Suchergebnisse

This paper shows that if workers have identical wealths, abilities, and preferences then a draft lottery is Pareto superior to a voluntary army. It also shows that if being a civilian is a "normal good", then the optimal pay schedule will be such that people prefer not being chosen for the army. The paper shows how this idea extends to occupational choice in general and shows that pure gambles taken prior to occupational choice can substitute for lotteries that determine one's occupation. The paper repairs what I think is a major flaw in standard general equilibrium theory, which assumes away the nonconvexity of preferences that follows from the discreteness of occupational choice.

This paper extends Bowen's theorem on the efficiency of majority-chosen public expenditures. It also discusses situations under which majority rule is likely to lead to inefficient outcomes.

This paper extends Bowen's theorem on the efficiency of majority-chosen public expenditures. It also discusses situations under which majority rule is likely to lead to inefficient outcomes.

A famous paper by Conrad and Meyer calculates that on the eve of the American Civil War, slave prices were about equal to the present values of the slaves' labor services. They argue that this is evidence for the proposition that ordinary economic forces, without political intervention were not likely to put an end to slavery. I wrote this paper when pretty much the only economics that I knew was 1) how to prove the existence of competitive general equilibrium. 2) how to calculate present values. So the paper does two things. It shows how to apply Arrow-Debreu type existence theory to an economy with slavery. (this involved some technical wrinkles that were not in the existing existence literature.) More importantly, it argues that the calculations of Conrad and Meyer showed only that capital markets for slaves were working pretty well, but were not direcly relevant to the question of whether slavery as an institution was economically viable. To answer the latter question, we need to calculate two things. 1) Does an infant slave have positive present value? [If not, reproduction would be discouraged.] 2) Would a freed adult slave, perhaps because of the better incentives and opportunities for free people, be able to earn more than enough on the labor market to repay his or her market price to a slaveowner. I investigate the latter two questions empirically. The answer to the first question is "Yes". Spotty evidence suggests that the answer to the second question was also often "Yes."

Can the government get people to contribute more to public goods by subsidizing voluntary contributions. In a general equilibrium model, answering this question is not a slam dunk, especially given the remarkable "neutrality theorems" in the theory of voluntary contributions. But our model yields a surprisingly decisive comparative statics result. If public goods and private goods are both normal goods, then increases in the subsidy rate necessarily increase the equilibrium supply of public goods.

This paper presents a theoretical model of political support for public provision of day care. In an economy where there are high taxes on wage income, selfish taxpayers with no children in the day care system may favor substantial public subsidies to day care because such subsidies induce mothers to join the labor force and hence pay income tax. Our model makes explicit quantitative predictions of the relation between the distribution of wages, theincome tax rate, and the subsidy rate for day care that maximizes net tax revenue from parents of small children. Applying parameter values from Sweden and the United States, we find that our model predicts a subsidy rate of between 50% and 100% for Sweden with its high tax rate on wages and between 15% and 30% for the U.S. with its lower tax rate on wages.

To answer the question of the paper's title, we looked at the tables of contents from two recent issues of 33 economics journals and attempted to find a freely available online version of each article. We found that about 90 percent of articles in the most-cited economics journals and about 50 percent of articles in less-cited journals are available. We conduct a similar exercise for political science and find that only about 30 percent of the articles are freely available. The paper reports a regression analysis of the effects of author and article characteristics on likelihood of posing and it discusses the implications of self-archiving for the pricing of subscription-based academic journals.

The net present value of costs and benefits from a pay-as-you-go social security system are negative for young people and positive for the elderly. If people all vote their financial self-interest, there will be a pivotal age such that those who are younger favor smaller social security benefits and those who are older will favor larger benefits. For persons of each age and sex, we estimate the expected present value gained or lost from a small permanent increase in the amount of benefits, where the cost of these benefits is divided equally among the population of working age. Assuming that everyone votes his or her long run financial self-interest, and calculating the number of voters in the population of each age and sex, we can determine whether there is majority support for an increase or a decrease in social security benefits. We use statistics on the age distribution and mortality rates for the United States to explore the sensitivity of political support for social security to alternative assumptions about the discount rate, excess burden in taxation, voter participation rates, and birth, death, and migration rates. We find that a once-and-for-all decrease in benefits would be defeated by a majority of selfish voters under a wide range of parameters. We also study the predicted majority outcomes of votes on changing the retirement age.

We consider a general model of the non-cooperative provision of a public good. Under very weak assumptions there will always exist a unique Nash equilibrium in our model. A smallredistribution of wealth among the contributing consumers will not change the equilibrium amount of the public good. However, larger redistributions of wealth will change the set of contributors and thereby change the equilibrium provision of the public good. We are able to characterize the properties and the comparative statics of the equilibrium in a quite complete way and to analyze the extent to which government provision of a public good 'crowds out' private contributions.

Abstract
Much attention has been given to the plight of minorities and persons of mixed race in need of a bone marrow transplant. This has led to increased efforts to recruit minority and mixed-race donors. There is strong evidence that members of racial minorities are less likely to find a match than those of European descent. Because the relevant sample sizes are small, direct estimation of the distribution of immunity types for mixed-race populations have not been available. We show how to estimate the distribution of HLA types for persons of mixed race indirectly, using simple principles of probability and the combinatorics of diploid reproduction. We show that recruitment of mixed race donors is cost-effective, but not for the expected reasons. While recruitment of mixed-race donors increases the welfare of patients with the same racial background, the benefits to the targeted recipients do not exceed the costs. However, when account is taken of the likelihood that a mixed-race registrant will be the only available match for a patient classified as being of a single race, the recruitment of mixed race donors turns out to be highly cost-effective.