ANARCHY, UNCERTAINTY, AND THE EMERGENCE OF PROPERTY RIGHTS

This paper investigates whether Lockean first claimer property rights should be expected to emerge in anarchy. Individuals behind a veil of uncertainty about their future wealth decide independently whether to commit to using fcrce. Neither the contractarian hypothesis that a thicker veil of uncertainty supports more co-operation nor Demsetz's hypothesis that well-defined property rights emerge as the value of the externality from not having private property increases is unambiguously implied by the model.     

International Debt, Insolvency and Illiquidity

Western governments and academics alike have neglected the dangers, long- and short-term, of the continuing and ill-considered issue of loans to countries - Poland, Mexico, etc. - whose rulers persisted with policies that have brought them to ruin. Professor Karl Brunner and five American collaborators analyse the genesis of such financial incontinence and indicate seven steps for the West to avoid international illiquidity.     

Are Some Forecasters Really Better Than Others?

In any data set with individual forecasts of economic variables, some forecasters will perform better than others. However, it is possible that these ex post differences reflect sampling variation and thus overstate the ex ante differences between forecasters. In this paper, we present a simple test of the null hypothesis that all forecasters in the U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters have equal ability. We construct a test statistic that reflects both the relative and absolute performance of the forecaster and use bootstrap techniques to compare the empirical results with the equivalents obtained under the null hypothesis of equal forecaster ability. Results suggest little support for the idea that the best forecasters are actually innately better than others, though there is evidence that a relatively small group of forecasters perform very poorly.     

On Price Caps Under Uncertainty

This paper shows how standard arguments supporting the imposition of price caps break down in the presence of demand uncertainty. In particular, though in the deterministic case the introduction or lowering of a price cap (above marginal cost) results in increased production, increased total welfare, decreased prices, and increased consumer welfare, we show that all of the above comparative statics predictions fail for generic uncertain demand functions. For example, for price caps sufficiently close to marginal cost, a decrease in the price cap always leads to a decrease in production and total welfare under certain mild conditions. Under stronger regularity assumptions, all of the monotone comparative statics predictions from the deterministic case also do not hold for a generic uncertain demand if we restrict attention to price caps in an arbitrary fixed interval (as long as the price caps are binding for some values in that interval).     

Feeding the British: convergence and market efficiency in the nineteenth-century grain trade

This paper traces the evolution of the international market for wheat, from an emerging market structure after the repeal of the corn laws to a mature market characterized by efficient arbitrage after the introduction of the transatlantic telegraph and the growth of trade. Efficiency is documented using traditional price gap accounting as well as error correction modelling. Markets which traded directly with each other as well as markets which did not trade with each other were integrated. The traditional bilateral focus in market integration studies has been extended to a multivariate approach, which generates new insights into the pattern of diffusion of price shocks in the international economy. Shocks in the major importing nation, Britain, dominated in the emerging market phase, while shocks in the major exporting economy, the United States, dominated international price movements at the end of the nineteenth century.