Review of Beyond the Beach: The Allied War Against France by Stephen Alan Bourque

Review of Beyond the Beach: The Allied War Against France by Stephen Alan Bourque

Hours Constraints in Market Equilibrium

The observation that many workers report wanting to work more or fewer hours at their current rate of pay appears to contradict standard neoclassical theory. Although most jobs limit the ability of workers to choose hours, economists typically assume that workers can choose hours by choosing jobs. The puzzle is why workers have not chosen jobs which allow them to work the number of hours they prefer. This paper outlines two classes of reasons that hours constraints might be observed in a neoclassical market equilibrium – mismatch (caused by search costs or market thinness) or wedges between imagined and feasible hours-compensation combinations (caused by market power, implicit contracts, overtime premia and fixed costs of employment like fringe benefits.) Using proxies for each of these putative explanations and cross-section data on self-reported hours constraints I find support for explanations that rely on fixed cost fringe benefits, overtime premia, search costs and unions but no support for the monopsony power or market thinness explanations. Moreover, the data are consistent with two strong empirical implications of hours constraints being illusory in the sense that the jobs constrained workers would prefer are not economically feasible.hours of work, constraint, desired hours

The Economics of Ideas and the Ideas of Economists

On college campuses across the country and on millions of home computers, too, young adults download from each other digital files containing recorded music and films for their entertainment. The owners of that copyrighted material pursue the downloaders with legal action as well as the software services that facilitate it. Napster’s existence as a free file-sharing internet site was shut down in 2001, and the Supreme Court has recently ruled that a successor file-sharing service, Grokster, engaged in copyright infringement by providing an easy way for individuals to exchange files. The amount of filesharing activity is not trivial; Paul Romer (2002) estimates that Napster users were downloading at the rate of 1.5 billion downloads per month before Napster was shut down and that the consumer surplus generated by downloading roughly equaled the revenues of the recording industry.Intellectual Property, property rights, creativity

Marginal Costs of Income Redistribution at the State Level

Previous analyses of the cost of redistribution by a unitary government have focussed on the welfare losses of distorted labor supply choices. On the other hand, the analysis of redistribution b,y local qovernments in a federal system has emphasized the effect of the migration of taxpayers and transfer recipients in raising the cost (faced by state residents) of engaging in more redistribution. This paper combines both migration and labor supply effects to compute marginal redistribution costs at the state and federal level. Surprisingly, for a wide range of parameter values, states face lower redistribution costs than the national government because they are able to "export" some of the cost through lower federal tax revenue. The normative implication of the analysis is that any case for national redistribution policies must be based on benefit spillovers across state lines rather than on tax competition among state governments.

When is the Efficient Subsidy to Higher Education the Equitable Subsidy ?

Despite some empirical evidence to the contrary, government subsidy to higher education is usually presumed to be inequitable because college-educated workers earn more than less educated workers. Using a simple model of edu- cational choice with endogenous wages and two worker types, I obtain strong results concerning this conßict between efficiency and equity ? namely that eq- uity and efficiency do not conßict unless there are borrowing constraints. Pre- existing distorting taxes or real externalities imply that the efficient subsidy is positive and that the efficient subsidy is also the subsidy which maximizes the net income of the unskilled. However, when tuition subsidies are used to overcome borrowing constraints, the efficient subsidy exceeds the subsidy which maximizes the net income of the unskilled. If borrowing constraints could be overcome with another policy, like student loans, efficiency and equity would not be in conßict. In a more complex model with a range of worker abilities there is no equity-efficiency trade-off only when the efficient subsidy is zero ? that is, in the absence of real externalities, pre-existing taxes or borrowing constraints. The presence of any one of these three complications makes the efficient subsidy positive, while the subsidy that maximizes the net income of the unskilled is lower. In those cases, efficiency conßicts with equity.higher education, subsidy

CREATIVE PRICING IN MARKETS FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Technological changes over the past two decades have made it easier to distribute and to copy intellectual property. Creators and owners of intellectual property have responded to these changes with a variety of creative pricing strategies. The paper reviews some of these pricing innovations. Two broad categories of innovations are explored: those that facilitate price discrimination and those that exploit complementarities between di¤erent types of creative works.pricing, intellectual property