There is a broad consensus among economists, policymakers, and informed citizens that free-market economics do not preclude many inefficiencies in resource allocation. There are many circumstances where policy interventions have the potential to achieve a "Pareto improvement" in the sense of...

Models of economic systems involving government intervention by definition include some policy variables, or policy instruments, through which the policy in implemented. In general, economists have tended to view these variables as exogenously given. While convenient in dealing with some...

The current round of negotiations of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) represents a major initiative of economic reform. Initiatives for trade reform are far from new. A facilitative framework has been proposed that ranks policies according to their level of price...

Any attempt to reform existing public policies or to implement new policies faces an arduous negotiation process and the tyranny of the status quo. One of the basic premises of the Uruguay Round of the GATT is that the reform of border policies could not be sustained without dramatic...

In the case of the U.S. agricultural policy, this paper shows how governmental intervention can be formally incorporated in a conditional-vector-error-correcting model. From the resulting theoretical framework and empirical analysis, formal hypotheses are tested regarding both forward and...

United States dairy policy includes both predatory and productive components. The milk price support program is designed to transfer income to dairy farmers while research and extension expenditures are designed to increase social welfare. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an empirical...

In a companion series of papers, we have described a new bargaining institution and the design of laboratory experiments to assess its performance (see Rausser and Simon [1991] and Harrison and Simon [1991]). In this paper we describe and evaluate the first series of pilot experiments. In...

This paper investigates the empirical foundation for policy reform prescriptions suggested by the institutional approach to economic growth. The focus is the relationship between institutional reforms, measured by changes in a country's political or civil rights, and economic growth. Empirical...

This paper proposes a noncooperative model of multilateral bargaining. The model can be viewed as an extension of the famous Stahl-Rubinstein bargaining game. Two players take turns proposing a division of a "pie." After one player has proposed a division, the other can accept or reject the...

In the first of three related papers, the authors analyze the dynamic pattern of comparative advantage in fruit and vegetable trade flows between the United States and Latin America. Their examination of several factors--including market demand, improving investment climates, technological...