post-war economics' dead end (part 1)

In the first of two articles Sir Alfred Sherman, advisor to Conservative leaders in the 1970s and 1980s and a founder of the Centre for Policy Studies, claims that post-war economics has reached a dead-end.     

The averch and Johnson analysis of public utility regulation twenty years later

The Averch and Johnson model of a rate-of-return regulated firm seems to have captivated economists and focused their attention on modest technical inefficiency. Pricing distortions, which were revealed by Welliscz, and the incentive for more extreme technical distortions, which was described by Westfield, are not as widely considered or even understood twenty years after the articles appeared. Analysis using uncertainty and dynamic methods has also failed to treat the full range of rate-of-return implications. To do justice to these original contributions more effort is called for in designing new institutions of public utility regulation.     

Foreign trade,resource allocation,and structural adjustment in Yugoslavia: 1976–1980

A multisector computable general-equilibrium model for the Yugoslav economy is used to analyze some of the internal and external causes of the foreign-exchange crisis of the 1976–1980 period. Methodologically, its modeling approach, appropriately modified for institutional differences, can be used to study the behavior of socialist economies in which prices play a role in resource allocation. Empirically, the results suggest that internal policy errors and systemic factors were the predominant force behind Yugoslavia's growing foreign-exchange shortage between 1976 and 1980. J. Comp. Econ., March 1985, 9(1), pp. 46–70. University of California, Berkeley, California 94720.     

Did households’ time preference change due to the Great Recession?

Household time preference for US households, as measured by the planning horizon, was fairly stable for many years, but sharply changed with the onset of the Great Recession. Based on an analysis of a combination of the 1992–2013 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) datasets, time preference increased in 2010 and remained high in 2013, indicating households were less patient after the onset of the recession. This pattern held up even after controlling for household characteristics.     

Trade and Tradability: Exports, Imports, and Factor Markets in the Salter-Swan Model

We extend the Salter-Swan model to include both factor markets and semi-traded goods. In our model, changes in relative factor prices depend on changes in world commodity prices, factor endowments, and the trade balance. In contrast, only changes in world commodity prices can affect factor prices in the neoclassical trade model. The inclusion of semi-traded goods weakens the magnification effect in both the Stolper-Samuelson and Rybczynski theorems. When imports and domestic goods are poor substitutes, a characteristic of some commodities in developing countries, the sign of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem is reversed.