The rate at which police officers were murdered rose over the 1960s, although expected penalties also grew more severe. During that period, a subjective index indicates, arrest suspects may have become more prone to commit crimes for impulsive or political reasons rather than out of rational...

In theory, employees may secure lasting employment if they have worked a long time early in their careers. [JEL J64]

Econometric simulations provide no evidence that families in West Virginia encouraged sons to drop out of high school in order to earn income as coal miners, at the net expense of later income that they would have earned with more education. Estimates of the typical family's subjective rate of...

Breaking up a monopoly may have stimulated innovation in oil refining over decades. In the shorter run, the immediate demand for oil may have spurred more innovation.

In 1975, Guam stopped testing food workers for foodborne disease. Instead, it taught them how to avoid spreading disease to restaurant patrons. But this new policy did not much cut the rate of foodborne disease among patrons, suggests a statistical study. A major typhoon may have cut the disease...

Suppose that the auctioneer begins at a maximum price, with every bidder knowing her own valuation of the object. Suppose that her valuation exceeds her expectation of the price. Then she might plan to bid more than some linear positive function of the valuation. Such a revision of the Vickrey...

Alchian and Allen’s “third law of demand” states that as a fixed cost increases by the same amount for low- and high-quality goods, the ratio of the prices of high- to low-quality goods will fall and the quantity demanded of high quality goods relative to low quality goods will increase....

A battery of four tests for randomness in a time series is developed. It is applied to the trend of annual personal income per capita in West Virginia, relative to that of the United States, from 1948 through 1970. The paper does not reject the hypothesis that the trend of relative income was...

The fiscal tug-of-war between two countries to play host to a foreign- owned firm is like a Nash game. Suppose that the countries are not sure how much the firm values the sites that they offer to it. Also suppose that the countries fashion their expectation of site value by assigning the same...

Small jurisdictions vie for economic development by relaxing pollution controls. This can cause damaging spillovers. Many policy analysts recommend replacing the small jurisdictions with a single authority that taxes development. But as the sole producer of development rights to a unique area,...