Land Aggregation Using Contingent and Guaranteed Payments

This article explores the use of alternative payment mechanisms to overcome the holdout problem when multiple parcels of land must be acquired to complete a real‐estate development project. Purchase offers contingent upon successful land aggregation are compared to combination offers containing both guaranteed and contingent payments to determine which approach better mitigates holdout. The distribution of gains between developers and landowners is also examined. The results of a series of economic experiments suggest that contingent offers expedite land aggregation but developer payoffs are higher when combination offers are used. The results offer insight to real‐estate developers participating in land aggregation and inform government entities considering the necessity of public‐sector intervention in real‐estate markets to encourage desired development projects.     

All in the family: why non-democratic leaders have more children

Economists have come to learn that politics matters. But survival matters the most to those involved in politics. We provide a theory whereby non-benevolent, non-democratic leaders increase their expected family size to raise the likelihood that a child will be a match at continuing the regime’s survival. As a consequence, having a larger family size raises the non-democratic leader’s expected rents that they can exploit from the citizenry. In contrast, democratic leaders have a lower desire to appropriate rents from the citizenry, and therefore have a diminished desire to have additional children for these purposes. We construct a data set of the number of children of country leaders as of August 31, 2005. We find that in a sample of 221 country leaders, fully non-democratic leaders have approximately 1.5–2.5 more actual children as compared to if they are fully democratic. This empirical relationship is established controlling for a full array of country specific as well as individual specific variables. Our finding also continues to hold when using alternative measures of family size. This paper has been prepared for a conference honoring Herschel I. Grossman at Brown University in April of 2006. We thank our discussant, Murat Iyigun, an anonymous referee, Michelle Garfinkel and conference participants for excellent suggestions.     

Toward a More Phronetic Leisure Science

In this essay, we examine the assumptions underlying natural science, social science, and the humanities. More specifically, we suggest that social science in general and leisure science in particular be guided by a different set of assumptions than those guiding natural science and the humanities. Drawing on the Aristotelian idea of phronesis, we propose that value rationality more so than instrumental rationality guide social scientific inquiry, and that social science in general, and leisure science in particular, be viewed as a bridge between natural science and the humanities.