Knowledge that Transforms

The paper describes an artificial economy in which firms in different sectors make inventions at different times but innovate simultaneously to take advantage of high aggregate demand. In turn, high demand results from simultaneous innovation in many sectors. The economy exhibits multiple cyclical equilibria, with entrepreneurs' expectations determining which equilibrium obtains. These equilibria are Pareto ranked, and the most profitable equilibrium need not be the most efficient. While an informed stabilization policy can sometimes raise welfare, if large booms are necessary to cover fixed costs of innovation, stabilization policy can stop all technological progress.

This paper examines a new possible explanation for the recent rejections of the life cycle-permanent income model of consumption: the treatment of seasonal fluctuations. The paper shows that when the seasonal fluctuations in consumption purchases are included in an analysis of the life cycle-permanent income model, there is no evidence in the aggregate data against the model. The estimates of the parameters of agents' utility functions obtained with seasonally unadjusted data are plausible, and the unadjusted data do not reject the overidentifying restrictions on the model.

A two-asset, intertemporal portfolio selection model is formulated incorporating proportional transaction costs. The demand for assets is shown to be sensitive to these costs. However, transaction costs have only a second-order effect on the liquidity premia implied by equilibrium asset returns: the derived utility is insensitive to deviations from the optimal portfolio proportions, and investors accommodate large transaction costs by drastically reducing the frequency and volume of trade. A single-period model with an appropriately chosen length of period does not imply the same liquidity premium as the intertemporal model because the appropriate length of the time period is asset specific.

The paper examines the path of final good price changes when a monopoly supplier of an intermediate good vertically integrates into a competitive, constant returns final good industry. I show that the price rises while the monopolist is taking over the downstream industry and then falls after downstream monopolization is complete. The relationship of these results to the existing literature on full forward integration is established.

The presence of distributional effects in macroeconomic equations is shown to coincide with nonlinearity in micro behavioral relationships. Parameters estimated with aggregate data, as in representative agent models, contain distributional biases that are not measurable using aggregate data alone. Tests for distributional effects and other measures of the extent of aggregation problems are derived using distributional data observed over time. Significant distributional effects are noted for a model of annual aggregate U.S. commodity expenditure data. A static model that accommodates individual heterogeneity is found to be statistically equivalent to a simply dynamic model that accommodates first-order autocorrelation.

In a corporation with many small owners, it may not pay any one of them to monitor the performance of the management. We explore a model in which the presence of a large minority shareholder provides a partial solution to this free-rider problem. The model sheds light on the following questions: Under what circumstances will we observe a tender offer as opposed to a proxy fight or an internal management shake-up? How strong are the forces pushing toward increasing concentration of ownership of a diffusely held firm? Why do corporate and personal investors commonly hold stock in the same firm, despite their disparate tax preferences?

According to the legal restrictions theory of the demand for money, characteristics such as denomination and negotiability of interest-bearing debt are what prevents it from being employed as a transactions medium. During the years 1915-27, the government of France used as a financing instrument securities that, by the legal restrictions theory, should have circulated in exchange. An experience by Eleanor Lansing Dulles, attempting to use one of these securities in a purchase, as well as other evidence, suggests that they did not.

The theoretical basis for measuring child costs is discussed, and detailed consideration is given to two straightforward procedures for calculation, Engel's food share method and Rothbarth's adult good method. Each of these methods embodies different definitions of child costs so that the same empirical evidence can generate quite different estimates depending on the method used. It is shown that true costs are generally overstated by Engel's method and understated by Rothbarth's procedure, although the latter, unlike the former, can provide a sensible starting point for cost measurement. Our estimates from Sri Lankan and Indonesian data suggest that children cost their parents about 30-40 percent of what they spend on themselves.

The paper emphasizes the use of accounting data in regulatory or procurement contracts when the supplier (1) has superior information about the cost of the project and (2) invests in cost reduction. The main result states that, under risk neutrality, the supplier announces an expected cost and is given an incentive contract linear in cost overruns. This (optimal) contract moves toward a fixed-price contract as the announced cost decreases. An investment choice is then introduced and the use of a rate-of-return regulation is studied.