Most economists agree that opportunistic behavior by politicians is limited by the threat of reelection. By implication, the level of shirking should be the greatest when a politician decides to leave office. This paper seeks to learn whether shirking can be reduced when opportunities exist for...

It is frequently assumed that safe-storage gun laws reduce accidental gun deaths and total suicides, while the possible impact on crime rates is ignored. We find no support that safe-storage laws reduce either juvenile accidental gun deaths or suicides. Instead, these storage requirements appear...

We examine several theoretical and empirical issues concerning punitive damage awards and their importance to business. First, we argue that previous justifications of punitive damage awards ignore the role of private contracting and reputation in assuring contractual performance. In the absence...

The authors resurrects an idea due to J. Hirshleifer (1971) by examining how one firm might profit by trading in the securities of other firms whose values are dependent upon the first firm's actions. They focus on the case of entry: can an entrant profit from trading in the securities of an...

This paper demonstrates that plausible cost-based explanations exist for what are commonly perceived to be cases of price discrimination. The authors explain such commonly discussed problems as the price spreads of retail gasoline products, the "high" price of dinners at restaurants, the "high"...

Many recent game-theoretic models suggest that, with asymmetric information, it can be profitable for firms to acquire a reputation for toughness to discourage later entry. The authors identify institutional arrangements that firms must undertake if predatory commitments are to be credible. For...

The existing literature ignores the fact that the marginal return to current campaign expenditures depends on the candidate's stock of brand name. This simple observation is then used to provide a possible explanation for the negative empirical relationship observed between an incumbent's...

The authors show that individuals' errors in identifying the relationships among variables cause downward biases in the aggregate that are equivalent to the public underestimating the strengths of the true relationships. They argue that rational expectations has considered only the...