Post World War II European welfare states experienced several decades of relatively low unemployment, followed by a plague of persistently high unemployment since the 1980s. We impute the higher unemployment to welfare states' diminished ability to cope with more turbulent economic times, such...

This paper analyses the effects of non-tariff barriers, in terms of both variable and fixed export costs, on the structure of trade and industry. We find that the relationship between fixed and variable trade costs affects industrial structure and determines whether international trade emerges....

A smooth transition autoregressive model is estimated for the Southern Oscillation Index, an index commonly used as a measure of El Niño events. Using standard measures there is no indication of nonstationarity in the index. A logistic smooth transition autoregressive model describes the most...

Examining detailed data for the home country operations of Swedish multinationals during the period 1986-1994, this paper shows that there are signs of very notable structural changes in the home country operations of these corporations. It also shows that the effects vary according to economic...

A short review of different types of motives in fertility decisions is given, followed by a discussion on the characteristics of societies where the insurance and producer goods motives are important. Three models investigating the effects of different types of policy interventions in such...

College-bound students in Japan undergo a process of intense preparation known as examination hell. An extreme manifestation of examination hell is the ronin phenomenon. Typically thirty percent of students choose the ronin option under which they spend years in addition to high school preparing...

The present paper consists of two closely related parts: one which outlines a normative criterion for evaluating the legitimacy of constitutional change and one which specifies a particular proposal of a constitution. The criterion used stems directly from the "pragmatic" brand of...

We consider a committee facing a binary decision under uncertainty. Each member holds some private information. Members may have different preferences and initial beliefs, but they all agree which decision should be taken in each of the two states of the world. We characterize the optimal...

In this paper we introduce an autoregressive model with a deterministically shifting intercept. This implies that the model has a shifting mean and is thus nonstationary but stationary around a nonlinear deterministic component. The shifting intercept is defined as a linear combination of...

This paper surveys the literature on group selection. I describe the early contributions and the group selection controversy. I also describe the main approaches to group selection in the recent literature; fixation, assortative group formation, and reproductive externalities.