Knowledge that Transforms

A social choice procedure is developed for selecting an alternative from a finite set on the basis of paired-comparison voting. Ballot data are used to construct a lottery on the alternatives that is socially as preferred as every other lottery. The constructed lottery is then used to select a winner. An axiomatization of social preferences among lotteries that justifies the procedure is included. The procedure will always select a consensus majority alternative when one exists, and it will never select an alternative that is Pareto dominated by another alternative.

Economists have traditionally viewed the allocation of workers among jobs through the concept of comparative advantage. This paper investigates hierarchical production models which display an absence of comparative advantage, in order to demonstrate that for hierarchical production there is a second allocating factor which plays an important role. Two results are found. First, the allocation of workers among jobs tends to match high ability workers with positions which value ability highly. Second, despite the fact that the models display an absence of comparative advantage, i.e. the standard theoretical explanation for why wage distributions might be skewed, the models' wage distributions are skewed to the right relative to the underlying ability distributions.

Recent developments in the economics of information emphasize the informational content of prices. We examine the degree to which prices convey information on product quality to uninformed agents. Under perfect competition, we show that a rational expectations equilibrium may not exist. When an equilibrium does exist, the information on quality conveyed by prices depends on the shape of the average cost curves and the relative numbers of informed and uniformed agents.

In this paper we present and estimate an adjustment cost model of industry employment which takes explicit account of both expectations and aggregation over different labour types. The resulting model is subject to a large number of tests and is a highly robust representation of the data. Finally forecasts are produced for manufacturing employment up to 1990.

The natural growth rate of most renewable resource stocks is in part stochastic. This paper examines the implications of such ecological uncertainty for competitive equilibrium in a market with property rights. We show that stochastic fluctuations add a risk premium to the rate of return required to keep a unit of stock in situ, and we examine the effects of fluctuations on resource rent. Examples are used to show that extraction can increase, decrease, or be left unchanged as the variance of the fluctuations increases, depending on the extent of market "self-correction". Regulatory implications are also discussed.

This paper presents new identifiability conditions for the Cox proportional hazard model for duration data when unobserved person specific variables are present. We compare our conditions with those presented by Elbers and Ridder. We also present identifiability conditions for a rich class of parametric hazard models without regressor variables.

The preserving of flexibility when faced with uncertainty is a neglected aspect of behaviour under risk. Yet it is an important factor in decisions to hold liquid assets or delay irreversible investment. This paper formalizes the notion of flexibility in a sequential decision context, and relates its value to the amount of information an agent expects to receive. A rudimentary money demand model is developed embodying these ideas, and the history of flexibility as an economic concept is traced.

This paper considers the problem of estimating distributed lags in short panels. Though the N time series contained in a panel may allow for relatively precise estimates of identified lag coefficients, identification requires restrictions on the contribution of the unobserved pre-sample x's to the current values of y, and the shortness of panels focuses attention on this matter. We investigate two such restrictions. The first constrains the relationship between the presample and insample x's, while the second constrains the lag distribution itself. An example, which investigates empirically how to construct “capital stocks” for the analysis of rates of return, closes the paper.

This paper presents an experimental study of a computerized “posted-offer” pricing mechanism that captures many of the basic institutional features of retail exchange in the U.S. Posted-offer market performance is evaluated relative to “double-auction” market performance using two supply and demand designs. Subject experience with the trading mechanism is explicitly considered as an experimental treatment variable. The market data suggest that prices tend to be higher and efficiency lower under posted-offer pricing relative to double auction. However, the institutional effect appears to interact with other design conditions. When feasible, the predictive power of competitive, Nash, and limit-price theoretic equilibria are empirically evaluated.

This paper is an econometric examination of female fertility and labour-supply decisions. Based upon utility-maximizing choice, fertility and labour-supply demand functions are specified and estimated jointly with a wage-accumulation equation. A main contribution of the paper is the demonstration of a maximum-likelihood estimation method which avoids the main selectivity-bias problems in this area.