A number of explanations are commonly presented in public finance texts as reasons why government intervention in the economy will improve performance. This paper questions the validity of each of them. The paper examines the merit goods argument, equity considerations, growth and development...

We show that estimates of the elasticity if demand for money in the United States depend crucially on which of the three minima of the residual sum of squares is selected by the Cochrane-Orcutt procedure applied to a model which contains a lagged endogenous variable. The model constitutes the...