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The article examines the subadditivity of costs and multiproduct production in large commercial banks in the United States. It is the aim of the article to contribute to economic literature centering around bank production efficiency. One of the ways the article contributes to the literature is that it analyzes a sample composed of banks of appreciably larger asset size than in analyzed in most previous bank cost studies. The result of this study reveals the production and product mix economies of larger banks. Several other contributions are also discussed in the article.

The author discusses his views on the value of economic and finance literature as an aid to decision-making. He believes the literature tends to promote policies that are either impractical or informed by inadequate analysis, and that rigorous application of economic techniques to apparently solvable problems is limited. He also discerns too great a willingness on the part of writers to publish work of merely academic interest, without expending the effort to determine whether it is applicable to real-world problems, or how it can be made so. Three examples are detailed to illustrate his contentions.

The article discusses publications from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). According to the author, FTC publications are an important resource for consumers, but they can be easily overlooked because the FTC does not actively market their availability. He also feels that the available publications from the FTC present a fair and balanced view. Some of the categories that publications fall into include consumer publications, business publications, business manuals, policy planning publications, and business guides, among others. The author includes charts showing the different categories and how they can be broken down, as well as how the publications can be put to use.

Recent writings on competitiveness fall into three almost disjointed clusters. One is oriented toward firms. A second is concerned with macroeconomic conditions. A third is about national industrial policies. Writings in each of the three perspectives purport to give a virtually complete explanation as to why American companies have been faring so badly recently in international competition. Each of the explanations is plausible, and yet they are completely different. This article aims to describe each of them and to sketch out how they might be joined with each other to arrive at a more integrated perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to examine some of the literature in Economics that concerns itself with the economics of advertising and to present some of the public policy implications of the results of these studies. It is found that it is unlikely that advertising expenditures are subject to increasing returns to scale, thus probably do not lead to an increased concentration of industry for this reason. A study is presented that deals with competition by advertising expenditures and product differentiation in the U.S. cigarette industry. It is found that advertising expenditures, during the 1956-68 period, were not effective in obtaining sales from competitors, although they may have had the affect of inducing new customers to buy the product. The effect of anti-smoking commercials is examined, and it is found that, although they may have had some effect on cigarette smoking, it is doubtful that they provide the impetus for the decreases in advertising expenditures in this particular industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an inventory of research on the U.S. capital market from 1954 to 1963 that was compiled by a committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Many ongoing research projects related to various aspects of the U.S. economy are, the article notes, being undertaken by agencies such as the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Commission on Money and Credit, and Harvard University. A bibliography is also included in the article that illustrates articles and books on the capital market and financial institutions, including the book "Individual's Saving: Volume and Composition," by I. Friend and V. Natrella, the article "Saving in the National Economy: From the National Income Perspective," by E. F. Denison, and "Variation in Bank Asset Portfolios," by R. McEvoy.

Throughout his career Geoff Harcourt has constantly and consistently highlighted the role of social norms and collective decisions in his study of modern economies. In doing so he has put a great deal of emphasis on the distribution of income between different social groups, especially so when concerned with the labour market. This article attempts to celebrate this particular aspect of his numerous contributions to economics by highlighting the role of social norms in influencing earnings across occupations and demographic groups in the USA. Social norms generate hierarchy, economic and non-economic inequalities amongst ascriptively distinguished groups. Drawing on the stratification and identity economics literatures, this article proposes a novel theoretical and empirical framework for analysing the effects of financialisation on the earnings dynamics of gender and race groups, a framework that is consistent with discrimination as a source of racial and gender inequality. The empirical methodology used in the form of long-run cointegrating relationships of groups’ earnings across occupations assesses whether a pattern of social norms on wage distribution emerges over time. The results of this study show that over the past 30 years social norms have exacerbated the stratification of the US labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dissertations in economics have changed dramatically over the past forty years, from primarily treatise-length books to sets of essays on related topics. We document trends in essay-style dissertations across several metrics, using data on dissertation format, PhD program characteristics, demographics, job market outcomes, and early career research productivity for two large samples of US PhDs graduating in 1996-1997 or 2001-2002. Students at higher ranked PhD programs, citizens outside the United States, and microeconomics students have been at the forefront of this trend. Economics PhD graduates who take jobs as academics are more likely to have written essay-style dissertations, while those who take government jobs are more likely to have written a treatise. Finally, most of the evidence suggests that essay-style dissertations enhance economists' early career research productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use a two-period one-to-one matching model with incomplete information to examine the effect of changes in divorce costs on marital dissolution. Each individual who has a nontransferable expected utility about the quality of each potential marriage decides whether to marry or to remain single at the beginning of the first period. Individuals married in the first period learn the qualities of their marriages at the beginning of the second period and then decide whether to stay married or to unilaterally divorce. We show that, for any society, there exist matching environments where the probability of the marital dissolution does not reduce divorce costs under gender-optimal matching rules. In such environments, an allocation effect of divorce costs with an ambiguous sign outweighs an incentive effect that is always negative. We also show that these results may also arise under stable matching rules that are not gender optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the way the work of classic institutionalist authors can inform modern nonprofit economics. From the Veblenian perspective, nonprofit organization is explained as an institutional consequence of the pecuniary-industrial dichotomy. The Ayresian theoretical system is used to highlight nonprofit organization as a particular form of the progressive weakening of the institution of private property in response to technological imperatives. Based on these arguments, the societal meaning of nonprofit organization is shown to be in realizing instrumental value that is unattainable through pecuniary ceremonial behavior embodied in the for-profit sector. At the same, in line with the Veblenian analysis of American universities, the ability of nonprofit firms to attain instrumental value is recognized as potentially limited by the corrupting effects of the embedding pecuniary culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author analyzes copyright doctrines in relation to economic literature on product differentiation and the article "The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies, and Computer Programs," by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer. He argues that rent dissipation concerns are reflected in copyright law. An overview of caselaw on the fixation and originality requirements is offered. He emphasizes the necessity for an empirical work on copyright policy.

We study empirically and analytically growth and fluctuation of firm size distribution. An empirical analysis is carried out on a US data set on firm size, with emphasis on one-time distribution as well as growth-rate probability distribution. Both Pareto's law and Gibrat's law are often used to study firm size distribution. Their theoretical relationship is discussed, and it is shown how they are complementable with a bimodal distribution of firm size. We introduce economic mechanisms that suggest a bimodal distribution of firm size in the long run. The mechanisms we study have been known in the economic literature since long. Yet, they have not been studied in the context of a dynamic decision problem of the firm. Allowing for these mechanism thus will give rise to heterogeneity of firms with respect to certain characteristics. We then present different types of tests on US data on firm size which indicate a bimodal distribution of firm size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Essay, we analyze how evidentiary concerns dominate actors' behavior. Our findings offer an important refinement to the conventional wisdom in law and economics literature, which assumes that legal rules can always be fashioned to achieve socially optimal outcomes. We show that evidentiary motivations will often lead actors to engage in socially suboptimal behavior when doing so is likely to increase their chances of prevailing in court. Because adjudicators must base decisions on observable and verifiable information - or, in short, evidence - rational actors will always strive to generate evidence that can later be presented in court and will increase their chances of winning the case regardless of the cost they impose on third parties and society at large. Accordingly, doctors and medical institutions will often refer patients to undertake unnecessary and even harmful examinations just to create a record demonstrating that the doctors or medical institutions went beyond the call of duty in treating them. Owners of land and intellectual property may let harmful activities continue much longer than necessary just to gather stronger evidence conceming the harms they suffer. And even the police will often choose to allow offenders to carry out crimes in order to improve the chance of a conviction. The effect we identify is pervasive. It can be found in virtually all areas of the law. Furthermore, there is no easy way to eliminate or correct it. However, the evidentiary phenomenon we discuss also has positive side effects: it reduces adjudication costs for judges and juries and improves the accuracy of court processes. In some cases, these improvements will exceed the social cost of suboptimal behavior. In other contexts, however, the social cost will far outweigh the benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that the economic literature on sharecropping uses a modernist notion of subjectivity that fails to explain the complexity of economic behaviour or the social context in which agency is formed. I look at the case of economic subjectivity of southern sharecropping tenants in the post-bellum USA, using non-determinist Marxist class analysis together with the concept of subjectivity drawing from postcolonial theory, in particular the work of Homi Bhabha. I argue that this alternative approach to economic subjectivity, which posits an ambivalent, or contradictory subjectivity provides us with a better analytical grasp of economic agency and a better explanation of the perpetuation or demise of a productive form such as sharecropping. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contract is predicated on agreement, or so the story goes. Of course, the reality of the modern bank-customer transaction is not so straightforward. In those transactions, the contract law is confronted with an ostensible dilemma: Should the law find its goal in the efficiency to be gained by binding customers to terms which they neither read nor understand? Or should the law instead focus on classical conceptions of bargain and agreement, and refuse to enforce contract terms that do not exhibit these characteristics? Article 4 of the Uniform Commercial Code, which regulates bank-customer transactions, attempts to strike a balance between fairness and efficiency, but the success of its task is undermined by one provision, section 4-103, which permits banks and customers to circumvent the effect of the Article "by agreement." The majority of the form terms that invade bank-customer agreements are not the subject of agreement in any meaningful sense: they are unilateral impositions of the "stronger" contracting party: the bank. Provisions such as waivers of a customers right to a jury trial and terms granting the bank the authority to alter the terms of the account agreement abound, and nobody—including the courts asked to enforce these provisions—seriously contends that these terms are the result of agreement in the sense of a bargained-for exchange. Instead, as the economic literature shows, these terms result from banks' exploitation of their naïve customers. In the typical bank-customer transaction, banks, like all businesses, exploit the naïveté of their less-sophisticated customers by imposing on those customers terms to which the customers have not manifested real agreement. This exploitation, which occurs even at market equilibrium, is achieved by the use of "shrouded' terms, or terms whose meaning and effect are hidden from the customer. But the impact of this shrouding is more harmful than a simple exploitation of naïve customers: Sophisticated consumers are complicit in the bank's efforts to exploit naïve customers. Indeed, because that exploitation redounds to their benefit, sophisticated customers seek our banks that exploit naïve customers. A pernicious cross-subsidy results. The extant "justifications" of unilaterally-imposed form terms such as those in bank-customer agreements miss the mark because they fail to account for that cross-subsidy. Commentators have argued that courts are capable of weeding Out those shrouded terms that result in an aggregate inefficiency, or that naïve customers suffer no real detriment because they are shielded by a protective umbrella erected by the more sophisticated customers. One commentator has argued that shrouded terms are merely a prelude to later bargaining and negotiation that occurs when a customer disadvantaged by a term calls to complain about its effects. These varied attempts to craft a trust-the-market solution to the impact of shrouded terms fail because the very market that created these terms cannot be trusted to alleviate their pernicious effects. If we cannot trust the market to police the effects of shrouded terms, then we must find some other mechanism to accomplish that task. Article 4 attempted to provide such a mechanism in the form of a laundry list of acceptable terms that would prevent banks from gaining too much power over their customers.… [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We elucidate, connect, and synthesize the literature that employs economics to study the individual rights and freedoms protected by the constitutional amendments comprising the Bill of Rights, especially as they relate to crime. Economics is uniquely suited to studying decisions involving tradeoffs, and each of the amendments requires tradeoffs. Emphasizing these tradeoffs allows us to discuss the constitutional rights in terms of "more or less," as opposed to taking an absolutist approach. We find that the economic literature on the amendments of the Bill of Rights is vibrant and growing, and that viewing the amendments within the framework of economics is highly useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses ways in which the courts in the U.S. and Europe might assess what behavior is and what is not compliant with standard-setting organization (SSO) members' fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) commitments. It then attempts to give more tangible meaning to the concept of FRAND licensing. In doing so, it reviews the intellectual property and SSO literature, which find patent values to be highly unequal. It then discusses two options for giving content to FRAND that emerge from the courts. Moreover, it looks at the models in the economics literature that show promise of providing plausible benchmarks for FRAND. Other significant information and analyses relative to the matter are also provided.

Focuses on the shortcoming of economic literature in the U.S. when it comes to incomplete contracts and precautions to be made to reduce the likelihood of an accidental breach. Discussion of the similarities between the newer literature and the older law-and-economics analysis; Impact of a possible renegotiation on the decision of a legal regime to give parties the right incentives to make an efficient choice between performance and breach; Differences between reliance investments and other kinds of precautions.

In this paper, I study the production of academic research by economics departments and economists. Worldwide rankings are provided based on both citations and publications. These rankings reveal a dominant position of the United States in the production of economics literature. Over time, however, the extent of this dominance is decreasing. (JEL: A10, A14) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a symposium of EEA-funded studies that evaluate economics research in Europe. The paper considers some general issues in evaluations, paying special attention to the problem of selecting journal weights, and notes some special features of the individual studies. Despite their very different approaches, the same group of institutions tend to appear at the top of all lists, though individual ranks are sensitive to the choice of more or less elitist journal weights. All the studies show that the gap between economics research in Europe and the United States is narrowing, but remains very wide. (JEL: A10, J44) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data as reported in the JEL in 2000 and 1985, the authors examine the pricing and other characteristics of books. There has been a substantial rise in book prices, even in real terms, between the two years, which the smaller rise in average page length appears insufficient to justify. A major factor behind the rise would appear to be the increasing importance of foreign presses that not only sell at a higher average price than U.S. presses but are increasingly likely to do so. University presses and other not-for-profit publishers sell at substantially lower prices than commercial publishing houses and are more likely to publish in paperback than commercial publishing houses. The discount on paperbacks appears to have been relatively stable in the two years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the economic fundamentals of bank runs in the U.S. Alternative theoretical explanations for the determinants of bank runs; Model of bank runs that is standard in the economic literature; Conditions under which multiple equilibria arise; Policy implications of bank runs.

Presents a study that examined the publication patterns of several U.S. economics departments. Significant determinants of earnings for tenured economics faculty; List of universities used in the study; Problems encountered in the study; List of top journals that emerged as leading outlets for the economics departments.

The article reviews the journal of economic literature related to time discounting and time preference in the U.S. It defines intertemporal choices as decisions involving tradeoffs among costs and benefits occurring at different times. In this article, the authors review empirical research on intertemporal choice, and present an overview of recent theoretical formulations. In section 2, the authors review the perspectives on intertemporal choice of John Rae and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economists, and describe how these early perspectives interpreted intertemporal choice as the joint product of many conflicting psychological motives. In section 3, they examine the various assumptions underlying the discounted-utility (DU) model. The remaining sections reviews DU anomalies, the numerous alternative theoretical models and reviews attempts to estimate discount rates.

This section presents the report of the American Economic Review for the year 2000. The editorial process at the Review is a cooperative enterprise. Papers are received at the Princeton office and then distributed to the appropriate co-editor for a decision with respect to publication. Co-editors arrange for refereeing and accept and reject papers in an entirely decentralized process. Only when a paper is accepted for publication is it sent again to the Princeton, New Jersey office for final editing and typesetting.

This article presents the report of the Representative to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Founded in 1920, NBER works toward increasing economic understanding. It achieves this through programs, projects, working papers, books, periodicals, and its Summer Institute. Among the many programs sponsored by the Bureau are those focusing on Aging, Corporate Finance, and Industrial Organization. During 2000 NBER issued a total of 13 books. Periodicals include the monthly "NBER Digest," and the "Reporter."

This paper examines data on the institutional backgrounds of editors and authors of the top 30 economics journals, identified by their 1995 citation impact. It is revealed, for example, that 70.8% of the journal editors were located in the United States, and twelve U.S. universities accounted for the location of more than 38.9%. Concerning journal article authors, 65.7% were located in U.S. institutions and twelve U.S. universities accounted for 21.8%. Arguably, the degree of institutional and geographical concentration of editors and authors may be unhealthy for innovative research in economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent article in this journal, Fred C. White, Bill R. Miller, and Charles A. Logan report on a study of property tax circuit-breakers applied to farmers and homeowners [1976]. Their study consisted of the following three parts: (1) determination of the property tax as a percentage of money income and as a percentage of total income for farmers and for homeowners in several adjusted gross income categories, (2) determination of the proportion of farmers and of homeowners who would benefit from a property tax circuit-breaker under alternative assumptions about maximum property tax as a percentage of adjusted gross income, and (3) development of some further implications of property tax circuit-breakers. They claim that their study "… firmly establishes the difference in tax burdens between farmers and homeowners" [p. 361], and they imply that a circuit-breaker should be used to reduce the difference. In the first section of this paper, we discuss the reason why we doubt that WM-L have firmly established a difference in property tax burdens between farmers and homeowners which requires relief from taxes on all of a farmer's real property. Further, they claim to have demonstrated the existence of a regressive distribution of the impact of property taxes for both farmers and homeowners. In the second section, we show that the relationship between adjusted gross income and property taxes as a percentage of money income and as a percentage of total income may be the result of underlying relationships which we hesitate to call "regressive" with that term's accompanying implication of inequity. In the third section of this paper, we explain how failure to consider the possibility of capitalization of the property tax may have led W-M-L to the wrong conclusion concerning the incidence of the tax burden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article offers a critique of the methodology and especially of its use by Pendse and Wyckoff [1974a]. The critique is based on a problem which occurred when the methodology was applied to estimate values for a proposed national park in New South Wales. The problem had not been discussed in any of the previous work, although it appeared to be the crux of the method in this application. The argument proceeds as follows. The basic methodology is summarized, then the application to the particular policy decision is discussed to highlight the problem in the method. Finally, to attempt to overcome the problem, a possible development is suggested, tested and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of doctoral dissertations in economics from United States and Canada for doctoral degrees conferred during academic year 1996-1997. The dissertations include "The Political Economy of Robert Heilbroner," by Michael C. Carroll, "David Ricardo on Public Debt," by Nancy Churchman, "The Legacy of John Law's Preclassical Research Program in Monetary Theory and Policy," by Thomas P. Garst and "The Economic Self as a Multidimensional Complexity: Towards a Critique and Reconstruction of Economic Theory," by Ahmet Kara.

The article provides information about various books related to economics. The book "Challenges to American Values: Society, Business, and Religion," by Thomas C. Cochran, examines the roots of American beliefs and values. Proposes that the historical origins of America's changing beliefs are the basis of understanding why Americans are who they are and for predicting their reactions to future events. Part 1 of the book examines the heritage of values, 1607-1850, and discusses history and values, the Colonial heritage, and old values reenforced. Part 2 reviews the challenges to older values, 1850-present, and considers the impact on values of the growth of a nation, bureaucracy, the challenge of science, social welfare, and challenges of the 1980s. Changes to the fifth edition of the book "The Economic Way of Thinking," by Paul Heyne, includes the revision of discussion questions, the inclusion of graph questions, and the reorganization of the macroeconomic materials. Includes margin notes, drawings, computations, and equations to help students understand economic principles in more practical terms.

HOW WOULD YOU go about finding articles on comparable worth or efficiency wage theory? To conduct a search on these topics, both discussed at the ASSA meetings in December 1984, you might consult the yearly volumes of the Index of Economic Articles or other hardbound indexes, where you would find references to begin a literature search. You also might ask a librarian to track down articles for you. This process could take hours, days, or weeks. If you or the librarian had searched an online bibliographic index with a computer, you could have found, as we did, 18 bibliographic citations to articles related to the topic of comparable worth in less than four minutes. Online information retrieval, or the capability of using a computer in an interactive mode to search for information in large databases, has become an important resource for many types of research. Using a computer terminal and a telephone line, it is now possible to access the entire Library of Congress card catalog, to see up-to-the-minute stock quotations or airline schedules, or even to read the entire text of articles in the Harvard Business Review. In addition to bibliographic databases, economists may be especially interested in using business databases that contain time-series data or financial data on publicly owned corporations or demographic databases, such as the U.S. Census data. These are only a few of the approximately 2,400 databases publicly available online at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to present in nontechnical language an overview of some of the recent economic literature relating to women. The article identifies the range of topical interests of economists and spells out some of the findings. The authors' own views are contained primarily in the section on market differentiation (Kohen) and in the final section (Kahne). The review cannot cover all of the economic areas bearing on women. It looks primarily at the literature relating to women's economic roles and omits a number of areas where a general theoretical or analytic framework also has relevance for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spiegel's professional life and contributions were outstanding and worth remembering. Spiegel's emigration from Europe to the United States was typical of many other émigré economists who were threatened by the turmoil in Europe during the 1930s. Spiegel was trained as a lawyer but not allowed to practice his trade simply because he was Jewish. But on arrival in the United States, he refocused his abilities from the legal field to the academy as an academic economist with a specialty in the fledgling field of development economics. Spiegel's originality as an historian of economics is revealed by his economists-on-other-economists projects that established a new genre of literature in economics. Spiegel's The Growth of Economic Thought is a masterful treatise on the history of economics, it is his greatest legacy and is still used in college teaching. This book is in print and supplies a descriptive rather than analytic approach to the story of how economics developed. In its breadth of coverage and links to sociology, philosophy, and even law, it is one of the best balanced treatments available. The current plans of economists in the People's Republic of China to translate the work into Chinese are noteworthy. As might be expected, Spiegel loved to collect books, and in his personal life with Cecile set aside time for warm companionship and a cultured life style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The one hundred and ninth annual meeting of the American Economic Association was called to order by President Anne Krueger on January 5, 1997, in the Grand Ballroom of the New Orleans Hilton. President Krueger began the meeting by reminding the audience that copies of the agenda and the printed reports of the various officers were available. The first item on the agenda to be consider was the minutes of the previous annual meeting as published in the Papers and Proceedings issue of the "American Economic Review." After an extended discussion covering such topics as the curriculum, placement of students, selection of students, success rates, the structure of previous programs, and so forth, it was voted to accept the committee's re- quest and increase American Economic Association's funding of the 1997 summer program by $25,000. The committee was encouraged to consider carefully whether another vehicle might be a better means of accomplishing an increase in minority participation in the economics profession.

Several articles have studied the relative publishing performance of economists associated with the economics departments of U.S. universities. This article presents an alternate method of quantifying the publication performance of academic departments and demonstrates that this alternative procedure produces significantly different results when compared with the usual method. The paper also discusses how these data can be interpreted as measures of interinstitution flows of publishing faculty. Examination of these data in this light provides evidence of systematic patterns of such human capital flows over the 1960-79 period. This study has compiled data on the volume of journal publication during the 1970-79 period for the current faculties of the economics department at those U.S. institutions offering graduate degrees in economics.

In the 1982 issue of "The American Economic Review," Philip Graves, James Marchand and Randall Thompson (G-M-T) provide a ranking of economics departments in the United States based on page counts of articles published during 1974-78 in twenty-four leading journals. The purpose of this comment is to update the G-M-T rankings, based on publications from 1978 through spring 1983. They also provide rankings for the top forty economics departments outside the United States. Finally, the authors compare concentration ratios measuring the dispersion in published pages among U.S. departments between the 1974-78 and 1978-83 periods. In order to ensure comparability, the authors rank departments using the same method as did G-M-T. No simple methodology can capture accurately the many dimensions which comprise research quality. Rankings are based on AER-standardized page counts in the twenty-four leading journals used by G-M-T.

This article investigates the determinants of the moonlighting supply function in terms of demographic and market factors. It also describes the relationship between primary and secondary employment in the U.S. A person holding two or more jobs is said to be moonlighting, or participating in a secondary labor market. Economic literature has treated moonlighting in two ways. First, there have been several attempts to extend traditional micro-economic theory to explain the individual moonlighter's supply curve. Second, some researchers have presented demographic profiles of the typical moonlighter. Traditionally, an individual receives purchasing power, or income, as payment for work. Time spent to obtain this income can be viewed as forgone leisure. The general character of second jobs often limits the number of hours that can be worked to less than full time or is contingent upon or complementary to the primary employment, or has an unacceptable uncertainty of income given the person's risk aversion. If an individual is completely free to determine the number of hours he wants to work, at a high enough secondary wage he may develop a backward bending supply curve, and an increase in his secondary wage might result in a decrease in the number of hours worked.

Reports on developments concerning the economics profession in the U.S. discontinuance of free reprints/offprints to authors of material appearing in the "American Economic Review and Journal of Economic Literature"; Submission fee for authors who are not members of the American Economic Association; Invitation for the XIV International Symposium on the Application of Computer Methods in the Mineral Industries.

The article discusses the issues related to proliferation of American academic economic theories that are not supported by empirical data. Wassily Leontief, a Nobel Laureate, and a president of the American Economic Association, anticipated that, as academic economics "lags intellectually," people in adjoining fields will eventually be vocal in their dismay at the stable, stationary equilibrium and the splendid isolation of academic economics. Approximately thirteen years have gone by since Leontief published his original paper. The article also presents tables showing twenty years of data collected by the journal "American Economic Review." A recent study by David Figlio generalizes on the proportions of empirical articles published from 1960 to 1992 in "the top ten" economics journals. He ranked them by the joint result of three "quality" measures--peer evaluation, citation frequency, and institutional affiliation. His study was offset by the judgment that, although there has been a boom in empirical analysis of economic issues in the past two decades, "relatively little" of the results have been published in major economic journals--a consequence of better computer technology and better research methodology.

The article focuses on how the matter of military expenditures of less developed countries (LDCs) does not command much attention among economists and in the economics literature. For the overwhelming majority of LDCs, military-capital expenditures account for only a relatively minute percentage of total military expenditures. It is also estimated that 95 % of LDCs military expenditures are personnel-related. Further, according to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency data for 1988, a mere twelve of the roughly 125 LDCs accounted for fully two-thirds of all arms imports by such countries. Two aspects of the military expenditures of LDCs, other than arms imports, urgently require serious economic analytical investigation. First is the relation between economic growth and military expenditures in LDCs. Second is the question of government budgetary tradeoffs between allocations to the military sector and nonmilitary sectors such as health, education, and infrastructure investments. Especially in these critical areas, the current level of knowledge is appallingly inadequate.

The article comments on the paper "America's Second Fiscal Revolution," by Herbert Stein. Stein's concern with "governing" the economy sets him apart from much conservative theorizing, which starts from the assumption that the economy does not need to be governed and that attempts to do so will only come to nothing against the natural forces of economic life. Stein derives his much more positive view partly from his own active participation in government and partly from the same sense of realism that enables him to see working Americans behind the abstraction of GNP. Stein simply accepts the fact that a sea change has overtaken the economy. One aspect of this change is that the federal budget is today a fifth as large as total national expenditure, compared with three percent as large in the 1920s. A second aspect is that the purposes of government spending have changed as dramatically as its size. Stein's interest in the budget as an instrument for affecting the use of national income contrasts markedly with that of most economists, conservative or otherwise. Conventionally, the budget has been regarded as a crucial variable by which levels of national growth and employment could be altered.

The article comments that the organized business community, under the guidance of U.S. President Ronald Reagan's administration, is intent on dismantling much of the American welfare state. The author says that the businessmen often distrust the state and praise the virtues of laissez-faire, as if such a society would be politically stable. They forget that social harmony is in their own self interest. Business opposition to taxes, government regulation, and social spending is commonplace in American politics. It however does not mean that the welfare state or government regulation per se are contrary to the general interests of the business community. The result is that businessmen often either do not understand their collective interests or are unable to act on those interests. Neoclassical economics has been a failure as art ideology for guiding and sustaining capitalism, basically because it makes the mistake of separating economics from politics. Although it presents itself to us as a positive science devoid of political bias, neoclassic theory rationalizes the ability of the capitalist to appropriate surplus value from direct producers.

The article presents an interview of Samuel Bowles, currently professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Armrest on various questions regarding economics. On the issue of zero-sum economy, he says in a zero-sum, the sum of the winnings and the losing adds up to zero. More winning means also more losing. A zero-sum economy is a full-employment Pareto optimal economy: one which fully and efficiently uses available economic resources. The introductory textbook depicts the zero-sum economy as one which is operating on the production possibility frontier. It follows logically that it's impossible to have more of one thing without having less of another. Therefore, the average American uses the notion of a zero-sum economy to argue for the necessity of belt-tightening. On the issue of unemployment he says there is waste through both the non-use and the misuse of labor and other inputs. We call the first demand-side waste and the second supply-side waste. It was the great virtue of Keynesian economics to focus the attention on demand-side wastes.

The article presents information on Sidney Weintraub, the economist. The late economist explored the link between wages and inflation; he proposed a tax-based incomes policy as a remedy. His friend of forty years, Professor Arthur Bloomfield of the University of Pennsylvania said that Sidney Weintraub was one of the leading American exponents of large and growing body of thought that has come to be known as post-Keynesian economics. His extensive writings over the last forty years, his many guest lectures and lecture tours at home and abroad has earned him an international reputation as a keen and imaginative economic theorist, a hard-hitting critic of the so-called neo-classic synthesis and of monetarism. Sidney Weintraub in course of his career, wrote or edited 17 books, published 100 articles in professional journals, and published over 200 pieces in more popular outlets. In 1959 the publication of "The General Theory of the Price Level," presenting the theory and evidence linking the money wage to the price level, and challenging the quantity theory with an alternative wage-cost markup theory of inflation.

Focuses on the fruitful phase of innovative advance in the publication of economic introductory textbooks in the United States since 1920s. List of competing texts; Importance of book content; Erosion of economics enrollments just when real-world problems and actions were most dramatic; Notes for historians on ideological pressures on ideological pressures brought against postwar economics teachers.

Presents several publications and resources on economics in the United States. Journal articles; Articles from Federal Reserve publications; Press articles; Resources on famous economists.

Otto Eckstein, economist, made significant contributions to three areas of economics. His early works on benefit-cost analysis contributed to the development of that area of public finance. His published papers on wage-price models represented a significant step forward in the empirical analysis of inflation. His crowning achievement was the construction and subsequent development of a large scale macroeconometric model of the U.S. economy. Eckstein's major contributions to economics literature over the past 27 years include eight books, editorship of three additional book six major public reports, and thirty journal articles and contributions to books. Although most these contributions were single-authored, he also collaborated with many other individuals on wide range of topics. In each of these areas he carried out perceptive policy analyses. In each of these areas his works exemplify the art and science of applied economics at its best. One of Eckstein's major professional concerns throughout his career was the analysis of inflation.

The post-war economics literature has been characterized by a marked trend toward co-authored articles. Economics is not the only discipline characterized by increasing co-authorship. This study investigates the question of why authors have been collaborating in increasing numbers over recent decades. The increasing specialization of the profession along with changes in the institutional incentives for publication are likely to be major factors explaining the trend toward co-authorship. The authors emphasis is placed on advancing and testing specific hypotheses regarding the underlying reasons for the trend in co-authorship. In the next section the author develops a simple model of co-authorship where researcher utility is a function of the number of articles produced. In sections 2 and 3 the model is applied to the post-war experience in both a time series and cross-section framework. The final section offers conclusions and a summary of our findings. Considering the continuing expansion of knowledge in economics, it is reasonable to expect the co-authorship trend to extend into the future.

The article presents information on economic education curricula of secondary schools in the U.S. and Japan. It discusses the substantial economics content of the Japanese school curriculum, which include two required social studies courses with major economics components and a popular economics-oriented social studies elective. It describes the content of Japanese and American textbooks for economics and social studies. Information is also given on the characteristics of economics teachers in both countries.