Knowledge that Transforms

This paper deals with a class of models of the demand for money that includes the Baumol-Tobin and other inventory-theoretic models as special cases. Among other things, the analysis shows that many supposedly robust comparative-statics propositions derived by earlier writers do not survive even modest generalization. More generally, the results of the paper strongly reinforce other recent research in indicating the need for a wholesale reconstruction of the microfoundations of contemporary monetary theory.

This paper derives an econometrically meaningful test of the Tiebout hypothesis and demonstrates that previous tests are inappropriate. The implications generated by two closely related models of voter-determined local fiscal variables and individual resident housing choices are compared. We demonstrate that when the Tiebout mechanism operates without interference, housing quantity and location choices are Pareto efficient, while they are not when frictions interfere with its operation. We show that the appropriate test requires joint estimation of a set of structural equations determining housing purchases and locational choices utilizing data for both median and nonmedian voters across metropolitan area jurisdictions.

Our tax system was designed for an economy with little or no inflation. The current paper shows that inflation causes capricious changes in the effective rate of tax on capital income and therefore in the real net rate of return that savers receive. This is not only a temporary disequilibrium effect but one which persists in steady-state equilibrium. Unlike earlier papers by Feldstein and by Green and Sheshinski, the current study recognizes that firms finance investment by both debt and equity in a ratio that depends on the tax rates and on the rate of inflation.

We examine the protective effect of a tariff in a small economy with uncertainty and a stock market in which shares of firms are traded. In a deterministic economy, the allocation of resources is governed by commodity prices; in our economy, it is governed by equity prices and is dependent on commodity prices only to the extent that they influence equity prices. We show that in the absence of international trade in securities a tariff need not protect the import competing sector. In the presence of international trade in securities, a tariff always protects the import competing sector.

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.

This paper constructs a model of trade in which an intermediate good is produced by an "Austrian" point-input-point-output process of variable duration while the finished good is produced instantaneously by labor alone. The rate of time preference is a function of the level of stationary consumption and the two countries differ in the rate at which they discount the future. It is shown that the less "impatient" country will export the time-intensive intermediate good and import the finished good, with both countries incompletely specialized and the rate of interest and real wage equalized.