Precommitted Government Spending and Partisan Politics

This paper analyzes government commitments to ongoing spending programs that require future outlays. Spending commitments are important for understanding partisan politics because they constrain future governments. In a model with one government good, a “stubborn liberal” policy maker can use precommitted spending to prevent a later conservative government from imposing decisive spending cuts. In a model where parties differ about spending priorities, reelection uncertainty creates a permanent bias towards higher government spending and higher taxes.government spending, partisan politics, political economy, precommitment

Popular Sovereignty, Judicial Supremacy, and the American Revolution: Why the Judiciary Cannot Be the Final Arbiter of Constitutions

Key to understanding the connection between popular sovereignty and judicial review is the historical development of the theory of sovereignty in England and America. Section One of this article traces the defeat of divine right theory in England and the emergence of parliamentary sovereignty. Section Two considers the American colonists’ rejection of parliamentary sovereignty during the Revolution and their establishment of popular sovereignty as the cardinal principle of American constitutionalism. Section Three studies English precedent often cited as providing the basis for the American doctrine of judicial review and shows that these English cases were simply exercises in statutory construction and cannot be classified as precursors to American judicial review. The final section examines the development of judicial review in American state courts both prior to and after ratification of the United States Constitution. This section also examines Marbury v. Madison in the context of these early state court decisions and concludes that Chief Justice Marshall never contemplated setting up the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of our Constitution. A believer in popular sovereignty, Marshall would not have reverted to British practice whereby a branch of government has total control over fundamental law. Instead, the Marbury opinion—like the state decisions before it—simply recognized that the judiciary is a co-equal branch of government empowered to interpret the Constitution along with the executive and the legislature

The harmonic interval : fact or artifact in spectral analysis of pulse trains

Originally issued as Reference No. 68-13The harmonic interval indicated during spectrographic analysis of a rapid train of pulses may be used to determine the pulse repetition-rate. If the pulse rate is regular, but too rapid to be separated, the repetition-rate may or may not be represented on such analysis as a line at the repetition frequency, but will always be indicated by the separation between harmonic bands, the harmonic interval.Office of Naval Research Contracts Nonr-4029 (00) NR 260-101 and Nonr-4446(00) NR 104-810

Essays on Imperfect and Dynamic Competition

This dissertation studies issues of imperfect and dynamic competition taking as motivation strategic interaction in the United States paper industry. The components of this work focus on both theoretical and empirical issues that arise in asymmetric oligopoly markets more generally. The first chapter considers that when consumers recycle a good, the future supply of intermediate inputs increases. If some of the inputs are used to manufacture a good that competes with the original good, the initial seller faces an incentive to reduce its supply to limit this source of future competition. I illustrate this incentive in a model of dynamic oligopoly, and test the predictions using data from the US paper industry between 1973 and 1993. I find that firms decrease quantity in response to policy changes that increase competition from firms using the recycled input. I then use the model to illustrate two implications: (i) the response to strategic incentives may lead antitrust authorities to underestimate the exercise of pre-merger market power, and horizontal mergers let firms internalize their effects on future competition, resulting in a greater supply reduction post-merger; and (ii) the policy trade-off between reducing harms from pollution and reducing the exercise of market power under oligopoly is sharper when firms respond to dynamic incentives. In the second chapter, I develop a tractable oligopoly model that preserves many of the predictions of the dominant firm model. Antitrust policy looks with skepticism on dominant firms as they are in position to leverage the position into higher profits at the expense of consumers and rival firms. I show the equilibrium price is higher and market share of the dominant firm is smaller in the dominant firm model in comparison to my oligopoly model. This suggests that the assumption on supply side strategic behavior are important for market outcomes. When the number of leaders is endogenous, more firms enter when rivals are price-takers. This result suggests barriers to entry must be high to sustain dominant market structures.Doctor of Philosoph