Thomas P. Frazier, Matthew S. Goldberg, Thomas R. Gulledge, Jr., Department of Defense Profit Policy and Capital Investment in the Military Aircraft Industry, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 74, No. 3 (Aug., 1992), pp. 394-403

Reviews the book `The Institute of Internal Auditors: 50 Years of Progress Through Sharing,' by Dale Flesher.

Reviews the book "Specifying and Diagnostically Testing Econometric Models," by Houston H. Stokes.

Reviews the book `Corporate Lease Analysis: A Guide to Concepts and Evaluation,' by Bennie H. Nunnally Jr., D. Anthony Plath and Helene W. Johns.

This paper exploits a newly developed data set to investigate recent changes in the international distribution of industrial pollution. In particular, the authors examine three issues: (1) the relationship between the toxic intensity of industrial production and the level of economic development, (2) the impact of OECD environmental regulation on global changes in toxic intensity, and (3) the relationship between trade policy and the toxic intensity of industrial production in LDC's. 10 refs.

In models of asymmetric information, possession of private information leads to rents for the possessors. This induces mechanism designers to distort away from efficiency. The authors show that this is an artifact of the presumption that information is independently distributed. Rent extraction in a large class of mechanism design games is analyzed, and a necessary and sufficient condition for arbitrarily small rents to private information is provided. Additionally, the two-person bargaining game is shown to have an efficient solution under first-order stochastic dominance and a hazard rate condition. Similar conditions allow full rent extraction in Milgrom-Weber auctions.

This paper presents an economic analysis of religious behavior that accounts for the continuing success of groups with strange requirements and seemingly inefficient prohibitions. The analysis does not presuppose any special motives for religious activity. Rather, religion is modeled as a club good that displays positive returns to "participatory crowding." The analysis demonstrates that efficient religions with perfectly rational members may benefit from stigma, self-sacrifice, and bizarre behavioral restrictions. The model also addresses sacrifice in nonreligious "social clubs": fraternities, communes, political parties, work groups, and families.