Knowledge that Transforms

This paper is an analysis of the effects of anticipations of government sales policies on the real price of gold. Although the risk of a future government gold auction depresses the price, it also causes the price to rise in percentage terms faster than the real rate of interest and at an increasing rate. Even risk-neutral investors require this rate of return as inducement to hold gold in the face of the asymmetric risk of a price collapse. Announcements making a government auction more probable cause a sudden drop in the price. Government attempts to peg the price or to defend a price ceiling with sales from its stockpile must result eventually in a sudden attack by speculators.

Recent changes in campaign finance legislation (passed by a heavily Democratic Congress) are considered within the context of the two competing theories of regulation, the "public-interest" theory and the economic theory of regulation. Empirical evidence is presented in support of the economic theory's explanation for these major regulatory changes in the political process. The evidence suggests that these changes were highly beneficial to the Democratic party and that they were instrumental in Jimmy Carter's defeat of Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election.

We argue that the most commonly used measures of natural resource scarcity are deficient. The discussion begins with some general comments on natural resource scarcity, then turns to a description and evaluation of each of the major scarcity indices: unit cost, product output prices, and rental rates. Rental rates or a useful proxy, marginal discovery costs, are preferred over the rival measures. But there are important instances where good scarcity indicators may be entirely absent.

[The effects of an unexpected change in income taxes are studied in a model with full rational expectations. In the short run, aggregate supply is quite price elastic because commitments to pay predetermined wages are made 1 or more years in advance. The model also recognizes the limited response of investment to unexpected developments in the short run. The paper finds that much of the effect of unexpected tax policy operates through inflationary expectations--an economy with rational expectations is more responsive to tax changes than is one with naive expectations.]

In this paper the issues raised in the turn-of-the-century American debate over the quantity theory of money are examined. J. Laurence Laughlin of Chicago,the leading antiquantity theorist, provoked the controversy with theoretical and empirical criticisms of the quantity theory, while Irving Fisher emerged as the chief defender of the monetary orthodoxy. Laughlin argued that issues of convertible paper money would not raise prices or the money supply but would instead lead to losses of monetary gold. His position was regarded as incompatible with the classical neutrality-of-money theorem. To identify the fundamental sources of disagreement between Laughlin and the quantity theorists, the neutrality-of-money proposition is decomposed into two components the neutrality proposition per se and the assumed causal role of money.

A constraint on a decision variable is normally thought to be binding only if it prevents that variable from taking on its unrestricted current equilibrium value. This paper establishes that this is not true when decisions are intertemporally related. In such a decision-making environment, imposing a price ceiling, for example, which is greater than the current equilibrium price can be binding in that it will alter current price. Likewise, the removal of a price ceiling which exceeds current price can result in a change in that price. Among other things, this result casts doubt on the widespread view that price ceilings on petroleum products are not binding because current prices are less than the ceilings.

When the quality of a good varies, quantity in physical units may be a very misleading measure of total consumption. In this paper it is argued that differences in quality are a distinguishing feature of the market for physicians' services. We develop a model to analyze properties of demand functions for the quantity and quality of physicians' services and apply the model to study the demand for pediatric care--physicians' services rendered to children. The theoretical model of quantity-quality substitution provides a framework for demand analysis whenever the market for a good is distinguished by a quality component.

Analysis of longitudinal earning data indicates higher earnings growth for scientists of the same experience but more recent vintage. Theoretical justification for such a relation is suggested, and the implied biases in cross-section data are noted. Because of a basic identification problem, an alternative interpretation, time-experience interaction, is also considered. The general conclusion is that earning growth is not uniform or neutral. There is no simple mechanical method by which lifetime profiles can be inferred from single cross-section data.

The problem of optimal exchange intervention is approached using the techniques derived in the "targets, instruments, and indicators" literature. The optimal exchange-rate policy is one of permitting the appropriate degree of exchange-rate flexibility rather than one of complete fixity or complete flexibility of the exchange rate. Although the problem of the optimal exchange-rate regime has been analyzed in these terms before, criteria previously employed, emphasizing the geographical or functional location of disturbances, are seen to be inappropriate for a portfolio balance model with some degree of capital mobility.