This paper reports on interesting changes in markdown pricing practices over time and differences in the pricing within a product line. The price discrimination and the uncertainty hypotheses appear to better explain the data than the peak load hypothesis. Fashion has become more important over time and appears to explain the greater seasonal variation in retail apparel prices in recent years. Differences in uncertainty also explains differences in the pricing of different types of men's dress shirts.

Estimates of the effect of college selectivity on earnings may be biased because elite colleges admit students, in part, based on characteristics that are related to future earnings. We matched students who applied to, and were accepted by, similar colleges to try to eliminate this bias. Using the College and Beyond data set and National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972, we find that students who attended more selective colleges earned about the same as students of seemingly comparable ability who attended less selective schools. Children from low-income families, however, earned more if they attended selective colleges.

This paper models interactions between a party with anticipatory emotions and a party who responds strategically to those emotions, a situation that is common in many health, political, employment, and personal settings. An “agent” has information with both decision-making value and emotional implications for an uninformed “principal” whose utility she wants to maximize. If she cannot directly reveal her information, to increase the principal's anticipatory utility she distorts instrumental decisions toward the action associated with good news. But because anticipatory utility derives from beliefs about instrumental outcomes, undistorted actions would yield higher ex ante total and anticipatory utility. If the agent can certifiably convey her information, she does so for good news, but unless this leads the principal to make a very costly mistake, to shelter his feelings she pretends to be uninformed when the news is bad.

A club's majority rule defines the number of members that must approve a policy proposed to replace the status quo. Since the majority rule thus dictates the extent to which winners must compensate losers, it also determines the incentives to invest in order to become a winner of anticipated projects. If the required majority is large, members invest too little because of a holdup problem; if it is small, members invest too much in order to become a member of the majority coalition. To balance these opposing forces, the majority rule should increase in the project's value and the club's enforcement capacity but decrease in the heterogeneity in preferences. Externalities can be internalized by adjusting the rule. With heterogeneity in size or initial conditions, votes should be appropriately weighted or double majorities required. Copyright (c) 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This paper documents changing inequality in employer-provided fringe benefits in the United States using much more comprehensive data than previously available. Inequality growth in broader measures of compensation slightly exceeds wage inequality growth over the 1981–1997 period. Employer costs due to paid leave, pensions, and health insurance fell for low wage labor and rose for high wage labor over this period. The findings suggest income effects as a contributory factor in the relative decline of fringe benefits among low wage workers.

The Incidence of Sales Taxes: A Note on Methodology Get access Benjamin Higgins Benjamin Higgins Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 54, Issue 4_Part_1, August 1940, Pages 665–672, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/54.4_Part_1.665 Published: 01 August 1940

Journal Article Premature Abandonment and the Flow of Investment Get access Benjamin Caplan Benjamin Caplan Ohio State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 54, Issue 1_Part_1, November 1939, Pages 152–157, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/54.1_Part_1.152 Published: 01 November 1939

An Eighteenth Century Record of the Evils of Depreciation B. Greenleaf B. Greenleaf Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 10, Issue 2, January 1896, Pages 243–246, https://doi.org/10.2307/1882384 Published: 01 January 1896

Major long-run swings in the U. S. stock market over the past century are broadly consistent with a model driven by changes in current and expected future dividends in which investors must estimate the time-varying long-run dividend growth rate. Such an estimated long-run growth rate resembles a long distributed lag on past dividend growth, and is highly correlated with the level of dividends. Prices therefore respond more than proportionately to long-run movements in dividends. The time-varying component of dividend growth need not be detectable in the dividend data for it to have large effects on stock prices.

We examine interest and inflation rates from 1879 to 1913. Deflation prior to 1896 was followed by inflation. Average U. S. inflation was 3.1 percentage points higher in the years after 1896, yet nominal interest rates were no higher after 1896. This nonadjustment of nominal rates would be consistent with rational expectations if inflation was not forecastable, and indeed univariate tests show little sign of serial correlation. But gold production does forecast inflation. The relationship between mining and inflation was such that expected inflation should have risen 300 basis points between 1890 and 1910. We consider explanations of this failure to foresee the shift in inflation after 1896 and conclude that it is not persuasive evidence that investors ignored relevant information, but does suggest great uncertainty about the appropriate model for analyzing the economy.