This paper examines bargaining among firms to mitigate rent dissipation following the major oil discoveries of 1926-35. Because of high bargaining costs, firms chose prorationing instead of consolidation and unitization, and success varied. The analysis also shows that prorationing took the form it did because concession, such as per well quotas, were required to draw in small operations and the quotas led to predictable responses regarding rent dissipation. Prorationing, despite its costs, controlled total field production and costs, conserved natural reservoir energies, and lengthened field life. When private agreements failed, the parties successfully appealed for state enforcement. Since similar heterogeneities influnce regulations elsewhere in the economy, detailed analysis of bargaining among firms is essential for insight into the emergence of various institutional forms. 33 references, 3 tables.

This paper addresses the question, What happens to the arrest rate when the number of law enforcers increases? One implication of the analysis is that arrest statistics are a poor instrumental variable for judging the quality of law enforcement. Increasing the number of police can increase of decrease the number of arrests. An increased probability of arrest induces fewer criminal acts; hence the ambiguity. Because of this result, we apply the theory in the setting of college basketball. We find a large reduction, 34 percent, in the number of fouls committed during a basketball game when the number of referees increases from two to three. Additional empirical evidence is presented which suggests that this elastic supply of basketball crime is due to more competent officiating and cleaner play.

This paper addresses the question, What happens to the arrest rate when the number of law enforcers increases? One implication of the analysis is that arrest statistics are a poor instrumental variable for judging the quality of law enforcement. Increasing the number of police can increase of decrease the number of arrests. An increased probability of arrest induces fewer criminal acts; hence the ambiguity. Because of this result, we apply the theory in the setting of college basketball. We find a large reduction, 34 percent, in the number of fouls committed during a basketball game when the number of referees increases from two to three. Additional empirical evidence is presented which suggests that this elastic supply of basketball crime is due to more competent officiating and cleaner play.

We analyze detailed longitudinal data on a cohort of males aged 58–67 in 1969–1973, a period of substantial increases in real Social Security benefits. We find the following: (1) the accelerating decline in labor force participation of elderly men in 1969–1973 can be explained by the large increase in real Social Security benefits; (2) there is evidence of a liquidity constraint effect for an important subgroup of the elderly; (3) the magnitude of this induced retirement effect is large enough that ignoring it can lead to serious underestimation of the fiscal implications of changes in benefit provisions. Our results are interpreted in the historical context of a particular cohort undergoing major, unanticipated transfers of wealth; the steady-state effects of Social Security on retirement may not be the same.

This paper examines the welfare effects of introducing storage into a market with stochastic supply in which all agents are competitive profit-maximizers with rational expectations. These welfare effects are the net result of the initial increase in demand for stock-building and the partial and asymmetric reduction in the dispersion of consumption brought about by storage. The distributional impacts depend crucially on the information available to producers before storage is introduced, the elasticity of supply, the specification of the consumption demand curve, and the cost of storage.