Knowledge that Transforms

This paper exploits the variation in the legal minimum working age across states in 1920 America in order to identify households' labor supply responses to exogenous changes in children's labor force participation. Using micro data on urban households from the U.S. Census, I find evidence that as a child moves to the labor market his siblings are less likely to work and more likely to attend school. I find no significant effect on parents' labor supply.

This paper describes how wealth inequality may distort public resource allocation. A government seeks to allocate limited resources to productive sectors, but sectoral productivity is privately known by agents with vested interests in those sectors. They lobby the government for preferential treatment. The government—even if it honestly seeks to maximize economic efficiency—may be confounded by the possibility that both high wealth and true economic desirability create loud lobbies. Broadly speaking, both poorer economies and unequal economies display greater public misallocation. The paper warns against the conventional wisdom that this is so because such governments are more “corrupt.”

In spite of the inexorable march of democracy around the globe, just how democratic institutions a¤ect human well-being is open to debate. The evidence that democracy promotes prosperity is neither strong nor robust. Moreover which aspects of policy making and human well-being are promoted by

Yeon-Koo Che and Ian Gale (1998) studied the impact of imposing a cap on lobbying expenditures. They showed that a cap may lead to (1) greater expected aggregate expenditures and (2) a less efficient allocation of a political prize. In their comment, Todd Kaplan and David Wettstein (2005) show that if the cap is not rigid (i.e., its effect on the cost of lobbying is continuous) it has no effect.

A wide range of costly government policies are designed to extend citizens ’ lives and to reduce the risk of premature death. Using economic reasoning, one can evaluate such policies on the basis of efficiency. Life-saving policies pass a cost-benefit test if and only if their costs fall below the beneficiaries ’ willingness-to-pay for the reduced fatality risk (W. Kip Viscusi, 1993). Some government agencies have now adopted this standard for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of various life-saving policies (Viscusi, 1993; Jim Holt, 2004). One important case of government tradeoffs between dollars and fatalities is military procurement of armored vehicles. Troop-intensive units, while relatively inexpensive, place large numbers of soldiers ’ lives at risk. By replacing some troop-intensive units with tank-intensive units, an army can achieve the same level of mission accomplishment as it did before, but with fewer fatalities. Doing so, however, requires that the government make costly capital purchases. Military policymakers have known about the usefulness of armored vehicles in reducing fatalities since their initial use in World War I (J.F.C. Fuller, 1928; B.H. Liddell Hart, 1925). This issue also motivates contemporary discussions regarding vehicle procurement in Iraq (Lisa

Using data on prices, production, and exports, we are able to identify marginal costs as well as the effectiveness of the Norwegian cement industry cartel. We find that our marginal cost estimates are very much in line with the detailed cost accounting data. We show that the cement cartel has been ineffective because the sharing rule induces “overproduction” and exporting below marginal costs. It is consumers — not firms — who benefit from the sharing rule. The ineffectiveness of the cartel was becoming so large that domestic welfare of a merger to monopoly would be positive around 1968, which is when the merger actually took place! We also show that competition would have resulted in even higher welfare gains over the entire sample.

Exploiting differences across U.S. states, this paper demonstrates that there is a tight link between higher education policies, past enrollment rates, and recent changes in the college wage premium among labor market entrants. The analysis reveals, however, that this relationship is much weaker in states with high private enrollment rates, high levels of interstate mobility, or interstate trade. The within-state estimates of the own-cohort relative supply effect shed some light on the extent to which the U.S. labor market can be characterized as a single national market or a collection of state-specific labor markets.

It has long been recognized that the media play an essential role in government accountability. Even in the absence of censorship, however, the government may influence news content by maintaining a “cozy” relationship with the media. This paper develops a model of democratic politics in which media capture is endogenous. The model offers insights into the features of the media market that determine the ability of the government to exercise such capture and hence to influence political outcomes.

Volume 2 of A History of the Federal Reserve covers mainly the years of inflation and disinflation, followed by a return to what is now regarded as relatively low inflation. It treats four questions: Why did inflation start? Why did it continue for 15 or more years, from 1965 to about 1982? Why did it end? Why did it not return? In this paper, I give an overview of the material that I consider in much greater detail in my book

Housing, Credit Constraints, and Macro Stability: The Secondary Mortgage Market and Reduced Cyclicality of Residential Investment by Joe Peek and James A. Wilcox. Published in volume 96, issue 2, pages 135-140 of American Economic Review, May 2006