Three years ago, as America was preparing to go to war in Iraq, there were few discussions of the likely costs. When Larry Lindsey, President Bush’s economic adviser, suggested that they might reach $200 billion, there was a quick response from the White House: that number was a gross...

These contributions discuss a number of important developments over the past decade in a newly established and important field of economics that have led to notable changes in views on governmental competition policies. They focus on the nature and role of competition and other determinants of...

Many aspects of the Iraq venture have turned out differently from what was purported before the war: there were no weapons of mass destruction, no clear link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, no imminent danger that would warrant a pre-emptive war. Whether Americans were greeted as liberators or not,...

A Strand of recent literature shows that a reform of import tariff (export tax) and consumption tax (production tax) that keeps consumer (producer) price unchanged cnhances welfare and increases revenue under plausible conditions. We demonstrate that the results derived so far critically depend...

This paper considers the implications of bankruptcies, take-overs, and divergent expectations for the financial policy of the firm; we argue that, under reasonable assumptions, there is an optimal debt-equity ratio. Previous studies have shown that under very general conditions, if there is no...

It is by now well known that, in the presence of moral hazard or adverse selection, randomization of insurance premiums and benefits may be Pareto efficient. This article provides a typology of the various forms that randomization may take, derives necessary or sufficient conditions for the...

This article provides a set of conditions under which the R&D undertaken in a market economy is invariant to the number (or size distribution) of firms and the market's allocation is efficient (i.e., given the aggregate expenditure, the market chooses socially optimal projects). As in several...