Knowledge that Transforms

Models of giving have often been based on altruism. Examples include charity and intergenerational transfers. The literatures on both subjects have centered around neutrality hypotheses: charity is subject to complete crowding out, while intergenerational transfers are subject to Ricardian equivalence. This paper formally develops a model of giving in which altruism is not "pure." In particular, people are assumed to get a "warm glow" from giving. Contrary to the previous literature, this model generates identifiable comparative statics results that show that crowding out of charity is incomplete and that government debt will have Keynesian effects.

This paper argues that regulatory institutions in defense procurement are (and necessarily must be) organized to create prizes for innovation in the form of positive economic profit on production contracts. This has a number of important policy implications. The values of the prizes on 12 major aerospace projects are estimated using stock market data and shown to be large.

This paper incorporates rational expectations, full price flexibility, and currency substitution into the usual small-economy model, taking explicit account of inflation abroad. Not only will the steady-state terms of trade be affected by an increase in the rate of monetary expansion when the inflation rate abroad is assumed to be nonzero, but its dynamic path may also be different from the usual case in which inflation abroad is ignored. It has been shown that if the import demands are relatively inelastic, the terms of trade will undershoot their equilibrium value; if the import demands are elastic, the terms of trade will overshoot. The key to these diametrically opposite results is the degree of ultimate deterioration in the terms of trade, which, in turn, turn on the size of the two import demand elasticities.

Self-employment rates and incomes differ significantly by race. We show that these differentials arise in markets with consumer discrimination and incomplete information about the price of the good and the race of the seller. Equilibrium income distributions have two properties: mean black incomes are lower than mean white incomes, and the returns to ability are lower for black than for white sellers. Able blacks, therefore, are less likely to self-select into the self-employment sector than able whites. Using the 1980 census data, we find that observed racial differences in the self-employment income distributions are consistent with the theoretical predictions.

The main result of this paper is that the multiple equilibrium problem in mechanism design can be avoided in private-value models if agents do not use weakly dominated strategies in equilibrium. We show that in such settings, any incentive-compatible allocation rule can be made the unique equilibrium outcome to a mechanism. We derive a general necessary condition for unique implementation that implies that the positive result for private-value models applies with considerably less generality to common-value settings.

It is almost universally agreed that individuals face incomplete insurance markets and cannot perfectly insure against the idiosyncratic risk. In this paper simple general equilibrium models with incomplete insurance markets are examined in order to assess the impact of imperfect insurance on the magnitude of the welfare costs of business cycles. Two versions of incomplete insurance markets are considered, and certain statistical properties of the equilibrium stochastic processes in these environments are compared with those of a perfect insurance economy.