Knowledge that Transforms

From 1818 to 1909, 35 government and 57 privately funded expeditions sought to locate and navigate a Northwest Passage, discover the North Pole, and make other significant discoveries in Arctic regions. Most major Arctic discoveries were made by private expeditions. Most tragedies were publicly funded. Public expeditions were better funded than their private counterparts yet lost more ships, experienced poorer crew health, and had more men die. Public expeditions’ poor performance is not attributable to differences in objectives, available technologies, or country of origin. Rather, it reflects a tendency toward poor leadership structures, slow adaptation to new information, and perverse incentives.

We present empirical evidence on the relationship between individual wages, conditional on worker characteristics, and equity returns using a unique survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Equity returns affect the wages only of workers with three or more years of tenure. A 4 percent increase in a firm's market value raises pay by 0.3 percent within three years. Our estimates suggest that each $10 increase in shareholder wealth raises the present value of a firm's wage bill by $1. The elasticity of white‐collar wages with respect to equity returns is one‐third smaller than the CEO salary elasticities in our sample.

This paper provides the first estimates of overall CPI bias prior to the 1970s and new estimates of bias since the 1970s. It finds that annual CPI bias was −0.1 percent between 1888 and 1919 and rose to 0.7 percent between 1919 and 1935. Annual CPI bias was 0.4 percent in the 1960s and then rose to 2.7 percent between 1972 and 1982 before falling to 0.6 percent between 1982 and 1994. The findings imply that we have underestimated growth rates in true income in the 1920s and 1930s and in the 1970s.

This paper summarizes the contributions of microeconometrics to economic knowledge. Four main themes are developed. (1) Microeconometricians developed new tools to respond to econometric problems raised by the analysis of the new sources of micro data produced after the Second World War. (2) Microeconometrics improved on aggregate time-series methods by building models that linked economic models for individuals to data on individual behavior. (3) An important empirical regularity detected by the field is the diversity and heterogeneity of behavior. This heterogeneity has profound consequences for economic theory and for econometric practice. (4) Microeconometrics has contributed substantially to the scientific evaluation of public policy.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires employers to accommodate disabled workers and outlaws discrimination against the disabled in hiring, firing, and pay. Although the ADA was meant to increase the employment of the disabled, the net theoretical effects are ambiguous. For men of all working ages and women under 40, Current Population Survey data show a sharp drop in the employment of disabled workers after the ADA went into effect. Although the number of disabled individuals receiving disability transfers increased at the same time, the decline in employment of the disabled does not appear to be explained by increasing transfers alone, leaving the ADA as a likely cause. Consistent with this view, the effects of the ADA appear larger in medium‐size firms, possibly because small firms were exempt from the ADA. The effects are also larger in states with more ADA‐related discrimination charges.

Several indivisible goods are to be divided among two or more players, whose bids for the goods determine their prices. An equitable assignment of the goods at competitive prices is given by a fair‐division procedure, called the Gap Procedure, that ensures (1) nonnegative prices that never exceed the bid of the player receiving the good; (2) Pareto optimality, though coupled with possible envy; (3) monotonicity, such that higher bids never hurt in obtaining a good; (4) sincere bids that preclude negative utility; and (5) prices that are partially independent of the amounts bid (as in a Vickrey auction). A variety of applications are discussed.

This paper examines strategic behavior of developers who, through offering different congested public‐good packages and revenue/fiscal schemes, compete for residents who are differentiated by income. There is an endogenous determination of numbers and sizes of communities. Developers have an incentive to strongly differentiate their public‐good offerings. In terms of pricing strategies, developers exhibit sharply contrasting behaviors. In low‐income communities, housing consumption is subsidized once lots are priced. In high‐income communities housing consumption is generally taxed.

We analyze a multiple‐activity, principal‐agent model in which the activities are naturally substitutable for the agent and complementary for the principal. A basic result is that the optimal compensation must cause the agent to view the activities as complements. This complementarity is achieved by employing a compensation scheme that is typically nonmonotone and makes success on multiple dimensions the sole source of large rewards. A number of empirical implications follow, along with explanations for some existing empirical findings. We also discuss applications to compensation in specific occupations.

In their seminal paper, Aumann, Kurz, and Neyman found the surprising result that the choice of levels of public goods in a democracy is not affected by the distribution of voting rights. This implies that groups of individuals may not value the franchise. This conclusion, however, does not correspond to what we commonly observe. We propose a new model to address the question of enfranchisement. The main feature of our model is that it takes into account natural affinities, such as religion or class, that may exist between voters. This allows us to show that while individuals may not value the vote, they nonetheless value the franchise. We also show that in the presence of nonconvexities, it is more likely that the group in power will grant the franchise when preferences are severely opposed.

Using equipment‐level data from aerospace plants that closed during the 1990s, this paper studies the process of moving installed physical capital to a new use. The analysis yields three results that suggest significant sectoral specificity of physical capital and substantial costs of redeploying the capital. First, other aerospace companies are overrepresented among buyers of the used capital relative to their representation in the market for new investment goods. Second, even after age‐related depreciation is taken into account, capital sells for a substantial discount relative to replacement cost; the more specialized the type of capital, the greater the discount. Yet, capital sold to other aerospace firms fetches a higher price than capital sold to industry outsiders. Finally, the process of winding down operations and selling the equipment takes several years.