The concept of intellectual property poses potentially difficult questions for those sympathetic to the Austrian economic viewpoint. Austrians are staunch proponents of the free market and this leads them to strongly defend private property rights. It also leads to a strong condemnation of...

Gibrat's Law of Proportionate Effect is reconsidered by assuming a process of stochastic growth and decline of firms in an industry. With the assistance of computer simulations it is shown that such a process leads to an even more skewed size distribution of firms than a random process of growth...

Simultaneous changes in demand and supply produce indeterminate results on equilibrium price or quantity. This paper provides a rigorous analysis of the factors responsible for indeterminacy and applies these findings to problems of tax and subsidy incidence and situations involving simultaneous...

The representative firm model is used to demonstrate that competitive markets yield least‐cost production in the long run. This model is deficient in two respects: The demonstration's validity is suspect and it fails to show that least‐cost production occurs in the short run as well.

Despite objections, “one of the more durable empirical relationships uncovered in statistical investigations of firm and industry profitability, is the tendency for profitability to be relatively high in high‐advertising consumer goods industries.”

An examination of imperfect price discrimination, modelled as a linear combination of perfect price discrimination and uniform pricing, is used to analyze the impact of imperfect discrimination on firm size and product diversity. Additionally, claims that perfect price discrimination leads to...

Ricardian behavior may increase the variance of consumption: A change in national income will change future tax liabilities endogenously; if consumers are Ricardian, consumption will change for this reason. This paper studies the effects of these changes on the stability of an economy with...

The relationship between a new measure of money, called the Rational Transactional Aggregate (RTA), and economic activity was investigated using annual and quarterly data in selected macroeconomic models from 1973–1990. For prediction purposes, the money demand function including RTA which...

Much attention has been devoted in the recent literature to temporal variations in the non‐accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (N.A.I.R.U.). Grubb, Layard and Symons (1984) note that the N.A.I.R.U. has increased over recent years, this observation being based on data ranging across 19...

Recent research in the public finance literature has developed a new model for the analysis of tax structures. Unlike the traditional income elasticity methodology, this model examines a structure in terms of its growth rate and volatility of receipts. Once a structure is analyzed, the model...