Information adds value to transactions in three ways: it supports reputations, permits customisation, and provides yardsticks. In the Soviet economy such information was frequently not produced; if produced, it was often concealed; whether concealed or not, it was often of poor quality. In short, the...

This paper characterizes welfarist social evaluation in a multi-profile setting where, in addition to multiple utility profiles, there may be more than one profile of nonwelfare information. We prove a new version of the welfarism theorem in this alternative framework, and we demonstrate that...

The paper provides a unifying framework for conducting Bayesian inference on the presence of seasonal and zero frequency unit roots in quarterly data. The main technique used is the analysis of posterior odds ratios. A new parameterization is provided for the model and the prior distributions...

The paper considers the influence of the budget for military spending in the Soviet command economy. A specific problem is that the Soviet strategy of concealment left us without good measures of the military burden on Soviet resources. The paper surveys previous western attempts to fill this...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between within-period preferences and the degree of intertemporal substitution. We first present a theoretical discussion which argues that the form of within-period preferences and the way these differ across the consumers may have important...

The reason why the social contract is so different in two otherwise comparable societies like the United States and continental Western European countries represents a challenging question. Large empirical evidence shows that the difference in the political support for redistribution appears to...

This paper proposes new concepts of strong and coalition-proof correlated equilibria where agents form coalitions at the interim stage and share information about their recommendations in a credible way. When players deviate at the interim stage, coalition-proof correlated equilibria may fail to...

There are signs – one is world university league tables – that people increasingly think globally when choosing the university in which they wish to work and study. This paper is an exploration of data on the international brain drain. We study highly-cited physicists, highly-cited...

This paper examines the implications of environmental externalities for income tax design in a growing economy. We describe a model with endogenously generated knowledge, in which technical progress reduces the emissions generated by production activities. In this setting, the lack of...