In the 1970s there has been a noticeable labor productivity slowdown in Canada. In addition to contributions of such traditional variables as changes in capital intensity and quality of labor, this study quantifies contributions of higher energy and changing import prices to productivity changes. A Taylor series approximation to a restricted profit function representing the Canadian economy helps reveal that rising energy prices have reduced labor productivity by 0.53 percent per year after 1970 and that the underlying modified rates of technical progress in the 1960s and 1970s, having netted out price of energy—and import—effects, are not dissimilar.

The Cotton South has always lagged behind the rest of American agriculture in the use and development of large-scale machinery. This paper formalizes an idea often found in the historical literature in loosely specified form which argues that the institutional structure of the southern plantation economy caused this technological inertia. In particular, the Institutional Hypothesis argues that the annual labor contracts used to secure plantation labor discouraged partial mechanization and inventive activity by redirecting the impact of higher labor costs away from the development and adoption of labor saving machinery and toward the adoption of small unmechanizable tenancies. This hypothesis is modeled, and supporting evidence is presented. Its larger implications are also discussed.

This paper develops a method for inferring from observations on a group's collective expenditure whether a cooperative or competitive resource allocation process, or some mixture of the two, has occurred. The method will be applicable to a variety of situations from small collectives such as the family or groupings of nations collaborating in security or trade alliances, to collectives with large numbers. This method will be useful for identifying (1) whether observed outcomes have been efficient, (2) whether costs have been shared equitably, (3) what is the form of collaboration or competition, and (4) what is the degree of “publicness” of the collective good.

This paper examines the response of the term structure of interest rates to weekly money announcements. Estimated responses for both the pre- and post-October 1979 periods are first presented. Then, two competing hypotheses involving the policy anticipations and expected inflation effects are formally specified and compared with the estimated responses. Both hypotheses are found to be consistent with the responses, but they have sharply different implications about the Federal Reserve's short-run monetary policy. By exploiting these different implications, additional empirical results focusing directly on the money stock process support the policy anticipations hypothesis.