Knowledge that Transforms

We study the behavior of a large trader with private information about the mean of an asset with a risky return. We argue that if the variability of the return is not too great, typically the trader will find it desirable to ensure that the market price does not reveal his information, that is, that a "pooling" equilibrium arises. Such an equilibrium has the advantage of avoiding the incentive constraints that arise in "separating" equilibria, where information can be inferred from prices. Thus the efficient market hypothesis may well fail if there is imperfect competition. Despite the uniformativeness of prices, the other (competitive) traders are also better off in the pooling equilibrium than in any separating equilibrium, again if one assumes limited variability.

A model analyzing the choice of shift is developed and estimated using data from two supplements to the Current Population Survey. The findings show a positive wage premium for shift work that varies with personal characteristics, and there is strong evidence showing the importance of self-selection, as workers with low potential daytime earnings are more likely to choose night work and supplement their earnings. The findings demonstrate that cross-section estimates of wage premiums for union membership and firm size are biased upward because they pick up some of the compensation differentials for shift work. Copyright 1990 by University of Chicago Press.

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 a theory of job matching in which matching information has both job-specific and occupation-specific components. If occupational matching is significant, then the theory predicts that for those who have switched jobs but remained in the same occupation, increased tenure in the previous job lowers the likelihood of separation from the current job. These predictions are tested using job tenure data from the National Longitudinal Survey's youth cohort. In general, the data are consistent with the occupational matching hypothesis.

In this paper, the authors develop and test a model of the effect of alternative compensation arrangements on productive efficiency in medical group practices. The technique employed is maximum likelihood production frontier estimation. The authors provide a simple behavioral model of the determination of productive efficiency and a new interpretation of the economic measure of technical efficiency. They derive a "behavioral production function" that relates production to individual responses to incentives, and they indicate that the impossibility of recovering the parameters of the production technology from observed behavior. Overall, the empirical results indicate that incentives do affect productivity. Copyright 1990 by University of Chicago Press.

Many have argued that if labor income is difference stationary, the permanent income hypothesis predicts that consumption should be relatively volatile. In U.S. aggregate data, labor income is well characterized as having a unit root; however, consumption turns out to be relatively smooth. This anomaly is known as Deaton's paradox. I resolve Deaton's paradox by providing decompositions of labor income into permanent and transitory components. These preserve the univariate dynamic properties of labor income. However, when agents distinguish permanent and transitory movements in their labor income--as the rational expectations hypothesis asserts they should--the permanent income hypothesis correctly predicts the observed smoothness in consumption.

This paper makes contributions to the estimation of health production functions and the economics of fertility control. We present the first infant health production functions that simultaneously control for self-selection in the resolution of pregnancies as live births or induced abortions and in the use of prenatal medical care services. We also incorporate the decision of a pregnant woman to give birth.

This paper presents evidence from empirical studies that test hypotheses derived from models of household behavior pertaining to the interrelationships among population growth, human capital, and economic development. These studies have exploited quasi-natural experiments embodied in the cross-area variability in the wage rates of children in a number of low-income countries, the intercouple variation in the biological propensity to conceive, and the geographically selective introduction of new high-yielding seed varieties in India in the period 1961-71. The different varieties of evidence support the hypotheses that alterations in the returns to human capital associated with exogenous technical change lead simultaneously to increases in human capital investments and to reductions in fertility and that the costliness of fertility control is a significant but modest factor in inhibiting human capital investments.

This paper contributes three extensions of Cochrane's work on measuring the relative stability of long-term growth. It estimates variance ratios for nine OECD countries over the period 1871-1985, presents an improved approximation to the distribution of the variance ratio, and considers the comovements of long growth cycles across countries. The evidence indicates that the relative stability of long-term growth found by Cochrane is unique to the United States. Relative to the United States, most countries have more variable dynamics at low frequencies and smoother dynamics at frequencies traditionally associated with business cycles.

This paper analyzes the application of liability to large-scale, long-term hazards. The key features distinguishing such hazards are the long temporal separation between exposure to a hazard and disease and the large damages when injuries finally emerge. The large scale of damages creates a strong incentive to avoid liability payments, and the long temporal separation creates numerous avenues through which parties can avoid paying possible damage awards. The analysis focuses on the incentive to avoid paying damages by vertically divesting production tasks associated with serious occupational risks. Such divestiture can lower liability costs if the small firm operating the risky stage goes out of business before latent injuries emerge or has insufficient assets to pay damages and declares bankruptcy when suits are filed. The paper then presents an empirical regression analysis of small-firm entry into the U.S. economy between 1967 and 1980, the period in which liability laws were changing. The point estimate is that, ceteris paribus, liability changes appear to have led to a large increase in small corporations in hazardous sectors. Hence the empirical analysis shows widespread attempts to avoid liability by shielding assets through divestiture.