The conditions under which transactors can use the market (repeat-purchase) mechanism of contract enforcement are examined. Increased price is shown to be a means of assuring contractual performance. A necessary and sufficient condition for performance is the existence of price sufficiently above salvageable production costs so that the nonperforming firm loses a discounted steam of rents on future sales which is greater than the wealth increase from nonperformance. This will generally imply a market price greater than the perfectly competitive price and rationalize investments in firm-specific assets. Advertising investments thereby become a positive indicator of likely performance.

Both economic theory and casual empirical observation of the U.S. economy suggest that spending propensities from temporary tax changes are smaller than those from permanent ones, but neither provides much guidance about the magnitude of this difference. This paper offers new empirical estimates of this difference and finds it to be quite substantial. The analysis is based on an amendment of the standard distributed lag version of the permanent income hypothesis that distinguishes temporary taxes from other income on the grounds that the former are "more transitory." This amendment, which is broadly consistent with rational expectations, leads to a nonlinear consumption function. Though the standard error is unavoidably large, the point estimate suggests that a temporary tax change is treated as a 50-50 blend of a normal income tax change and a pure windfall. Over a 1-year planning horizon, a temporary tax change is estimated to have only a little more than half the impact of a permanent tax change of equal magnitude, and a rebate is estimated to have only about 38 percent of the impact

This paper develops and tests a simple model for the determination of tariff and nontariff barriers to trade across industries within the United States, using 1970 trade data. We find that nontariff trade restrictions have supplemented tariff protection in the United States. Both tariff and nontariff trade restrictions are biased toward industries in which the United States has an apparent comparative disadvantage in world trade and away from industries in which consumer welfare losses from protection would be great. We also find substantial evidence that tariff and nontariff trade restrictions predominate in industries with very different market characteristics

This paper analyzes compensation schemes which pay according to an individual's ordinal rank in an organization rather than his output level. When workers are risk neutral, it is shown that wages based upon rank induce the same efficient allocation of resources as an incentive reward scheme based on individual output levels. Under some circumstances, risk-averse workers actually prefer to be paid on the basis of rank. In addition, if workers are heterogeneous inability, low-quality workers attempt to contaminate high-quality firms, resulting in adverse selection. However, if ability is known in advance, a competitive handicapping structure exists which allows all workers to compete efficiently in the same organization

This paper examines the controversy concerning the relative desirability of fixed versus flexible exchange rates by examining whether a country can achieve a smaller variance of domestic output around its full employment path operating under an exchange rate rule or under a money supply rule. The paper finds that neither policy will always dominate the other. However, it does find that if shocks in one market of the economy are large relative to shocks to other markets, then one type of rule can be shown to dominate the other

[The paper analyzes the role of current income in providing new information about future income and thus signalling changes in permanent income. Using time-series analysis to quantify the revision in permanent income induced by an innovation in the current income process, a structural econometric model of consumption is developed. The rejection of the joint rational expectations-permanent income hypothesis is both statistically and quantitatively significant. The paper also shows that the test of the rational expectations-permanent income hypothesis proposed by Hall is based on the reduced form of this structural model and reconciles Sargent's consumption paper with Hall's

This paper develops and estimates a model of the joint determination of the exchange rate, international reserves, and the rate of inflation under a crawling-peg system. The framework presented, which is an extension of previous work on the monetary approach, generates short-run deviations from purchasing power parity that occur simultaneously with movements in both international reserves and the exchange rate. The model is estimated by full-information maximum likelihood on the basis of quarterly data for Brazil

A price dispersion equation is tested with data from the German hyperinflation. The equation is derived from a version of Lucas's and Barro's partial information-localized market models. In this extension, different excess demand elasticities across commodities imply a testable dispersion equation, in which the explanatory variable is the magnitude of the unperceived money growth. In order to test this hypothesis a price dispersion series is constructed, and a measure of the unperceived part of money growth is estimated. The model receives support from the empirical analysis, although it is evident that unincluded variables have important effects on price dispersion.

This paper tests Mincer's minimum-wage model by estimating reduced-form wage and employment equations for both the covered and uncovered sectors in nine regions of the United States. As theory predicts, in regions with comparatively small covered-sector demand elasticities, the northern and midwestern regions, the uncovered-sector wage increases after a minimum-wage hike; and in regions with comparatively large demand elasticities, the southern and western regions, the uncovered-sector wage decreases. Because of data limitations the uncovered-sector employment effect could not be estimated sharply, and so its relationship to the covered-sector demand elasticity is weak