William Baumol and William Bowen's work on the economics of the arts in the 1960's laid the foundation for a new field and provided arguments for public support. This paper discusses influences on their work, the nature of their analysis, and their impact on the development of the economics of...

Recently in the Southern Economic Journal Palivos and Yip marry real and monetary analysis to provide an intriguing new argument for protection. Is this an idea which international agencies like the World Trade Organization and the World Bank should educate their member countries about? The...

This paper proposes a new nonparametric estimator for general regression functions with multiple regressors. The method used here is motivated by a remarkable result derived by Kolmogorov (1957) and later tightened by Lorentz (1966). In short, they show that any continuous function of multiple...

The fixed parameters of the nonlinear mixed effects model and the density of the random effects are estimated jointly by maximum likelihood. The density of the random effects is assumed to be smooth but is otherwise unrestricted. The method uses a series expansion that follows from the...

It is becoming increasingly clear that the evaluation of policy measures that affect the growth performance of the economy requires adequate treatment of their effects on technological change. Environmental policy and regulations fit in this category. In this paper, I study the effects of taxes...

The authors suggest that the rapid growth of the illegal underground economy in 1970s and 1980s has destabilized the Soviet state economy and weakened the mechanism of central planning. This hypothesis is advanced on the basis of the examination of striking decline in income (legal) elasticities...

This paper examines the rationale for intellectual property protection in the development of new pharmaceutical products. Prior survey studies of R&D executives have found that patents play a more critical role in appropriating the benefits of innovation in pharmaceuticals compared to other high...

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...

We analyze a dynamic moral hazard setting, in which agents can borrow and lend and their decisions about effort, consumption and savings are private information. In contrast with previous findings, we show that as long as agents do not have perfect control over publicly observable outcomes, the...

Studies in psychology and behavioral economics have found that decision-making is replete with cognitive biases. Using stylized examples of time inconsistency, regret, and overconfidence, this paper illustrates possible interactions among them. As is generally true in second-best environments,...