Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines the responsiveness of taxable income to changes in marginal tax rates using detailed compensation data on several thousand corporate executives from 1991 to 1995. The data confirm that the higher marginal rates of 1993 led to a significant decline in taxable income. Indeed, this small group of executives may account for as much as 20 percent of the aggregate change in wage and salary income for approximately the one million richest taxpayers over this time period; one person alone can account for more than 2 percent. The decline, however, is almost entirely a short‐run shift in the timing of compensation rather than a permanent reduction in taxable income. The short‐run elasticity of taxable income with respect to the net‐of‐tax share exceeds one in this sample, but the elasticity after one year is at most 0.4 and probably closer to zero. Breaking out the tax responsiveness of different types of compensation shows that the large short‐run responses come almost entirely from a large increase in the exercise of stock options by the highest‐income executives in anticipation of the rate increases. Executives without stock options, executives with relatively lower incomes, and more conventional forms of taxable compensation such as salary and bonus show little responsiveness to tax changes.

Possible explanations for earnings differentials in self‐employment and paid employment are investigated. The empirical results suggest that the nonpecuniary benefits of self‐employment are substantial: Most entrepreneurs enter and persist in business despite the fact that they have both lower initial earnings and lower earnings growth than in paid employment, implying a median earnings differential of 35 percent for individuals in business for 10 years. The differential cannot be explained by the selection of low‐ability employees into self‐employment and is similar for three alternative measures of self‐employment earnings and across industries. Furthermore, the estimated earnings differentials may understate the differences in compensation across sectors since fringe benefits are not included in the measure of employee compensation.

We introduce home production into the neoclassical growth model and examine its consequences for development economics. In particular, we study the extent to which one can account for international income differences with differences in policies that distort capital accumulation. In models with home production, such policies not only reduce capital accumulation but also change the mix of market and nonmarket activity. Hence these models can generate larger differences in output than standard models for a given policy differential. We also show how the welfare implications change when we incorporate home production.

The nature and normative properties of competition in health care markets have long been the subject of much debate. In this paper we consider what the optimal benchmark is in the presence of moral hazard effects on consumption due to health insurance. Intuitively, it seems that imperfect competition in the health care market may constrain this moral hazard by increasing prices. We show that this intuition cannot be correct if insurance markets are competitive. A competitive insurance market will always produce a contract that leaves consumers at least as well off under lower prices as under higher prices.

An overlapping generations model of marriage and divorce is constructed to analyze family structure and intergenerational mobility. Agents differ by sex, marital status, and human capital. Single agents meet in a marriage market and decide whether to accept or reject proposals to wed. Married couples must decide whether to separate or not. Parents invest in their children depending on their wherewithal. A simulated version of the theoretical prototype can generate an equilibrium with a significant number of female‐headed families and a high degree of persistence in income across generations. To illustrate the model's mechanics, the effects of two antipoverty policies, namely child support and welfare, are investigated.

Intellectual collaboration in science includes formal coauthorship as well as presentation of papers at workshops, seminars, and professional meetings and informal commentary from colleagues, journal referees, and editors. While the incidence and extent of formal coauthorship are greater in biology than in economics, the extent of intellectual collaboration is greater in economics than in biology. Intellectual property rights to coauthored papers in economics tend to be assigned alphabetically, whereas biology is characterized by a strong merit‐based (nonalphabetical) assignment of intellectual property rights. These patterns do not result from differences in the relative importance of funding/physical capital.

Output prices tend to respond faster to input increases than to decreases. This tendency is found in more than two of every three markets examined. It is found as frequently in producer goods markets as in consumer goods markets. In both kinds of markets the asymmetric response to cost shocks is substantial and durable. On average, the immediate response to a positive cost shock is at least twice the response to a negative shock, and that difference is sustained for at least five to eight months. Unlike past studies, which documented similar asymmetries in selected markets (gasoline, agricultural products, etc.), this one uses large samples of diverse products: 77 consumer and 165 producer goods. Accordingly, the results suggest a gap in an essential part of economic theory. As a start on filling this gap, the study finds no asymmetry in the resonse of an individual decision maker (a supermarket chain) to its costs, but it finds above‐average asymmetry where a cost shock is filtered through a fragmented wholesale distribution system. It also finds a negative correlation between the degree of asymmetry and input price volatility and no correlation with proxies for inventory costs, asymmetric menu costs of price changes, and imperfect competition.

In an assignment market with uncertainty regarding productive ability of participants, early contracting can occur as participants balance risk sharing and sorting efficiency. More promising agents may contract early with each other because insurance gains outweigh sorting inefficiency, whereas less promising agents wait. It can also happen in equilibrium that more promising job applicants contract early with less promising firms. Such worker‐driven equilibria may arise when applicants are more risk‐averse, have greater uncertainty regarding their quality, or face a tighter market and when production exhibits increasing returns to firms’ qualities. Early contracting then unambiguously hurts the more promising firms that choose to wait.

Financial contagion is modeled as an equilibrium phenomenon. Because liquidity preference shocks are imperfectly correlated across regions, banks hold inter-regional claims on other banks to provide insurance against liquidity preference shocks. When there is no aggregate uncertainty, the first-best allocation of risk sharing can be achieved. However, this arrangement is financially fragile. A small liquidity preference shock in one region can spread by contagion throughout the economy. The possibility of contagion depends strongly on the completeness of the structure of interregional claims. Complete claims structures are shown to be more robust than incomplete structures.

Bioprospecting has been touted as a source of finance for biodiversity conservation. Recent work has suggested that the bioprospecting value of the “marginal unit” of genetic resources is likely to be vanishingly small, creating essentially no conservation incentive. This result is shown to flow specifically from a stylized description of the research process as one of brute‐force testing, unaided by an organizing scientific framework. Scientific models channel research effort toward leads for which the expected productivity of discoveries is highest. Leads of unusual promise then command information rents, associated with their role in reducing the costs of search. When genetic materials are abundant, information rents are virtually unaffected by increases in the profitability of product discovery and decline as technology improvements lower search costs. Numerical simulation results suggest that, under plausible conditions, the bioprospecting value of certain genetic resources could be large enough to support market‐based conservation of biodiversity.