Governments sometimes impose price controls and nonprice rationing-by-queuing. Profit-seeking firms occasionally ration by putting their customers on “allocation.” Following Barzel [1974] and Deacon and Sonstelie [1985], we take the decision to ration as a given and analyze it, employing standard microeconomics and applied welfare economics. This paper adds to the literature by focusing on optimally rationing a good across markets. Further, we estimate the actual welfare cost of improper allocation across markets in the U. S. gasoline crises of 1973–1974 and 1979.

This paper models effects of short-sale constraints on the speed of adjustment (to private information) of security prices. Constraints eliminate some informative trades, but do not bias prices upward. Prohibiting traders from shorting reduces the adjustment speed of prices to private information, especially to bad news. Non-prohibitive costs can have the reverse effect, but this is unlikely. Implications are developed about return distributions on information announcement dates. Periods of inactive trade are shown to impart a downward bias to measured returns. An unexpected increase in the short-interest of a stock is shown to be bad news.

Ralph M. Bradburd, Richard E. Caves, Transaction-Cost Influences on the Adjustment of Industries' Prices and Outputs, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Nov., 1987), pp. 575-583

Metadata only record

Temporary labor migration from five countries to South Africa's mines is examined. Emigration (a) diminishes domestic crop production in the short run; (b) enhances crop productivity and cattle accumulation through invested remittances in the long run; (c) increases domestic plantation wages. Conflicting interests thus exist between employers in the sending countries and in the mines. State intervention adopted in the sending countries includes forced labor, emigration quotas, and compulsory population relocation.

[The professional auditing literature identifies the need to evaluate a client's control environment prior to the auditor's design of compliance tests. This study seeks to: (1) identify client attributes that adequately describe a client's control environment; (2) investigate auditors' perceptions of the importance of these attributes on actual engagements; (3) highlight the contextual factors that condition the importance ratings of the attributes; and (4) ascertain the audit team member responsible for evaluating the various attributes. This study identified 48 client attributes that appear to serve as cues for auditors' control environment evaluations. The reported levels of importance for certain attributes differed across auditors. It was found that audit firm affiliation, auditor rank, audit office specialization, the client's management structure, and the client's total assets exhibited significant associations with auditors' ratings. In addition, it was found that seniors were responsible for evaluating most of the control environment attributes.]

This paper extends the simple errors-in-variable bound to the setting of systems of equations. Both diagonal and nondiagonal measurement error covariance matrices are considered. In the nondiagonal case, the analogue of the simple errors-in-variable interval of estimates is an ellipsoid with diagonal equal to the line segment connecting the direct least squares with a two-stage least squares estimate. For the diagonal case, the set of estimates under some conditions must lie within the convex hull of 2k points.