Market theorists assume that expected utility predicts preferences at the market level even as evidence mounts that it predicts poorly at the individual level. The arguments for better‐performing markets are grounded in the assumption that individuals respond to the competition of the market. The objective of this study is to test empirically the validity of those assumptions using the betweenness property of expected utility. I conclude that expected utility does indeed predict better in markets, but analyses suggest that improved performance may be due to the statistical role played by markets introduced by market price selection rules.

Equilibrium models of real exchange rate determination in the presence of transactions costs imply a nonlinear adjustment process toward purchasing power parity (PPP). Conventional cointegration tests, which ignore the effect of transactions costs, may be biased against the long-run PPP hypothesis. The authors' results, using both monthly data for the interwar period and annual data spanning two countries, clearly reject the linear framework in favor of an exponential smooth transition autoregressive process. The systematic pattern in the estimates of the nonlinear models provides strong evidence of mean-reverting behavior for PPP deviations and helps explain the mixed results of previous studies.

This paper examines the claim that expansion of the voting franchise has been an important factor in the growth of government. State government spending and state and local spending are explained using a panel of 46 states for 1950-88. Elimination of poll taxes and literacy tests led to higher turnout, particularly among the poor, and a poorer pivotal voter. As predicted, we find that these changes, a fall in the income of voters relative to state income, and the ouster of Republicans from state government led to a sharp rise in welfare spending but no change in other spending.

This paper examines the claim that expansion of the voting franchise has been an important factor in the growth of government. State government spending and state and local spending are explained using a panel of 46 states for 1950-88. Elimination of poll taxes and literacy tests led to higher turnout, particularly among the poor, and a poorer pivotal voter. As predicted, we find that these changes, a fall in the income of voters relative to state income, and the ouster of Republicans from state government led to a sharp rise in welfare spending but no change in other spending.

It is well known that comparative performance information can enhance efficiency in static principal-agent relationships by improving the trade-off between insurance and incentives in the design of explicit contracts. In dynamic settings, however, there may be implicit as well as explicit incentives, for example, managerial career concerns and the ratchet effects in regulation. The authors show that the dynamic effects of comparative performance information on implicit incentives can either reinforce or oppose the familiar (static) insurance effect and in either case can be more important for efficiency. The overall welfare effects of comparative performance information are thus ambiguous and can be characterized in terms of the underlying information structure.

This paper considers the design of an optimal unemployment insurance system. The problem is modeled as a repeated principalagent problem involving a risk‐averse agent‐the unemployed worker‐and a risk‐neutral principal, which cannot monitor the agent's search effort. The optimal long‐term contract subject to the associated incentive constraints is characterized. This contract involves a replacement ratio that decreases throughout the unemployment spell and a wage tax after reemployment that, under some mild regularity conditions, increases with the lenght of the unemployment spell. Some numerical results are presented that suggest that the gains from switching to this optimal unemployment insurance scheme could be quite large. The performance of this optimal contract is also compared to alternative liquidity provision mechanisms.