This paper deals with two related subjects. The first is the failure of economic analysis to trigger elimination of welfare-reducing public policies affecting the older mass media technologies, such as broadcasting. The second is some speculation about policy issues that may continue or arise in...

We investigate the consequences of demographic change for business cycle analysis. We find that changes in the age composition of the labor force account for a significant fraction of the variation in business cycle volatility observed in the U.S. and other G7 economies. During the postwar...

In 2006, sports economics celebrated its fiftieth birthday. This essay reviews Simon Rottenberg’s seminal 1956 article and a handful of articles appearing over the next fifteen years that established the conceptual foundation for the field. A common thread among these papers is that all were...

In a regime of free foreign exchange markets and free capital movements the reserve (hard) currencies are likely to substitute for the local soft currency in agents’ portfolia that include currency as an asset. This argument implies a process of cumulative circular causation with currency...

Apparent ignorance of more than a century of economic history now threatens the competitive constitution of the Internet under the guise of “net neutrality.” Net neutrality is a slogan that stands for the proposition that the Internet and physical means of access to it should be available to...

Credit card rebates, which are paid to all credit card users regardless of borrowing, have grown substantially. This paper analyzes this phenomenon by comparing the socially and privately optimal interchange fees in debit and credit cards. Compared to debit cards, credit cards raise efficiency...

Public and private policy for the European Research Area has an important role to play in fostering and maintaining the richness and diversity of this region’s “innovation ecology”, especially with respect to the formation and reconfiguration of information connections. But some of the...

Children are sometimes viewed as a method of insuring against disability and providing income after retirement, especially in developing countries with limited markets for credit and insurance. But how do children decide on how much care to provide to their parents in old age, particularly in...

We examine the impacts of increased U.S. gasoline taxes with a model that links the markets for new, used, and scrapped vehicles. Parameters for the household demand side of the model derive from an estimation procedure that integrates individual choices for car ownership and miles traveled. The...