The last eight years have seen the adoption by a number of the younger leaders of the British trade-union movement of the ideal of industrial self-government. In June, I914, the annual meeting of the National Union of Railwaymen resolved unanimously, that this congress, while reaffirming previous decisions in favor of nationalization of the railways, declares that no system of state ownership of the railways will be acceptable to organized railwaymen which does not . . . . allow them a due measure of responsibility and control in the safe and efficient working of the railway system.' At the annual conference in May, i919, of the Postal and Telegraph Clerks' Association, it was emphatically pointed out that the control demanded by the postal employees included participation in directing the technical improvement of the service for the good of the community.2 In i9i9 the Miners' Federation brought formally before the Coal Industry Commission a request not only for the nationalization of the mines, but of joint control by the

We examine the limiting behavior of cooperative and noncooperative fiscal policies as countries' market power goes to zero. We show that these policies converge if countries raise revenues through lump-sum taxation. However, if there are unremovable domestic distortions, such as distorting taxes, there can be gains to coordination even when a single country's policy cannot affect world prices. These results differ from the received wisdom in the optimal tariff literature. The key distinction is that, contrary to the tariff literature, the spending decisions of governments are explicitly modeled.

This paper develops the quantitative implications of optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model. In a stationary equilibrium, the ex ante tax rate on capital income is approximately zero. The tax rate on labor income fluctuates very little and inherits the persistence properties of the exogenous shocks; thus there is no presumption that optimal labor tax rates follow a random walk. Most of the welfare gains realized by switching from a tax system like that of the United States to the Ramsey system come from an initial period of high taxation on capital income.

We study the efficiency of premarital investments when parents care about their child’s marriage prospects, in a large frictionless marriage market with nontransferable utility. Stochastic returns to investment ensure that equilibrium is unique. We find that, generically, investments exceed the Pareto-efficient level, unless the sexes are symmetric in all respects. Girls will invest more than boys if their quality shocks are less variable than shocks for boys or if they are the abundant sex. The unique equilibrium in our continuum agent model is the limit of the equilibria of finite models, as the number of agents tends to infinity.

Using a random judge design and panel data from Norway, we estimate that imprisonment discourages further criminal behavior, with reoffense probabilities falling by 29 percentage points and criminal charges dropping by 11 over a 5-year period. Ordinary least squares mistakenly reaches the opposite conclusion. The decline is driven by individuals not working prior to incarceration; these individuals increase participation in employment programs and raise their future employment and earnings. Previously employed individuals experience lasting negative employment effects. These findings demonstrate that time spent in prison with a focus on rehabilitation can be preventive for a large segment of the criminal population.

We develop a model of competition in prices and infrastructure among mobile network operators. Although consolidation increases market power, it can lead to more efficient data transmission due to economies of scale, which we derive from physical principles. After estimating our model with French consumer and infrastructure data, equilibrium simulations reveal that while prices decrease with the number of firms, so do download speeds. Our framework also allows us to quantify the impact of spectrum allocation. The marginal social value of spectrum exceeds firms’ willingness to pay in our model as well as observed prices in spectrum auctions.