This paper develops and expanded framework for social planning in which coercion stemming from the provision of public goods is explicitly acknowledged. Key issues concern the precise definition of coercion, its difference from redistribtion, and its incorporation into social welfare...

We expand the investigation of the role of Congress in explanations of government growth, building on the work of Kau and Rubin (2002). In addition to reconsidering the importance of the median ideological position of elected representatives they introduced, we allow for the roles of majority...

We analyze how family ties affect incentives, with focus on the strategic interaction between two mutually altruistic siblings. The siblings exert effort to produce output under uncertainty, and they may transfer output to each other. With equally altruistic siblings, their equilibrium effort is...

Three significant characteristics of resource consumption are introduced into the decision-making process: time costs of consumption; a costly access activity; and, mutual exclusivity of (some)consumption activities. It is seen that when these factors are ignored approaches based upon estimation...

We argue that the traditional question ‘fixed vs. flexible exchange rates?’ is not well-defined, because ‘flexible exchange rates’ does not explicitly specify any particular monetary policy. In traditional analyses, ‘flexible exchange rates’ was interpreted as implying a fixed money...

Antitrust enforcement in a number of countries allows an efficiencies defence for horizontal mergers, joint ventures, specialization agreements and other horizontal arrangements. These defences may be statutory, jurisprudential or administrative. They involve, in essence, a balancing of real per...

This paper examines the impact of a collapsing exchange rate regime on output in an open economy in which shocks to capital flows and exports predominate. A sticky-price rational expec-tations model is used to compare the variability of output under the collapsing regime to that under...