The law and economics of sycophancy

Tullock (in: Rowley (ed) The selected works of Gordon Tullock, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, pp 399–455, 2005) was skeptical of the presumed economic efficiency of the common law, as adversarialism, apparently inherent to common law procedures, allowed for and was prone to litigiousness. Common law litigations accord to patterns of rent-seeking, as litigants invest ever more resources to assure victory. This paper asks if viable institutional solutions can emerge to resolve the problem Tullock identified. I survey the historical development of the term sycophancy within ancient Greek law as a revealing case study. Though a relatively innocuous pejorative in contemporary parlance, the term’s etymological roots stem from a formative process of ancient legal and institutional change within Athenian Greece. In the wake of specific legal reforms that expanded the scope of governmental authority under Solon (born 638–558 BCE), citizens were given explicit financial incentive to report violators of newly implemented public laws. Thereafter, social stigma surrounding third party legal representation leveraged the term sycophancy in reference to prosecutors motivated by private interests over the public welfare. Forgone social status and eventually formal criminal sanction emerged as offsetting differentials against the incentives of sycophancy.     

A comparison of alternative methods of updating input-output coefficients

In recent years there has been a growing number of input-output models of economies ranging in scale from the rural to the national. While offering invaluable insights into the interaction of sectors within an economy, the input-output model suffers from the fact that its coefficient values are altered over time due particularly to technological change. Two of the prominent techniques designed to update these technical coefficients, the RAS and linear programming methods, are compared herein with regard to changes in U.S. national coefficients between 1963 and 1967. Suggestions for improvements to the latter method are outlined.     

A model of the skill composition of US immigration

A human capital model is specified to explain the skill composition of US immigration. A unique set of panel data (57 source countries and 15 annual observations) and a methodology not previously used to study a demographic phenomenon are employed to estimate the model. Coefficients on time-invariant variables are recovered by means of the Hausman - Taylor instrumental variable procedure, which yields considerably different results than the generalized least squares model.     

Educational attainment and cohort size

"We argue that the postwar baby boom [in the United States] caused substantial fluctuations in both the economic rewards to education and educational attainment over the last 3 decades. If substitutability between young and old workers diminishes with education, the present value of lifetime earnings for a boom cohort is depressed more for highly educated workers, reducing incentives for educational attainment. The opposite is true for pre- and postboom cohorts. The diminishing substitutability hypothesis explains the declines in both the returns to college and college completion rates in the 1970s and predicts a substantial increase in educational attainment for postboomers."     

MAQUILADORA RESPONSE TO U.S. AND ASIAN RELATIVE WAGE RATE CHANGES

ThiS paper investigates whether the output of the Mexican maquiladoras is an alternative to production in the Pacific Rim. The analysis involves estimating supply functions for Mexican maquiladora output using relative wage data for Mexico, Singapore, and the United States. It also involves estimating the impact of relative wage rates on maquiladora output in five industries as well as on more aggregated levels. Results indicate that production in Mexico and in the Pacific Rim are substitutes, although this relationship is stronger for some industries than for others.     

Interests Versus Ideology in the Ratification of the 16th and 17th Amendments

The ideology of Progressivism that peaked in the early years of the 20th century brought with it the 16th amendment, which allowed the federal government to tax incomes, and the 17th amendment, which mandated direct elections of Senators. Both were ratified in 1913. The 16th amendment provided the financing for government to expand its scope, and the 17th amendment created more democratic accountability, which both were goals of the Progressive movement. An examination of House and Senate voting on these amendments suggests that those opposed to the amendments voted against them based on interests rather than ideology.