When markets are incomplete, individuals may choose to marry to diversify their labor income risk. Love, however, can complicate the picture. If love is fleeting or the resolution of agents’ income uncertainty occurs predominantly later in life, then marriages with good economic matches last longer. In contrast, if love is persistent and the resolution of uncertainty to agents’ income occurs early, then marriages with good economic matches are more likely to be caught short with too little love to save a marriage. Consequently, once married, the partners will be more likely to divorce. Evidence is provided to distinguish between these alternative scenarios.

The invisible hand is not a power that makes the good of one the good of all, and it is not any of a number of other things it is said to be. It is simply the inducement a merchant has to keep his capital at home, thereby increasing the domestic capital stock and enhancing military power, both of which are in the public interest and neither of which he intended. Smith's exposition discloses how his rhetorical sallies could disfigure his economics, confuse his argument for free trade, and make him play fast and loose with facts and the ideas of others.

Previous studies of congressional spending have typically found a large positive effect of challenger spending but little evidence for effects of incumbent spending. Those studies, however, do not adequately control for inherent differences in vote-getting ability across candidates. This paper examines elections in which the same two candidates face one another on more than one occasion; differencing eliminates the influence of any fixed candidate or district attributes. Estimates of the effects of challenger spending are an order of magnitude below those of previous studies. Campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes, regardless of who does the spending.

Salaries of academic economists are studied to determine if individuals receive differential returns to publishing articles of varying quality and to coauthored versus single-authored articles. Estimates based on detailed data and a flexible nonlinear least-squares procedure indicate that substantial returns to quality exist and that an individual's return from a coauthored paper with n authors is approximately 1/n times that of a single-authored paper.

Public goods can be financed by direct taxation or a subsidy to private spending. This paper examines the relative efficiency and distributional consequences of the two methods. Efficiency is shown to depend on the price elasticity of private spending and the trade- off between public and private spending. When this trade-off is dollar for dollar, however, a subsidy is always more efficient than direct taxation. The gains from a subsidy are larger for a mixed good than for a pure public good. Looking a t distributional effects, the author shows when richer taxpayers may prefer a tax credit to deductibility, even though they face lower prices with deductibility, and also shows when richer taxpayers prefer direct taxation to either type of subsidy.

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 explores a model where private charity and public transfers are determined simultaneously. In political equilibrium, the government "overprovides" public transfers, transferring more to the poor than altruistic taxpayers prefer. At this equilibrium, private charity is zero. Evidence for this result is found by examining various types of data from the 1920s to the present. While private charity currently exceeds $50 billion, very little of it goes to the poor. I provide evidence that this phenomenon of zero private charity began, as the model predicts, in the 1930s, the beginning of federal intervention in the charity market.