Post-communist countries offer new evidence on the relative importance of courts and relationships in enforcing contracts. Belief in the effectiveness of courts has a significant positive effect on the level of trust shown in new relationships between firms and their customers. Well-functioning...

In this paper we consider recent proposals to auction U.S. import quotas. using the funds so obtained to encourage relocation out of the protected industries. We argue that the information available to the government, or lack thereof, is a critical factor in understanding these policies. In a...

Analyzing a variety of cross-national and sub-national data, we argue that high adult mortality reduces economic growth by shortening time horizons. Higher adult mortality is associated with increased levels of risky behavior, higher fertility, and lower investment in physical and human capital....

Which is the tighter constraint on private sector investment: weak property rights or limited access to external finance? From a survey of new firms in post-communist countries, we find that weak property rights discourage firms from reinvesting their profits, even when bank loans are available....

This paper analyzes the relative importance of the major factors underlying the post-1978 increase in China's agricultural productivity. We present a method for assessing the role of price increases and strengthened individual incentives due to the introduction of the responsibility system. Data...

We explore the interaction between two facts. The first is that income is variable; the second is that the tax and transfer system transforms before tax income into after tax income in highly non-linear ways. The effect is to penalize (and reward) income variability in a manner which is both...

Introductory lectures on capital theory often begin by analyzing the following problem: I have a tree which will be worth X(t) if cut down at time t. If the discount rate is r, when should the tree be cut down? What is the present value of such a tree? The answers to these questions are...

Higher education has many of the attributes of a competitive industry. Many enterprises compete for inputs and sell similar outputs to a great variety of buyers. The competitive perspective has not been much used in the analysis of higher education. In this paper we find such a point of view...

This paper examines the effects of a proportional capital gains tax in an economy with an Austrian sector (with wine and trees) and an ordinary sector. We analyze the effect of capital gains taxation (on both an accrual and a realization basis) on the efficiency with which resources are used...

Asset pricing relations are developed for a vector of assets with a time varying covariance structure. Assuming that the eigenvectors are constant but the eigenvalues changing, both the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Arbitrage Pricing Theory suggest the same testable implication: the time...