Knowledge that Transforms

It is often argued that the same expenditures on military procurement would produce a more effective defense if larger numbers of less sophisticated (and thus cheaper) weapons were purchased. This paper shows that such a result can occur even if the military derives no private consumption value from technically sophisticated weapons. Rather the organization of the decision-making process itself can produce this result. This suggests some possible solutions through organizing decision making in a different fashion.

A non-parametric analysis of technology, technical change, and productivity is presented in the context of cost minimizing behavior. A number of non-parametric tests concerning the existence and nature of technical change are applied to U.S. and Japanese manufacturing data. Non-parametric measures of technical change are presented.

Official margin requirements in the U.S. stock market were established in October 1934 to limit the amount of credit available for the purpose of buying stocks. Since then, higher or rising margin requirements are associated with lower stock price volatility, lower excess volatility, and smaller deviations of stock prices from their fundamental values. The results hold throughout the post-1934 period and are not very sensitive to the exclusion of the turbulent depression years from the sample. Thus margin requirements seem to be an effective policy tool in curbing destabilizing speculation.

A sequential equilibrium model of private antitrust enforcement is presented. Consumers have incomplete information about cartel costs and cannot accurately estimate a priori the damage recovery from an antitrust action. Consumers are able to infer cartel costs from the equilibrium pricing strategy of firms. The universal divinity criterion is used to characterize the sequential equilibrium. It is shown that for a sufficiently large damage multiple, antitrust enforcement effectively increases social welfare.

The United States became the world's preeminent manufacturing nation at the turn of the twentieth century. This study considers the bases for this success by examining the factor content of trade in manufactured goods. Surprisingly, the most distinctive characteristic of U.S. manufacturing exports was intensity in nonreproducible natural resources; furthermore, this relative intensity was increasing between 1880 and 1920. The study then asks whether resource abundance reflected geological endowment or greater exploitation of geological potential. It was mainly the latter.

Political business cycle theories generally rely on nominal rigidities and voter myopia. This paper offers an equilibrium theory which preserves some basic insights from earlier models, though with significant refinements. The "political budget cycle" emphasized here is in fiscal policy rather than output and inflation; it arises via a multidimensional signal process. One can consider the welfare implications of proposals to mitigate the cycle, and the effects of altering the electoral structure.