Knowledge that Transforms

America is a nation filled with guns and gunowners. Using the General Social Survey, we investigate who owns guns. Gunowners resemble neither criminals nor victims, although they do hunt. Waiting periods appear to have little effect on the overall level of gun ownership, but they do lower the propensity to own guns among people who have been arrested. Living around other gunowners increases gun ownership. Guns appear to be a substitute for the legal system, because gun ownership is highest among people who do not trust the government and where the availability of police is lowest. Guns also are associated with a general taste for violent retribution.

The populations of most of the worlds countries are growing older.... The rapidly growing populations of the elderly are putting unprecedented stresses on societies because new systems of financial support social support and health care have to be developed and implemented. I will focus on a particular research thrust namely demographic analyses of survival and longevity. (EXCERPT)

There are two reasons we expect moreconcentrated industries to have advantages over less-concentrated industries in playing the lobbying game.' One is that in a noncooperative setting, as the number firms rises, we expect the free-rider problem to become worse (this is the finding of Rodrik, 1986). The second is that we expect that the ability to maintain a cooperative outcome deteriorates as the number of firms in the industry rises. [The classic reference is Mancur Olson (1965); also, see Russell Hardin (1982) and Todd Sandler (1992) among others.] In contrast with the second intuition, this paper shows that there is no general presumption that maintaining cooperation becomes more difficult as the number of firms in the industry rises. The ability of an industry to overcome the free-rider problem is analyzed in a re-peated tariff lobbying game where cooperation may be maintained through the use of a simple trigger strategy.2 The difficulty of maintaining cooperation is measured by the critical value of the discount parameter. All values above this critical value are consistent with cooperation, and all values below the critical value imply that cheating will prevent maintenance of the cooperative outcome. There is no presumption that this critical value rises with the number of firms. A separate, but related, question involves asymptotic results. Standard intuition suggests that as industry structure approaches perfect competition, it becomes impossible to maintain cooperation. In the context of this paper, this intuition corresponds to the critical value of the discount factor converging to I as the number of firms increases to infinity. In the general case it is shown that the critical value of the discount parameter converges to a value less than 1 in the limit as the number of firms becomes arbitrarily large. If the actual discount parameter lies above this value, then cooperation may be maintained even with an infinite number of firms. Though the framework here is quite simple, it provides results which contrast sharply to our standard intuition about how industry structure affects the ability to maintain cooperation.' There are two ways to interpret the results of this paper. One is to assert that standard intuition is wrong, and that there is, in fact, no presumption that maintaining cooperation becomes more difficult as the number

The Central and East European (CEE) countries are completing the first decade of a dramatic transition from a centrally planned economic system to a market system. Although economic outcomes have been diverse, all CEE countries (except for the Czech Republic) have experienced rapidly rising and persistently high unemployment rates, which have been accompanied by long spells of unemployment. By contrast, in the Czech Republic the unemployment rate has remained low and unemployment spells have been short (Table 1). The unemployment crisis in the CEE countries has contributed to a political backlash as disenchanted voters often ousted the first reform governments after a few years. This experience underscores the importance of two questions. First, why has the unemployment problem in the Czech Republic been much less severe? Second, how can economies in transition strike a balance between (i) reducing government intervention and introducing market incentives, and (ii) providing an adequate social safety net that ensures public support for the transition? In addition to being of academic interest, answers to these questions are essential for policy makers in the CEE countries, in Western governments, and at international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

This paper re-examines the effect of asset ownership on investment decisions for a joint relationship in the absence of contracts on investment levels. It obtains some results which contradict findings by Sanford J. Grossman, Oliver D. Hart, and John Moore. In particular, it finds that the loss of ownership of an asset may increase the asset loser's investment incentive. The difference between this paper and those authors' papers stems from the different interpretations of the roles of the threat point and outside options in bargaining. This paper also clarifies the role of relationship-specific investments as a cause of integration. Copyright 1998 by American Economic Association.