The long-standing controversy over whether speculators in a futures market earn a risk premium is analyzed within the context of the capital asset pricing model recently developed by Sharpe, Lintner, and others. Under that approach the risk premium required on a futures contract should depend not on the variability of prices but on the extent to which the variations in prices are systematically related to variations in the return on total wealth. The systematic risk was estimated for a sample of wheat, corn, and soybean futures contracts over the period 1952 to 1967 and found to be close to zero in all three cases. Average realized holding period returns on the contracts over the same period were close to zero.

Decision rules for stabilization policy in an open economy are examined under alternative specifications of the balance of payments. In particular, distinction between interest-sensitive debt capital and equity capital which responds to an activity variable alters the comparative static properties of instrument assignment. Various aspects of dynamic adjustment are further investigated in a context in which time is endogenous and in which the decision process minimizes a criterion function. It is shown that traditional one-to-one pairing of targets and controls may be inferior to assignment of clusters of instruments to some targets for specified time intervals.

The article points out that a subsidy-in-kind, such as below-cost education provided by state universities, replaces more private consumption of the subsidized good that an equivalent money subsidy, such as a scholarship. Indeed, a subsidy-in-kind may reduce total consumption. Empirical estimates in the article indicate that in higher education (a) about three-fourths of government expenditures substitute for private expenditures, (b) this fraction has exceeded one in a recent period, (c) a substantial part of this government-private substitution is due to the in-kind form of government subsidies, and (d) there is less government-private substitution in enrollment than expenditures.

In this paper I discuss the economic (and other) determinants of the adverse effect of distance on migration, which is demonstrated by the negative distance elasticity of migration flows. These determinants are sorted and classified into two groups: (1) increasing (with distance) psychic cost and (2) diminishing (with distance) information. I further discuss how aging and education respectively influence the relative importance of these two groups. Using data on flows of migrants cross-classified by age and by education, I estimate the effect of age and education on the distance elasticity of migration. The statistical hypothesis that aging does not affect the distance elasticity whereas increasing education strongly diminishes the absolute value of the distance elasticity is accepted. The acceptance of this hypothesis, coupled with my theoretical consideration, implies that the adverse effect of distance on migration is basically a diminishing-information phenomena

In this paper I construct and analyze a simple mathematical model for the commercial exploitation of a natural animal population. The model takes into account the response of the population to harvesting pressure, the increasing harvesting costs associated with decreasing population levels, and the preference of the harvesters for present over future revenues. The principal conclusion of the analysis is that, depending on certain easily stated biological and economic conditions, extermination of the entire population may appear as the most attractive policy, even to an individual resource owner

Interrelated city-suburbs residential-location equations for middle- and upper-income-class families and for poor families are estimated using cross-sectional data on 87 large metropolitan areas in 1960. We find that residential-location decisions of middle- and upper-income-class families are determined, among other things, by the city-suburbs rent differentials, by fiscal surplus differentials, and (negatively) by the location of poor families; additional hypotheses concerning interactions with family income were suggested and statistically accepted. The location equations for the poor families involved cost and fiscal differentials and a proxy variable for employment opportunities.

A measure of agricultural research output in 75 wheat- and maize-growing countries was utilized to explain increases in yield per unit land in these crops over the period 1948-68. Several alternative specifications were tried, incorporating direct contribution of indigenous research as well as "borrowing" of outside knowledge. Statistical estimates are presented and their economic implications discussed.

Data drawn from the 1960 Survey of Consumer Expenditures are used to estimate price and income elasticities of the demand for hospitalization and physicians' services. The price elasticity ranges from -0.35 to -1.5 for prices ranging from 20 to 80 percent of the 1960 market price. The income elasticity ranges from 0.25 to 0.45 for incomes ranging from 4,000 to 10,000. The estimated demand function is used to calculate the cost of providing protection against the highly probable, small losses typically covered by health insurance policies. A family with an income of 7,000 paid 2.5 times the actuarial value of the loss to protect itself against a highly probable 110 loss.