The recent surge in U.S. patenting and expansion of patentable subject matter has increased patent office backlogs and raised concerns that in some cases patents of insufficient quality or with inadequate search of prior art are being issued. At the same time patent litigation and its costs are...

Recent work in the sociology of economic development has emphasized the establishment of a professional bureaucracy in place of political appointees as an important component of the institutional environment in which private enterprise can flourish. I hypothesize that establishment of such a...

The objective of this paper is two-fold. First, we describe and compare the gift and bequest (estate) tax systems in the United States and Japan. Second, we use tax data to estimate the magnitude of intergenerational transfers. The magnitude of intergenerational transfers provides aid in...

The United States differed dramatically from Britain in the way manufacturing was organized during early industrialization. Even before widespread mechanization, American production was almost exclusively from centralized plants, whereas the British and other European economies were...

Recently, the United States International Trade Commission conducted a Section 201 or "escape clause" hearing to determine whether imports have been the most significant cause of injury to the U.S. steel industry. This paper suggests a methodology for conducting the necessary analysis for such...

This paper examines fifteen historical episodes of stock market crashes and their aftermath in the United States over the last one hundred years. Our basic conclusion from studying these episodes is that financial instability is the key problem facing monetary policy makers and not stock market...

This paper describes data on U.S. imports from 1972-1994, classified according to the Tariff Schedule of the U.S. Annotated (TSUSA), Harmonized System (HS), Standard International Trade Classification (SITC, Revisions 2 and 3), and Standard Industrial Classification (SIC, 1972 basis), along with...

It is well recognized by economists that long-term contracting under an array of price and non-price provisions may be an efficient response to small-numbers bargaining problems. Empirical work to distinguish such issues from predictions of models of market power and bargaining has been sparse,...

This paper examines the magnitude of changes in relative wages across industries between 1860 and 1983 and analyzes the macroeconomic determinants of such changes at different intervals during this period. The variance across industries in wage growth was at least four times larger before 1948...

Because its benefit formula replaces a greater fraction of the lifetime earnings of lower earners than of higher earnings, Social Security is generally thought to be progressive, providing However, much of the intra-cohort redistribution in the U.S. Social Security system is related to factors...