Samuelson (1974) noticed what he called a 'curious case' in which a redistribution of endowments, of the sort usually considered in connection with the Second Welfare Theorem, would not necessarily achieve a desired distribution of utilities. Samuelson's observation raises important questions...

Piecemeal reform methodology is used to identify Pareto improving directions of gifts in the economy studied by L. Kranich, "Gift Equilibria and Pareto Optimality Reconsidered", Journal of Economic Theory, 64, 1994, pp. 298-300.

This paper discusses the feasibility of bootstrapping DEA scores in the context of the arlier paper by Ferrier and Hirschberg (1997). A simple experiment is devised to demonstrate that in the one-input, one-output case the bootstrap of the non-modified DEA scores is not a failure of the bootstrap.

This paper develops a theoretical framework for analyzing incentive schemes under bounded rationality. It starts from a standard principal-agent model and then superimposes an assumption of boundedly rational behavior on the part of the agent. Boundedly rational behavior is modeled as an...

This paper formalizes the concept of a distributional spike and its sharpness in order to describe more rigorously the 'peakedness' chracteristics of an empirical distribution. The working definition of a spike is a distribution which exhibits a discontinuity in its derivative.

New results in the asymptotic theory of Markov processes are applied to analysis of the long-run behaviour exhibited by optimal growth models with unbounded productivity shock. The techniques developed here are geometrically intuitive, and are shown to imply global stability for a popular model...

This paper traces the discovery of the Cobb-Douglas function. There were four antecedents to Cobb and Douglas; von Thunen, Mill, Pareto and Wicksell. The demand functions specified by Mill and Pareto implied the Cobb-Douglas utility function and von Thunen and Wicksell stated the Cobb-Douglas...

The traditional textbook approach to avoiding the dummy trap problem is to delete a category from each qualitative variable. We illustrate an alternative constraint introduced by Sweeney and Ulveling (1972) which can be used to transform conventional dummy variable coefficients. This constraint...

There is now a large and complex literature on optimal income taxation, within the context of second-best welfare economics. This paper considers the potential role of this analysis in the practical design of direct tax and transfer structures. It is stressed that few results are robust, even in...

This paper shows that, indeed , Aumann's classical existence and equivalence theorems depend on there being many more agents than commodities. We show that for an arbitrary atomless measure space of agents three is a fixed non-separable infinite dimensional commodity space in which one can...