Who should enforce laws or contracts: judges or regulators? Many Coasians, though not Coase himself, advocate judicial enforcement. We show that the incentives facing judges and regulators crucially shape this choice. We then compare the regulation of financial markets in Poland and the Czech Republic in the 1990s. In Poland, strict enforcement of the securities law by a highly motivated regulator was associated with a rapidly developing stock market. In the Czech Republic, hands-off regulation was associated with a moribund stock market.

We examine the optimal design of contracts when an agent is privately informed about his wealth, his ability, and his effort supply. We find that the agent's wealth and ability act as perfect complements in determining the power of the incentive scheme under which he operates. Only if his ability and his wealth both increase can an agent be assured of operating under a more powerful scheme. Consequently, severe under-utilization of wealth and ability arise in equilibrium.

Until the middle of the 1970's, regulations constrained banks' ability to enter new markets. Over the subsequent 25 years, states gradually lifted these restrictions. This paper tests whether rents fostered by regulation were shared with labor, and whether firms were discriminating by sharing these rents disproportionately with male workers. We find that average compensation and average wages for banking employees fell after states deregulated. Male wages fell by about 12 percent after deregulation, whereas women's wages fell by only 3 percent, suggesting that rents were shared mainly with men. Women's share of employment in managerial positions also increased following deregulation.

Using confidential firm-level panel data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, we examine how the bilateral trade flows of U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) and their Canadian affiliates responded to U.S.-Canadian tariff reductions from 1983 to 1992. We find that Canadian affiliate sales to the United States are negatively correlated with Canadian tariffs, but U.S. parent sales to Canadian affiliates have little association with Canadian tariffs. These results contradict the notion that Canadian tariff reductions would lead to a ‘hollowing out’ of Canadian manufacturing. We also find substantial heterogeneity in MNC responses to tariff changes within narrowly defined manufacturing industries. Overall, bilateral trade liberalization is trade-creating, as U.S. MNCs integrated their North American production such that Canadian affiliates increased sales to the United States and reduced domestic sales.

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics by Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried. Published in volume 91, issue 2, pages 509-511 of American Economic Review, May 2001

This paper introduces a new model of exchange: networks, rather than markets, of buyers and sellers. It begins with the empirically motivated premise that a buyer and seller must have a relationship, a “link,” to exchange goods. Networks—buyers, sellers, and the pattern of links connecting them—are common exchange environments. This paper develops a methodology to study network structures and explains why agents may form networks. In a model that captures characteristics of a variety of industries, the paper shows that buyers and sellers, acting strategically in their own self-interests, can form the network structures that maximize overall welfare.

In this paper we analyze the impact of the Internet on the performance of the economy and the standard of living of average Americans. Our analyses illustrate that even though the stock market’s speculative bubble has burst, the Internet will continue to have a significant impact on old economy industries and as a result generate real benefits for the overall economy.

This study examines novice auditors' knowledge acquisition. I investigate whether low-cost, informal training interventions improve knowledge acquisition in complex auditing tasks. I designed an experiment that tests the effect of two alternative training approaches on audit judgment performance: explanatory feedback (a replication and extension of Bonner and Walker [1994]), and self-explanation of the rationale underlying a judgment of reasonableness. The results suggest that each approach promotes procedural knowledge acquisition, and combining the two approaches provides more benefit than either approach alone. The effectiveness of the self-explanation approach is primarily attributable to the learner's level of reasoning. Adding explanatory feedback to self-explanations has no incremental effect after controlling for the effect of the learner's reasoning. The paper discusses the implications of these results for the design of audit training environments.

Economists are as perplexed as anyone by the behavior of the stock market. Figure 1 shows a broad measure of stock-market value in relation to GDP from 1947 through 2000. In addition to saw-tooth movements including the contraction in late 2000, the value of the stock market has large, low-frequency swings, moving upward from 1950 to 1965, then downward to 1982, and upward until early 2000. I entertain the hypothesis that these large movements are the result of rational (if not accurate) appraisal of the cash likely to be received by shareholders in the future. The hypothesis receives some support from work by financial economists showing that irrational markets create profit opportunities for active traders and that passive traders consistently earn higher returns. Most of my discussion will be complementary to the work of financial economists—I will look at the fundamentals underlying stock-market values. The lecture considers three potential contributors to the big movements shown in Figure 1:

This study assesses five common explanations for the large decline in U.S. total factor productivity (TFP) during the Great Depression: changes in capacity utilization, factor input quality, and production composition; labor hoarding; and increasing returns to scale. The study finds that these factors explain less than onethird of the 18 percent TFP decline between 1929 and 1933. The rest of the decline remains unexplained. The study offers a potential explanation: declines in organization capital, the knowledge firms use to organize production, caused by breakdowns in relationships between firms and their suppliers, for example. As some firms failed during the Depression, efficiency in surviving firms decreased; managers had to shift time away from production in order to establish new relationships, and firms had to shift to unfamiliar technologies that initially were operated inefficiently. This article originally appeared in the American Economic Review. © 2001 by the American Economic Association. The views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Federal