In, 1990, the New York Stock Exchange amended its Rule 80A to restrict stock index arbitrage on days of large price movements. The authors find that Rule 80A significantly curtails--or 'collars'--index arbitrage activity. In spite of this curtailment in index arbitrage volume, they find that...

If each legislator wishes to encourage other legislators to address new problems in future periods, then a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium can exist with the following properties: (1) no legislator finds it worthwhile to make a narrow proposal that appeals to a minimum majority; (2) instead,...

Public officials often have little incentive to spend time and effort proposing policies that benefit others. When, however, some public policies generate rents to these officials, rent seeking in politics can motivate them to provide public goods. We consider the motivational effects of rent...

This paper empirically examines whether major domestic oil companies held down product prices relative to their less visible counterparts during the 1979 oil crisis. The authors compare company prices on unregulated fuel oil with a measure of political pressure--the level of television coverage...

This research seeks to determine the extent to which the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's policy of "Open Access" to natural gas pipelines has created competition in natural gas markets. We argue that recently developed cointegration techniques are the natural way to evaluate competition...

Recent regulatory changes permitted natural gas pipelines to become "open access" transporters. This change in pipeline carrier status dissolved regulatory barriers to markets. This paper describes the institutions that were developed to support exchange in gas markets and observes and evaluates...

We estimate the probability distributions of budgets, revenues, returns, and profits to G-, PG-, PG13-, and R-rated movies. The distributions are non-Gaussian and show a self-similar stable Paretian form with nonfinite variance and nonstationary mean. The profit distributions have asymmetric...

Everyone knows that the movie business is risky. But how risky is it? Do strategies exist that reduce risk? We investigate these questions using a sample of over 2000 motion pictures. We discover that box-office revenues are asymptotically Pareto-distributed and have infinite variance. The mean...