Price and quantity data prove that Irish potatoes in the 1840s were not Giffen goods. Intertemporal trade‐offs required by the fact that a sizable fractiono of the potato crop is needed for seed crops can produce unusual market dynamics. The Irish experience is well described by a normal demand model in which a permanent decline in the productivity of seed potatoes was at first mistaken as a transitory crop failure. These mistakes provoked “oversaviong” of seed crop in a population in dire circumstances. With the benefit of hindsight, consumption of seed crop capital was warranted. Erroneous expecations of potato productivity by growers delayed necessary agricultural adjustments and contributed to the catastrophe later on.

The paper's main contribution is to provide a rational for advocacy. After observing that many organizations (corporations, judiciary, and the executive and legislative branches of government) use competition among enfranchised advocates of special interests to improve policy making, it argues that advocacy has two major benefits. First, the advocates' rewards closely track their pursuing several conflicting causes at one time. Second, advocacy enhances the integrity of decision making by creating strong incentives to appeal in case of an abusive decision. The paper also analyzes the costs of advocacy in terms of manipulation and garbling of information. It further shows that it may be costly for both the organization and interested parties themselves to let these parties plead their own causes instead of being represented. The paper concludes with two applications to comparative legal systems and to the organization of Congress and with suggestions for future research

The hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution India. Estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the Indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect, combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men, importantly underlies the expansion of female literary following the onset of the green revolution.

Before the opening of the Paris Bourse, traders place orders and indicative prices are set. This offers a laboratory to study empirically the tâtonnement process through which markets discover equilibrium prices. Since preopening orders can be revised or canceled before the opening, indicative prices could be noise. We test this against the hypothesis that preopening prices reflect learning.Early in the preopening the noise hypothesis is not rejected. As the opening gets closer, the informational content and efficiency of prices increase and the learning hypothesis is not rejected. We also propose a GMM‐based estimate of the speed of learning.

This paper embeds variable effort into a traditional two‐sector Heckscher‐Ohlin model of international competition. Effort enters a production function as total factor productivity, and on the assumption that effort does not affect capital depreciation, the capital cost savings from high‐effort operations are passed on to workers. The labor market thus offers a set of contracts with higher wages compensating for higher effort. This has implications for growth, openness, minimum wages, collective bargaining, public support of education, efficiency of state enterprises, the distribution of wealth, childbearing, and much more

The roles of the entitlements of the AFDC program and marital prospects in the fertility and marriage choices of young women are assessed in the context of a model incorporating heritable endowment heterogeneity, assortative mating, concern for child quality, and potential parental and public support alternatives. Estimates based on data describing the fertility and marital experience up to age 23 of the eight birth cohorts of women in the NLSY provide evidence that higher AFDC benefit levels and lower marital prospects induce young women to choose to have a child outside of marriage.

The pathogenesis of Theiler's murine encephalomyelitis virus (TMEV)-induced demyelinating disease is still controversial. Our hypothesis is that primary infection of oligodendrocytes (OLGs) is not a crucial event in the pathogenesis of demyelination in this model. In fact, it has been proposed that myelin may be destroyed, as an innocent bystander, following an antiviral delayed-type hypersensitivity (DTH) response. This hypothesis would not need widespread oligodendroglial infection, because virus present in other cells would be sufficient to trigger a DTH response. The present study demonstrates that cultured OLGs and astrocytes from susceptible strains of mice (SJL and DBA) and immortalized OLGs can be infected with TMEV in vitro. Infection of OLGs, however, is at very low levels and does not result in overt cytolytic effect. In contrast, infection of immortalized OLGs is very efficient and results in clear cytolysis. Because an important characteristic of DTH responses is the liberation of potentially injurious cytokines into adjacent tissues, we also examined the effects of mouse recombinant tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha), interleukin-1 alpha (IL-1 alpha), and interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) on cultured OLGs and immortalized OLGs. We found that TNF-alpha caused immortalized OLG cytotoxicity in a time- and dose-dependent manner. In contrast, no cytotoxicity was observed on primary OLGs with any of the above cytokines. To determine whether functional effects could be demonstrated on primary OLGs by either virus or cytokines, we measured mRNA expression of different myelin proteins in primary and immortalized OLGs exposed to virus or TNF-alpha. Neither the BeAn strain or the GDVII strain of TMEV interfered with myelin protein mRNA expression in primary OLGs, whereas GDVII virus dramatically reduced myelin OLG glycoprotein (MOG) mRNA in immortalized OLGs. Interestingly, although even high concentrations of TNF-alpha (10,000 U/ml) did not produce primary OLG cytotoxicity, they resulted in a significant reduction in mRNA for both myelin basic protein (MBP) and MOG in these cells. TNF-alpha (at 500 U/ml) also specifically reduced MOG mRNA in immortalized OLGs. Because immortalized OLGs are considered to be arrested at an early stage of maturation, our results suggest that immature OLGs are susceptible to both virus- and cytokine-dependent cytotoxicity, whereas mature OLGs are resistant to cytolysis by either TMEV or cytokines. TNF-alpha, however, is capable of reducing mRNA expression of myelin proteins in primary OLGs; therefore, it may participate in the induction of demyelination, as suggested by the DTH-mediated hypothesis.