being genuinely of less interest than the former once we have succeeded in telling them apart. To the fascinating question of whether classical political economy does, or can be made to, offer an alternative paradigm --in the sense of Thomas Kuhn [11, 1962]-to modern mainstream economics, the present investigation provides an instructive answer. So to speak, within every classical economist there is to be discerned a modern economist trying to be born. A Ricardo or Mill did not so much replace supply and demand by quite different mechanisms but rather sought to be able to say something significant and limiting about their properties, quite in the same way that we moderns endeavor to do. I describe and analyze here the basic classical model in its essential form.