The recent world energy crisis raises serious questions about the extent to which the United States should increase domestic oil production and develop alternative sources of energy. We examine the energy developments in Brazil as an important experiment. Brazil has reduced its share of imported...

In this paper we examine exclusion accomplished by a coalition of firms--frequently, a coalition of suppliers and customers--that share the benefits of exclusion. As a particular historical example, we study the Canadian sugar industry of the 1880s, which was controlled by a complex coalition of...

This paper outlines the salient characteristics of competing models of economic regulation and controls. It then examines the evolution of the American sugar program from 1934 to 1987 in the light of these models. While lobbying and other features of traditional models were clearly important,...

In economies with a large informal sector firms can increase profits by reducing workers' outside options in that informal sector. We formalize this idea in a simple model of an agricultural economy with plantation owners who lobby the government to enact coercive policies--e.g. the eviction and...

Direct empirical evidence on whether domestic consumers or foreign exporters bear the burden of a country's import duties is scarce. This paper examines the incidence of U.S. sugar duties using a unique set of high-frequency (weekly, and sometimes daily) data on the landed and the duty-inclusive...

On October 6. 1979, the Federal Reserve announced what most people interpreted as a change in monetary policy. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the effects of this change on the 1980-81 economy. The effects of the change are estimated from simulations with my model of the U.S. economy...

This paper formulates a back of the envelope approach to study the effects of monetary policy on household consumption expenditures. We analyze several transmission mechanisms operating through direct, partial equilibrium channels--intertemporal substitution and net interest rate exposure--and...

The Internet comprises thousands of independently operated networks, where bilaterally negotiated interconnection agreements determine the flow of data between networks. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes strict restrictions on processing and sharing of...

We quantify the importance of non-monetary news in central bank communication. Using evidence from four major central banks and a comprehensive classification of events, we decompose news conveyed by central banks into news about monetary policy, economic growth, and separately, shocks to risk...