This note gives a method that can sometimes be used to find the long-run equilibrium output of a firm operating under imperfect competition and which differs from standard methods of output determination. Let X be a product supplied under oligopoly or monopolistic competition and suppose that,...

While the North Korean economy has emerged from a decade of negative growth, it is uncertain if the recovery is sustainable. This paper surveys the path the economy has taken, examines the issues of food, energy and foreign trade, and presents its prospects for the future.

We analyse a monopolist’s choice of product diversity and the effects of retailer countervailing power on that choice. We show that monopoly causes distortion in product diversity even after we take into consideration the effects of monopoly pricing. Specifically, the number of differentiated...

This paper analyzes optimal taxation in an efficiency-wage economy with involuntary unemployment, thereby extending Chamley’s (1986) optimal-tax analysis of the standard full-employment case. For this purpose, we introduce optimal savings into the shirking-unemployment model of Shapiro and...

An important part of the Cuban government’s response to the crisis of the 1990s focused on opening the country to foreign resources in order to capture foreign exchange, which had reached minimal levels, in the shortest time possible. This economic opening was critical for reactivating the...

An inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the literature on the measurement of welfare is that the use of consumer’s surplus is a bad idea. This is especially true in the light of the fact that modern computing power facilitates the straightforward calculation of equivalent variation, the...

This paper develops and expanded framework for social planning in which coercion stemming from the provision of public goods is explicitly acknowledged. Key issues concern the precise definition of coercion, its difference from redistribtion, and its incorporation into social welfare...

We expand the investigation of the role of Congress in explanations of government growth, building on the work of Kau and Rubin (2002). In addition to reconsidering the importance of the median ideological position of elected representatives they introduced, we allow for the roles of majority...