Search

From 1818 to 1909, 35 government and 57 privately-funded expeditions sought to locate and navigate a Northwest Passage, discover the North Pole, and make other significant discoveries in arctic regions. Most major arctic discoveries were made by private expeditions. Most tragedies were publicly funded. By other measures as well, publicly-funded expeditions performed poorly. On average, 5.9 (8.9%) of their crew members died per outing, compared to 0.9 (6.0%) for private expeditions. Among expeditions based on ships, those that were publicly funded used an average of 1.63 ships and lost 0.53 of them. Private ship-based expeditions, in contrast, used 1.15 ships and lost 0.24 of them. Of public expeditions that lasted longer than one year, 47% were debilitated by scurvy, compared to 13% for private expeditions. Although public expeditions made some significant discoveries, they did so at substantially higher cost (as measured by crew size or vessel tonnage) than private discoveries. Multivariate tests indicate that these differences are not due to differences in the exploratory objectives sought, country of origin, the number of previous expeditions on which the leader served, or the decade in which the expedition occurred. Rather, they are due to systematic differences in the ways public and private expeditions were organized. Historical accounts indicate that, compared to private expeditions, public expeditions: (1) employed leaders that were relatively unmotivated and unprepared for arctic exploration; (2) separated the initiation and implementation functions of executive leadership; and (3) adapted slowly to new information about clothing, diet, shelter, modes of arctic travel, organizational structure, and optimal party size. These shortcomings resulted from, and contributed to, poorly aligned incentives among key contributors.

Press reports of investigations of fraud, indictments, and suspensions in military procurement are associated with significantly negative average abnormal returns in the stocks of affected firms. Abnormal stock returns are significantly less negative, however, for firms ranking among the top 100 defense contractors than for unranked contractors, even after one controls for firm size, the frauds' characteristics, and the firm's recidivism. Unranked contractors are penalized heavily for procurment frauds, experiencing both a decline in market value and a subsequent loss in government‐derived revenues. Furthermore, these losses are related to the percentage of the firm's revenues that derive from government contracts. Influential contractors, in contrast, are penalized lightly, experiencing negligible changes in share value and government contract revenue.

The discrepancy between elaborate proposals to "solve" the common pool fishery problem and actual fishery regulations is examined. The self-interest hypothesis of regulation and fisherman heterogeneity can explain two historically popular types of fishery regulations, season closures and capital constraints. These have differential impacts on fishermen and typically redistribute the fishery's harvest from more efficient toward less efficient producers. To the extent that fishermen indigenous to a regulatory body's jurisdiction also tend to be relatively inefficient, it is predicted that these regulations will withstand the theory and data that demonstrate their suboptimality.