Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines the extent to which households offset pension wealth with reductions in other wealth. Systematic econometric biases imply that the estimated offsets in previous empirical studies are smaller than the true offset and may even have the wrong sign. New empirical estimates that do not correct for the biases generate little offset between pensions and other wealth. Estimates that correct for the biases show substantially more offset (a smaller impact of pensions on overall saving) than in most previous studies. The estimates also indicate that the effects of pensions on wealth vary significantly across households.

Specific quasi rents arise in a variety of economic relationships and are exposed to opportunism unless fully protected by contract. Rent appropriation has important macroeconomic consequences. Resources are underutilized, factor markets are segmented, production suffers from technological “sclerosis,” job creation and destruction are unbalanced, recessions are excessively sharp, and expansions run into bottlenecks. While, depending on the shock, expansions may require reinforcement or stabilization, recessions should typically be softened. In the long run, institutions may evolve to alleviate the problem by balancing appropriation. Technology choice will also be affected, with the appropriated factor partially “excluding” the other from production to reduce appropriation.

This paper provides new evidence that state policies play a role in the location of industry. The paper classifies a state as probusiness if it has a right‐to‐work law and antibusiness if it does not. The paper finds that, on average, there is a large, abrupt increase in manufacturing activity when one crosses a state border from an antibusiness state into a probusiness state.

This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common‐law countries generally have the strongest, and frenchcivillaw countries the weakest, legal protections of investors, with German‐and scandinavin‐civil‐law countries located in the middle. We also find that concentration of ownership of shares in the largest public companies is negativelyrelated to investor protections, consistent with the hypothesis that small, diversified share‐holders are unlikely to be important in countries that fail to protect their rights.

Recent regional initiatives have been addressed from a Vinerian perspective of trade creation and trade diversion. This is true of both policy‐oriented economists, who tend to be critical of the initiatives, and theorists, who have added dynamic and gametheoretic elements to the Vinerian structure. This paper describes the stylized facts of much recent regional integration and develops an alternative model. The analysis suggests that regional integration, far from threatening multilateral liberalism, may in fact be a direct consequence of the success of past multilateralism and an added guarantee for its survival.

This paper studies the life cycle career choices of law school graduates using unique data from the University of Michigan Law School. The model assumes that these graduates act according to the optimal solution of a dynamic optimization problem in which they sequentially choose among five employment sectors. The employment sectors are differentiated by pecuniary and nonpecuniary returns, promotion and dismissal probabilities, and the extent of transferability of human capital. the estimation of the model reveals a self‐selection mechanism, based on unobserved heterogeneity in abilities and expected future returns, which plays a critical role in reproducing the sector‐specific nonmonotonic separation hazards observed in the data. The underlying self‐selection mechanism also has implications for policy interventions in the market for lawyers, such as loan forgiveness programs.

Post‐World War II European welfare states experienced several decades of relatively low unemployment, followed by a plague of persistently high unemployment since the 1980s. We impute the higher unemployment to welfare states' diminished ability to cope with more turbulent economic times, such as the ongoing restructuring from manufacturing to the service industry, adoption of new information technologies, and a rapidly changing international economy. We use a general equilibrium search model in which workers accumulate skills on the job and lose skills during unemployment.

How do movements in the distribution of income and wealth affect the macroeconomy? We analyze this question using a calibrated version of the stochastic growth model with partially uninsurable idiosyncratic risk and movements in aggregate productivity. Our main finding is that, in the stationary stochastic equilibrium, the behavior of the macroeconomic aggregates can be almost perfectly described using only the mean of the wealth distribution. This result is robust to substantial changes in both parameter values and model specification. Our benchmark model, whose only difference from the representative‐agent framework is the existence of uninsurable idiosyncratic risk, displays far less cross‐sectional dispersion and skewness in wealth than U.S. data. However, an extension that relies on a small amount of heterogeneity in thrift does succeed in replicating the key features of the wealth data. Furthermore, this extension features aggregate time series that depart significantly from permanent income behavior.

This paper investigates the strength of the empirical evidence of the strategic bequest hypothesis proposed by Bernheim. Shleifer, and Summers (1985). At issue is whether bequests are primarily motivated by a desire to influnce the behavior of potential beneficiaries. Alternatively, bequests may be motivated by altruism or risk aversion in the presence of incomplete annuity and health insurnace markets (e.g., Tomes 1981; Hurd 1989).