This paper analyzes the optimality of the one share-one vote rule. We focus on takeover bids as a mechanism for allocating control. We assume two types of control benefits — benefits to security holders and private benefits to the controlling party. One share-one vote maximizes the importance of benefits to securityholders relative to benefits to the controlling party and hence encourages the selection of an efficient management team. However, one share-one vote does not always maximize the reward to securityholders in a corporate control contest. Sufficient conditions are given for one share-one vote to be optimal overall. The paper also includes a discussion of the empirical evidence.

This article investigates racial differences in 1985-86 salaries of individual professional basketball players. White and black players earn similar mean compensation; however, controlling for a variety of productivity and market-related variables and for the endogeneity of player draft position, we find a significant ceteris paribus black compensation shortfall of about 20%. Further, we find that all else equal, including team performance and market factors, replacing one black player with an identical white player raises home attendance by 8,000 to 13,000 fans per season. The compensation and attendance results together are consistent with the idea of customer discrimination.

In this paper we extend Varian's (1984) nonparametric production analysis to situations when the set of observed output, input, and price data is not consistent with profit maximization for at least one firm. In such cases, Varian's results imply that no production possibility set containing all observations can rationalize the observed data. We identify each firm whose performance, given the prices faced by it, may be found consistent with profit maximization relative to some production possibility set containing all observed output-input vectors. We show that the set 4' of all such firms can itself be weaklv rationalized in the sense that there exists a (closed, convex, and monotone) production possibility set that contains all the observations, and relative to which the performance of all the firms in the set 8O is consistent with profit maximization given their respective prices. By definition, firms not included in this largest set d of efficient observations unambiguously deviate from profit maximizing behavior for any production possibility set containing all observations. We follow Farrell (1957) and analyze these deviations into technical and allocative efficiency measures, considering as admissible all closed, convex, and monotone production possibility sets relative to which the performance of each firm in the set g remains consistent with profit maximization. We then describe nonparametric methods for determining the tightest upper and lower bounds on the technical, allocative, and aggregate efficiency measures evaluated relative to all such admissible production possibility sets. It is seen that the tightest upper bound on the technical efficiency measure is the same as the value computed by the nonparametric efficiency evaluation technique known as data envelopment analysis, thus establishing a link between this literature in management science/operations research and the nonparametric production analysis in economics.

This paper considers two questions: (i) what is the purpose of legal restrictions intended to separate "money" from "credit markets," and (ii) is such a separation desirable? It is argued that historical legal restrictions meant to achieve such a separation were designed to preclude the occurrence of sunspot equilibria. It is also shown that a coherent model can be constructed in which sunspot equilibria exist in the absence of legal restrictions, but not if money and credit markets are separated. Nevertheless, there is no obvious welfare justification for such a separation.

This paper investigates a general equilibrium model of unemployment and the business cycle in which specialization of labor plays a key role. A rational expectations equilibrium with ful ly flexible wages and prices can exhibit unemployment in which the ma rginal product of employed workers exceeds the reservation wage of th ose who are without jobs. Workers are unemployed either because they are in the process of relocating for a better job or because they are waiting for conditions in the depressed sector to improve. Moreover, seemingly small disruptions in the supplies of primary commodities s uch as energy could be the source of fluctuations in aggregate employ ment and can exert surprisingly large effects on real output.

The debt crisis that began in 1982 forced a number of developing countries that had relied on external financing into rapid adjustment of their current account positions. In many of these countries external adjustment mainly took the form of import reduction, or what has been termed 'import compression,' to generate trade balance surpluses necessary to service the existing stock of foreign debt. While the effects of import compression on consumption and growth have been discussed in the literature, there has been little concern expressed with regard to the direct effects such a policy can have on export performance. This paper develops a model that takes explicit account of the feedbacks between imports and exports that arise through the effects of imported inputs on exports and the availability of foreign exchange on imports. Empirical tests of this model for 34 developing countries tend to confirm both these hypotheses. These results point clearly for additional foreign financing to reduce the need for import compression and its attendant-negative effects on the supply of exports.