Economic Inquiry back issues from July 2002:
Do minimum wages fight poverty?
Jul 01, 2002; ... We present evidence on the effects of minimum wages on family incomes. The results indicate that minimum wages increase both the probability that poor families escape poverty and the probability that previously nonpoor families fall into poverty. The estimated increase in the flow into poverty ...
Income mobility and the earned income tax credit
Jul 01, 2002; ... Households who work full-time at minimum wage jobs earn more than the phasein range of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). This means that the EITC mainly acts as a negative income tax. However, most families are eligible to receive the EITC for a relatively short time. Seventy-four percent of ...
Provider selection, bargaining, and utilization management in managed care
Jul 01, 2002; ... Managed care controls cost through a combination of provider selection, bargaining, and utilization management. Provider selection will reduce expenditures if patients are funneled to efficient providers. Bargaining will reduce expenditures through lower rates. Utilization management will reduce ...
Optimal deterrence with legal defense expenditure
Jul 01, 2002; ... Legal defense expenditure by honest and dishonest accused can increase or reduce the amount of crime, and deterrence can decrease when punishment is increased. Unregulated expenditure of innocent and guilty defendants is inefficient whether or not there is a direct social harm from type I and II ...
Revenue-sharing in movie exhibition and the arrival of sound
Jul 01, 2002; ... During the silent film era, film companies rented the vast majority of their films to exhibitors for flat per-day fees. A technology "shock" in the form of the coming of sound led to the widespread replacement of flat fees by revenue sharing. This article seeks to determine why. It finds that ...
Scale economies and the dynamics of recurring auctions
Jul 01, 2002; ... We analyze the dynamics of a game of sequential bidding in the presence of stochastic scale effects, either economies or diseconomies of scale. We show that economies of scale give rise to declining expected equilibrium prices, whereas the converse is not generally true. Moreover, first- and ...
Gifts, cash, and stigma
Jul 01, 2002; ... Each year individuals in the United States transfer between $50 and $72 billion in resources in the form of noncash holiday gifts, despite the fact that holiday gift recipients apparently value their noncash gifts at about 10% less than the prices paid by the givers. We document that cash giving ...
The Confederate constitution, tariffs, and the Laffer relationship
Jul 01, 2002; ... This article offers an example of a national constitution, that of the Confederate States of America, which effectively constrained its fiscal authorities to tax rates on the lower end of the Laffer relationship. The taxes were Confederate import tariffs. Drawing on primary sources, the paper ...
Government organization and power
Jul 01, 2002; ... We develop a theoretical framework to examine how government organization affects its power and size. The framework abstracts from distortions that arise from the means of government finance and separates government power into two dimensions-pure coercive power and pure pricing power. A ...
A disinflation trade-off: Speed versus final destination
Jul 01, 2002; ... When introducing a new monetary regime designed to reduce inflation, does a central bank prefer more or fewer economic agents who form informed forecasts of inflation? The relevance of the question arises because the central bank can make a decision about how much information to disseminate ...
Explaining U.S. federal deficits: 1889-1998
Jul 01, 2002; ... We review and jointly test various competing theoretical and empirical models of U.S. federal deficits using annual data from 1889 to 1998. We find that tax smoothing matters and that political and interest group/distributional factors are also present in our results. (JEL E6, H6) ...
Safety and soundness and the CRA: Is there a conflict?
Jul 01, 2002; ... Ordered probit regressions of the supervisory ratings assigned to banks point to a conflict between the credit enhancement objectives associated with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and financial safety and soundness standards. Aggressive banking strategies tend to help CRA ratings but hurt ...
Buying a dream: Alternative models of demand for lotto
Jul 01, 2002; ... Existing lotto demand models utilize effective price, computed as the face value of a ticket minus the expected value of prize money per ticket, as their primary explanatory variable. By contrast, this article proposes a key role for consumption benefit or "fun" in the demand for gambling in ...
International charity: For the poor?
Jul 01, 2002; ... We show how international charity leads to reduced self-help, exacerbated internal income inequality, and less charity for needy countries when international funds transfer is costly and there are information asymmetries. Mechanism design techniques are used to analyze international income ...
Institutional constraints and deforestation: An application to Mexico
Jul 01, 2002; ... Following North (1990), this article hypothesizes that effective rural institutions may impose additional costs on tropical deforestation through agricultural conversion. This allows a formal agricultural household analysis of institutional constraints on deforestation and therefore a method of ...