Joint search for several goods

Joint search occurs when a buyer incurs a single cost to observe prices of several different goods. If the prices are drawn from a known joint distribution function, the optimal sequential strategy with no recall uses a reservation sum for any subset of items. When the observed prices total more than the corresponding reservation sum, not all goods will be bought and search continues for items not purchased. Thus, regions in the price space are associated with various buy-search decisions. The reservation sums, however, have properties analogous to those of the reservation price with search for one good.     

A theory of residential location decisions of two-worker households

This paper presents a model of the residential location of a household with two members working in separate urban employment centers. A three-dimensional bid-rent surface is developed and compared with the bid-rent surfaces for three other types of land users. The resulting bid-rent surfaces are used to describe the location and shape of the regions where these various types of households will choose to reside in an urban community.     

COHABITATION AND THE MEASUREMENT OF CHILD POVERTY

We use 1990 U.S. Census of Population data to calculate what poverty rates would have been if cohabitors were treated in the same manner as married couples. We find that the official treatment of cohabiting partners as separate family units overstated the extent of poverty in 1989 among all children by about three percent. Only about 11 percent of the observed rise in child poverty between 1969 and 1989 would be eliminated if the Census Bureau made this change in its definition of the family. We estimate a logistic regression model of the likelihood that poor, cohabiting families with children would be reclassified as non-poor if the cohabitor's income were included in family income.     

Cooperative R&D and Strategic Trade Policy with Bertrand Competition

This paper uses a strategic trade policy model to analyze the welfare effects from allowing cooperation in R&D when firms compete in a price‐setting game in the product market. A policy game between two governments is analyzed, where each government chooses a particular cooperative R&D policy in order to maximize national welfare. At the Nash equilibrium to this game only one government allows cooperation in R&D. This equilibrium is both individually and jointly optimal. International cooperation in R&D is superior to no cooperation in R&D but is inferior to the Nash equilibrium of the government policy game.     

Long-term effects of public low-income housing vouchers on neighborhood quality and household composition

In this paper we estimate the effect of housing voucher receipt on the composition of recipient households and the quality of the neighborhoods in which recipient households reside. Drawing on a dataset that contains extensive information on a large and diverse panel of low-income families for up to 5 years following voucher receipt, we isolate the effects of voucher receipt using propensity score matching techniques together with regression adjustment. Full-sample results show voucher receipt to have little effect on neighborhood quality in the short-term, but some positive long-term effects. We also find that voucher receipt is tied to a higher probability of change in household composition in the year of voucher receipt, but greater stability in subsequent years. Our large sample allows us to explore differential responses of geographic and socioeconomic subgroups. Our findings have several implications for both research and policy.     

THE ECONOMICS OF FIRE PROTECTION: FROM THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON TO RURAL/METRO1

This article examines the history of fire protection in London from the Great Fire of 1666 to the present and argues that many of the popular perceptions of market failure in the provision of fire protection that are repeated in standard economics textbooks are in fact myths. In reality, fire protection began in the private sector and only transferred to the public sector when insurance companies faced the prospect of collecting escalating premiums from their clients. To this day, voluntary and private provision in parts of the USA is a model of how fire protection can be provided more cheaply and more effectively outside the public sector.     

Influences on what consumers know and what they think they know regarding marketer pricing tactics

Although a considerable amount of research has investigated consumer knowledge of individual prices, consumer knowledge of marketer pricing tactics (e.g., partitioned prices, pennies a day) has received only limited attention. In the current research, a model depicting hypothesized antecedents of consumer knowledge (both accurate and self‐perceived) regarding pricing tactics marketers use is proposed and then investigated in two studies. Tests of the model provided support for the hypothesized antecedents of both objective and subjective pricing tactic knowledge and suggested that experience is a key moderator of the objective pricing tactic knowledge–subjective pricing tactic knowledge relationship. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The Impact of Human Resource Practices and Compensation Design on Performance: An Analysis of Family-Owned SMEs

A sample of 168 family-owned fast growth small and medium enterprises (SMEs) was used to empirically examine the consequences of five human resource practices on sales growth performance. The results suggest that training and development, recruitment package, maintaining morale, use of performance appraisals, and competitive compensation were more important for high sales-growth performing firms than for low sales-growth performing firms. In addition, we examined the use of incentive compensation in the form of cash, noncash, and benefits and perks for four different levels of employees in family-owned SMEs. The findings suggest that high sales-growth performing firms used more cash incentive compensation at every level in the organization.