The paper develops an agency-theoretic approach to interest-group politics and shows the following: (1) the organizational response to the possibility of regulatory agency politics is to reduce the stakes interest groups have in regulation. (2) The threat of producer protection leads to low-powered incentive schemes for regulated firms. (3) Consumer politics may induce uniform pricing by a multiproduct firm. (4) An interest group has more power when its interest lies in inefficient rather than efficient regulation, where inefficiency is measured by the degree of informational asymmetry between the regulated industry and the political principal (Congress).

[An example is given of a sequence of labor managed economies with decreasing efficiency sizes for which a free entry Cournot equilibrium fails to exist.]

In this paper we analyze the solutions of linear econometric models with rational expectations. More precisely, we describe in detail the set of all the solutions; in particular this set is shown to be much larger than the sets previously considered. We also study various criteria of selection in this set of solutions and we examine to what extent these criteria redtiuce the set of the solutions.

[In this paper we consider the problem of the existence of a well-defined reduced form in the context of piecewise linear models. We give a general theorem which provides necessary and sufficient conditions, called coherency conditions, for such an existence. This result is applied to various kinds of models: self-selectivity models, simultaneous equation probit and tobit models, multimarkets disequilibrium models.]

This paper brings some empirical evidence to the construction of a more disaggregated view of disequilibrium. Individual data on firms collected by INSEE through periodic Business Surveys are used to construct the distribution of firms over the four possible disequilibrium regimes. Then the behavior of this distribution over time is analyzed by estimating dynamic conditional logit models on panel data.

For many years, social scientists have been interested in obtaining testable definitions of causality (Granger 1969, Sims 1972). Recent works include those of Chamberlain (1982) and Florens and Mouchart (1982). The present paper first clarifies the results of these latter papers by considering a unifying definition of noncausality. Then, log-likelihood ratio (LR) tests for noncausality are derived for qualitative panel data under the minimal assumption that one series is Markov. LR tests for the Markov property are also obtained. Both test statistics have closed forms. These tests thus provide a readily applicable procedure for testing noncausality on qualitative panel data. Finally, the tests are applied to French Business Survey data in order to test the hypothesis that price changes from period to period are strictly exogenous to disequilibria appearing within periods.

This paper considers the econometric problems raised by multi-market disequilibrium models. It uses a specification which is derived from general disequilibrium theory and, therefore, provides a first bridge between the economic theory approach and the econometric theory approach of disequilibrium. The model is piecewise linear; the problem of the existence of a reduced form, which is a crucial issue in nonlinear models, is solved. Limited information estimators as well as full information estimators are proposed; a simple numerical algorithm is given for the computation of a FIML estimator.