The classical economists engaged in a vigorous debate over whether Britain's tariff reductions in the 1840s should be made contingent on tariff liberalization abroad. Some, notably Robert Torrens, believed that a unilateral tariff reduction would so deteriorate British terms of trade as to outweigh efficiency gains and make the country worse off. In this paper, Britain's foreign trade elasticities are estimated for this period in a simultaneous equation model. They are used in a simple general equilibrium model that explicitly takes the terms of trade into account to assess the welfare impact of tariff reductions. The results indicate that Britain would have been made worse off from a unilateral tariff reduction. However, foreign tariff reductions mitigated the terms of trade deterioration and could easily have made Britain better off.
In this paper, the characteristics model of Lancaster is reconsidered. It is shown by example that equilibrium prices need not be linearly decomposable. It does follow that equilibrium prices must be a convex function of characteristics, however. Further, it is shown that this fact holds independent of the form of firm competition (e.g., perfect or monopolistic). Finally, the predictions of the theory are discussed in the context of two empirical examples.
This paper contributes a new element to the explanation of the Gibson paradox, the puzzling correlation between interest rates and the price level seen during the gold standard period. A shock that raises the underlying real rate of return in the economy reduces the equilibrium relative price of gold and, with the nominal price of gold pegged by the authorities, must raise the price level. The mechanism involves the allocation of gold between monetary and nonmonetary uses. Our explanation helps to resolve some important anomalies in previous work and is supported by empirical evidence along a number of dimensions.
[A market composed of pairwise trading under incomplete information is modeled in order to analyze how resources are allocated among competing uses when information about trade gains is incomplete. Contrary to the results from studying a single such trade, sufficient homogeneity across potential trades guarantees that efficiency obtains. This is analogous to simple first-price auctions with homogeneous bidders, where bidders have a common bid function and, as a result, the high bidder also places the highest value on the auctioned object. With enough symmetry, the decentralized bilateral trades in the present model occur as if they were made in a first-price auction that occurs through time. The robustness of the efficiency result to heterogeneities among agents and to nontrivial search intensity decisions is then considered.]
This article examines interactions between markets and state commercial planning in the context of China's agricultural sector. It begins with a discussion of recent trends in agricultural planning and commerce in China and then presents a theoretical model that analyzes the way that a mixed commercial system of the sort observed in China functions. The theoretical analysis suggests that a mixed system is sustainable and can have desirable efficiency and distributional effects. Markets, however, limit the range of sustainable plans, and in the presence of markets, state planning may no longer directly influence production and consumption behavior.
In this paper we contrast panics and information-based bank runs in an effort to provide a robust and empirically plausible model of how bank runs are triggered. The model of information-based runs is characterized by two-sided asymmetric information: the bank cannot observe the true liquidity needs of the depositors while depositors are asymmetrically informed about bank asset quality. We also examine the relative degrees of risk sharing provided by bank deposit contracts and traded equity contracts. We show that the choice of deposit or equity depends on the attributes of and information about the underlying investment returns.
[This paper considers two questions: (i) what is the purpose of legal restrictions intended to separate "money" from "credit markets," and (ii) is such a separation desirable? It is argued that historical legal restrictions meant to achieve such a separation were designed to preclude the occurrence of sunspot equilibria. It is also shown that a coherent model can be constructed in which sunspot equilibria exist in the absence of legal restrictions, but not if money and credit markets are separated. Nevertheless, there is no obvious welfare justification for such a separation.]
[When changing jobs is costly, efficient employment contracts usually fail to compensate workers for the effects of posthiring events and decisions. Then, when there are executives and managers with authority to make discretionary decisions, affected employees will be led to waste valuable time trying to influence their decisions. Efficient organization design counters this tendency by limiting the discretion of decisions makers, especially for those decisions that have large distributional consequences but that are otherwise of little consequence to the organization.]
A self-interest explanation is presented for opposition by some farm groups to futures markets. During the twenties and thirties political opposition to futures markets was greater in the grain-producing states. The opposition was centered in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and a few other states. The line elevator companies were prominent in these states and not others and used futures prices to facilitate a buying cartel. Futures prices were used to derive a suggested buying price for elevator purchases in each local market. The political opposition to futures by farmers was designed to raise the cost of operating local cartels. Political opposition was greater and gross profit margins of elevators were higher in states with line elevators.