Robert Crandall in the March 19, 1999 Wall Street Journal wrote, "On Wednesday the House passed one of the most blatantly protectionist pieces of legislation since the 1930s. Reacting to the anguished cries from the steel industry and its rapidly declining unionized workforce, the House voted to...

We consider an economy (e.g., Chile 1973-83 or modern Turkey) with a minimum wage sector and a free sector, and a tax on labor earnings. We ask "Can a slightly binding minimum wage simultaneously raise tax revenue, employment, and economic efficiency?" We answer "Yes, if the elasticity of demand...

Sebastian Edwards and Alejandra Cox Edwards in their analysis of the Chilean economic liberalization argue that both capital inflows and outflows may have harmed the Chilean economy. They model the Chilean economy as using labor and fixed factors to produce traded and non-traded goods subject to...

Several authors have argued that if exporting firms anticipate a voluntary export restriction in a future period, and they expect VERs to be allocated in proportion to past exports, then they have an incentive to dump in the earlier period. In this paper we ask: How does a regime characterized...

In this paper, we calculate the real rate of return from purchasing the S&P 500 index from 1871 through 2001. We assume the investor purchases the index in January of each year and holds it forever, consuming dividends, but never selling the index itself or else selling it after its present...

For the steel import quota bill of 1999, our answer to the question posed in the title is that each word in the Congressional Record costs $39 in campaign contributions from the steel industry. Consequently, our answer is "Yes."

In an overlapping generations model, capital and labor produce two tradeable goods. A kleptocratic government spends the tariff revenue. Trade liberalization, which lowers the relative price of the importable to the private sector, benefits the retired generation if and only if the relative...

We consider an economy (e.g. Chile 1973-83 or modern Turkey) with a minimum wage sector and a free sector, and a tax on labor earnings. We ask can a minimum wage hike raise employment and economic efficiency?

This paper examines the major interest groups in the debate over allowing the wholesale re-importation of prescription drugs through the Pharmaceutical Market Access Act. By making use of the logit model, we see the effects that each of these groups has had on the voting behavior of the 108 th...

Sugar growers have been capturing substantial rents from the U.S. sugar program. Despite well-documented huge welfare losses of this program, legislators have always voted against phasing it out. This paper uses Tobit analysis to explore the determinants of campaign contributions from the sugar...