Knowledge that Transforms

At the microeconomic level, durable purchases are often discontinuous and relatively large. This feature has the potential to explain why aggregate expenditure on durables responds only slowly (relative to the frictionless permanent income model) to wealth and other aggregate innovations. In this paper I develop new results on the problem of dynamic aggregation of stochastically heterogeneous units, which help to characterize the connection between microeconomic behavior and aggregate dynamics in the presence of nonconvex adjustment costs. Using these results and splitting postwar U.S. aggregate durable purchases into different subcategories and time periods, I provide further support for the view that lumpy microeconomic purchases play an important role in explaining the time-series behavior of aggregate expenditure on durable goods.

When harassed users adopt new ways of transaction, supply changes in predictable ways. This linkage between demand and supply can explain a number of puzzling consequences of the decriminalization of marijuana and the war on heroin and cocaine.

This study examines the effects of antitrust prosecution on prices charged by firms indicted for price fixing. In a survey of 25 cases filed between 1973 and 1984, prices are found to gradually rise by about 7 percent over the 4 years following an indictment. However, the severity of penalties is negatively correlated with prices. These two findings suggest either that penalties are too lenient or that prosecution is too broad, penalizing economically efficient conspiracies along with those that are inefficient.

Milton Friedman has claimed that his monetary economics derives from a Chicago Tradition that, in the 1930s, offered a monetary explanation of cyclical fluctuations in general and the Great Depression in particular, an optimistic view of the power of monetary policy, and a case for governing it by rules rather than discretion. It is argued that all the elements of this tradition except the last are to be found in earlier writings of Ralph Hawtrey, Allyn Young, and Lauchlin Currie and that there is much evidence to point to a direct influence running from Hawtrey, through Harvard to Chicago.

This paper investigates the role of induced innovation in the development of American agriculture from 1880 to 1980. The induced innovation hypothesis, most closely associated with the work of Hayami and Ruttan, argues that successful economies develop technologies in accordance with market price signals to loosen constraints on growth imposed by factor scarcities. Our analysis employing new state and regional level data fails to find support for Hayami and Ruttan's hypothesis. This paper suggests that many of the fundamental generalizations about American agricultural development need to be reconsidered and redirects attention to the role of settlement, changing crop patterns, and biological investments in explaining changes in factor utilization in American agriculture.

Product liability ideally should promote efficient levels of product safety, but misdirected liability efforts may depress beneficial innovations. This paper examines these competing effects of liability costs on product R & D intensity and new product introductions by manufacturing firms. At low to moderate levels of expected liability costs, there is a positive effect of liability costs on product innovation. At very high levels of liability costs, the effect is negative. At the sample mean, liability costs increase R & D intensity by 15 percent. The greater linkage of these effects to product R & D rather than process R & D is consistent with the increased prominence of the design defect doctrine.

A single seller of an indivisible good operates in a market with many consumers who differ in their ability to process information. The consumers' constraints are modeled in two submodels: the first in terms of the limits on the number of sets in the partition of the price space, and the second in terms of the limits on the complexity of the operation he can use to process a price offer. For the construction of the second submodel, the tool of a "perceptron" is borrowed from the parallel computation literature. Assuming a negative correlation between the seller's cost of supply of the good and the consumer's ability to process information, I demonstrate that the heterogeneity of consumer's abilities can be used by the seller to profitably discriminate among them.

The hypothesis that takeovers provide managers with the incentive to maximize firm value is tested by examining the relationship between profitability and state statutes governing takeover activity among banks. The evidence indicates that firms in states with an active takeover market are more profitable. When takeover activity is restricted, increased use of other mechanisms that provide an incentive to maximize firm value, such as concentration of equity ownership and management ownership of stock, is observed. However, these alternative methods have a smaller effect on profitability and do not completely compensate for the absence of an active takeover market.

This paper presents evidence on the nature of productivity growth for five major industries in six countries. Output growth is found to be more correlated across countries than productivity growth. In addition, productivity growth is more correlated across industries within one country than across countries within one industry. Using an error-components model, I find that a substantial fraction of changes in annual productivity can be attributed to nation-specific factors that are common across industries. The evidence suggests that short-run productivity growth is similar across industries in a nation but less similar across countries in any specific industry.

This paper suggests a new procedure for evaluating the fit of a dynamic structural economic model. The procedure begins by augmenting the variables in the model with just enough stochastic error so that the model can exactly match the second moments of the actual data. Measures of fit for the model can then be constructed on the basis of the size of this error. The procedure is applied to a standard real business cycle model. Over the business cycle frequencies, the model must be augmented with a substantial error to match data for the postwar U.S. economy. Lower bounds on the variance of the error range from 40 percent to 60 percent of the variance in the actual data.