not all rivals look alike estimating an equilibrium model of the release date timing game a very serious game of strategy is at work a cross between chess and chicken which studio distribution chiefs play year round but with increasing intensity during the summer and holiday release period new york times december 6 1999 hubris hubris if you only think about your own business you think i ve got a good story department i ve got a good marketing department we re going to go out and do this and you don t think that everybody else is thinking the same way in a given weekend in a year you ll have five movies open and there s certainly not enough people to go around joe roth chairman of walt disney studios answering a question about the large number of major movies opening within days of each other los angeles times december 31 1996 i introduction the number of americans who go to the movies varies dramatically over the course of the year and sometimes more than doubles within a period of two weeks at the same time the first week accounts for almost 40 of the box office revenues of the average movie the combination of these two facts makes the timing of launching a new movie a major focus of attention for distributors of movies with virtually no subsequent price competition the movie s release date is one of the main short run vehicles by which studios compete with each other in this paper i develop and estimate a model of discrete games which allows me to analyze this release date timing game most empirical industry studies focus on price and quantity competition taking other product characteristics as given in many industries however prices play a very small role and competition is channeled through other product attributes the entertainment industry is a prime example competition among movies television programs or broadway shows is on nonmonetary product attributes such as content advertising and time therefore understanding competition in such industries requires a model that endogenizes some of these product attributes especially those that can be changed in the short run this paper provides a framework in which release decisions can be endogenized and nonprice competition can be analyzed the absence of price competition is useful because it allows the focus of the analysis to be on the timing dimension without relying on assumptions about the nature of the postrelease price competition 1 together with the frequent timing decisions associated with different movies this makes the motion picture industry quite attractive for empirical analysis of the timing game this industry however is not the only example in which timing decisions play a central role similar timing considerations are also important in the release decisions of books compact disks and other new products as well as in the scheduling decisions of major events television programs flight schedules and promotional sales 2 when taking on a new project distributors of movies typically plan for a friday release which falls within a relatively short window of time carefully chosen to match the type of the movie this makes the choice of the release date a very discrete one the exact friday within the season is generally determined by a strategic timing game played among distributors before each release season distributors scramble to release their movies on big holiday weekends when demand is high when doing so each distributor tries to release on the attractive holiday weekend and at the same time to deter competitors from doing the same the extent to which distributors are successful in doing so largely depends on the quality of the movies at their disposal and on the way they can compete with movies released by other studios thus modeling this timing game must account for the asymmetries among movies and for the variation in these asymmetries across release seasons specifically i develop and estimate a sequential move game with private information i assume that the observed release date decisions are the equilibrium outcome of such a game

international institutions and the volatility of international trade during the past half century states have established a large number of international trade institutions both multilateral and regional in scope the existing literature on this topic emphasizes that these agreements are chiefly designed to liberalize and increase the flow of overseas commerce yet such institutions have another function that has been largely ignored by researchers namely reducing volatility in trade policy and trade flows exposure to global markets increases the vulnerability of a country s output to terms of trade shocks governments seek to insulate their economies from such instability through membership in international trade institutions particularly the world trade organization wto and preferential trading arrangements ptas we hypothesize that these institutions reduce the volatility of overseas commerce we further hypothesize that because market actors prefer price stability trade institutions increase the volume of foreign commerce by reducing trade variability this article conducts the first large scale multivariate statistical tests of these two hypotheses using annual data on exports for all pairs of countries from 1951 through 2001 the tests provide strong support for our arguments ptas and the wto regime significantly reduce export volatility in so doing these institutions also increase export levels

equality employment and budgetary restraint the trilemma of the service economy this article presents an analysis of the postindustrial economy from a political economy perspective it identifies a set of specific distributional trade offs associated with the new role played by the services sector as the chief source of employment growth in advanced democracies over the last three decades it is argued that three core policy objectives budgetary restraint wage equality and expansion of employment constitute a political trilemma that allows only two of the goals to be successfully pursued at the same time using a combination of statistical and case oriented analysis the authors demonstrate the political and economic salience of the trilemma the distributional tensions inherent in each strategy to cope with it and the political institutional constraints under which these strategies are chosen

partisanship tax policy and corporate profit shifting in a globalized world economy political science scholarship has found mixed evidence on the impact of partisanship on the taxation of firms in this article i show that although left leaning governments set tax rates at higher

real sources of european currency policy sectoral interests and european monetary integration in the thirty years before economic and monetary union was achieved european currency policies varied widely among countries and over time in this article i argue that the sectoral impact of regional exchange rate arrangements in particular their expected real effects on european trade and investment exerted a powerful influence on the course of european monetary integration the principal benefit of fixing european exchange rates was facilitation of cross border trade and investment within the european union eu the principal cost of fixed rates was the loss of national governments ability to use currency policy to improve their producers competitive position empirical results indeed indicate that a stronger and more stable currency was associated with greater importance of manufactured exports to the eu s hard currency core while depreciations were associated with an increase in the net import competition faced by the country s producers this suggests a powerful impact of real factors related to trade and investment and of private interests concerned about these factors in determining national currency policies

a political economy theory of trade agreements we develop a model where trade agreements in addition to correcting terms of trade externalities help governments to commit vis a vis domestic industrial lobbies the model allows us to explore how the characteristics of the political environment aect the structure of the trade agreement and the extent of trade liberalization the model also highlights the role of intersectoral capital mobility in determining trade liberalization in a dynamic extension of the model we explore the extent to which trade liberalization occurs gradually and how its speed depends on the fundamentals of the problem

political partisanship and welfare state reform in advanced industrial societies in this article we evaluate two claims made in recent studies of the welfare states of advanced industrial societies first that welfare states have remained quite resilient in the face of demands for retrenchment and second that partisan politics have ceased to play a decisive role in their evolution addressing the first claim we present analysis from a new data set on unemployment insurance and sickness benefit replacement rates for 18 countries for the years 1975 99 we find considerably more evidence of welfare retrenchment during the last two decades than do recent cross national studies second we examine the end of partisanship claim by estimating the effects of government partisanship on changes in income replacement rates in sickness and unemployment programs our results suggest that contrary to claims that partisanship has little impact on welfare state commitments traditional partisanship continues to have a considerable effect on welfare state entitlements in the era of retrenchment

distribution and redistribution in postindustrial democracies this paper analyzes the processes of distribution and redistribution in post industrial democracies we combine a pooled time series data base on welfare state effort and its determinants assembled by huber ragin and stephens 1997 with data on income distribution assembled in the luxembourg income survey lis archive in the case of the lis data we re calculate the micro data in order to remove the distorting influence of pensioners on pre tax pre transfer income distribution we examine the determinants of three dependent variables pre tax pre transfer income inequality post tax post transfer income inequality and the proportional reduction in inequality from pre to post tax and transfer inequality we hypothesized that pre tax pre transfer income inequality would be determined by labor market institutions union density bargaining centralization labor market conditions unemployment and economic structures post industrialism third world imports we hypothesized that the reduction in inequality would be determined by political configurations directly by left government and indirectly via their effect on welfare state generosity by left government and christian democratic government post tax and transfer income inequality was hypothesized to be a product of the combination of labor market variables and political variables the results broadly confirms our hypotheses and the overall fit is very good

shocking intellectual austerity the role of ideas in the demise of the gold standard in britain britain s 1931 suspension of the gold standard remains one of the most shocking policy shifts of the past century conventional explanations focus on changing international conditions alongside the rise of social democracy when britons refused to shoulder the increasing costs of defending the exchange rate the bank of england was forced to abandon the gold standard this article refocuses attention on policy makers causal ideas at critical moments drawing on numerous primary sources held in several archives it reveals a cleavage within the bank over the appropriate response to the flight from sterling following the nervous collapse of the bank s governor the deputy governor shifted the bank s strategy from making defensive rate hikes to pursuing fiscal austerity he then temporarily suspended gold convertibility in a gambit to forestall the election he incorrectly assumed would unseat the gold standard s supporters in parliament when the unintended experiment with a managed float proved successful keynes was able to persuade policy makers to embrace the new exchange rate regime

the politics of trade adjustment versus trade protection the united states trade adjustment assistance taa program seeks to help workers transition away from jobs lost to import competition by contrast trade remedies like antidumping seek to directl

price and variety in the spokes model the spokes model of nonlocalized spatial competition provides a new analytical tool for dierentiated oligopoly and a representation of spatial monopolistic competition an increase in the number of rms leads to lower equilibrium prices when consumers have relatively high product valuations but surprisingly to higher equilibrium prices for in termediate consumer valuations new entry alters consumer and social welfare through price market expansion and matching eects with free entry the market may pro vide too many or too few varieties from a social welfare perspective and the equilibrium price remains above marginal cost even when the number of rms is arbitrarily large

explaining foreign support for china s global economic leadership we analyze the factors that increase the likelihood that other nations will follow china s global economic leadership while our theoretical framework incorporates the conventional argument that china pulls in followers with economic benefits we focus on grievances with the current global order that have the effect of pushing countries toward the rising new leader we find that grievances about global financial instability are particularly important push factors our results show that countries that have experienced more financial crises more variable capital account policies more volatile portfolio capital outflows and more social unrest during imf programs are more likely to support china s global leadership than leaders of nations that have been less exposed to these problems we find no evidence that grievances about global governance or grievances about discriminatory us trade policies are related to foreign support for china s global economic leadership overall our evidence is consistent with the interpretation that leaders want to reform and preserve the wto and the imf which have worked reasonably well for them under us leadership at the same time they have incentives to follow china s economic leadership on global capital flows emphasizing long term infrastructure and development finance over short term flows which under the current order have imposed large costs on many economies

commercial policy variability bindings and market access abstract protection unconstrained by rules often varies substantially over time rules based disciplines such as wto tariff bindings and bindings on market access in services constrain this variability we examine the theoretical effects of such constraints on the expected cost of protection and offer a formalization of the concept of market access emphasizing both the first and second moments of the distribution of protection as an illustration we provide a stylized examination of uruguay round bindings on wheat

the causes of welfare state expansion deindustrialization or globalization an influential line of argument holds that globalization causes economic uncertainty and spurs popular demands for compensatory welfare state spending this article argues that the relationship between globalization and welfare state expansion is spurious and that the engine of welfare state expansion since the 1960s has been deindustrialization based on cross sectional time series data for fifteen oecd countries the authors show that there is no relationship between globalization and the level of labor market risks in terms of employment and wages whereas the uncertainty and dislocations caused by deindustrialization have spurred electoral demands for welfare state compensation and risk sharing yet while differential rates of deindustri alization explain differences in the overall size of the welfare state its particular character in terms of the share of direct government provision and the equality of transfer payments is shaped by government partisanship the argument has implications for the study and the future of the welfare state that are very different from those suggested in the globalization literature

does flexibility promote cooperation an application to the global trade regime do flexibility provisions in international agreements clauses allow ing for legal suspension of concessions without abrogating the treaty promote coop eration recent work emphasizes that provisions for relaxing treaty commitments can ironically make states more likely to form agreements and make deeper conces sions when doing so this argument has particularly been applied to the global trade regime the general agreement on tariffs and trade gatt and its successor the world trade organization wto yet the field has not produced much evidence bearing on this claim our article applies this claim to the global trade regime and its chief flexibility provision antidumping in contrast to prior work this article explic itly models the endogeneity and selection processes envisioned by the theory we find that states joining the wto are more likely to adopt domestic antidumping mech anisms likewise corrected for endogeneity states able to take advantage of the regime s principal flexibility provision by having a domestic antidumping mecha nism in place are significantly more likely to 1 join the wto 2 agree to more tightly binding tariff commitments and 3 implement lower applied tariffs as well

a new perspective on planned obsolescence automobile manufacturers have long had a policy of introducing annual style changes into their new model cars textbook publishers have a policy of periodically bringing out revised editions of their popular books recently ibm changed the operating system used in its personal computers causing a reduction in the compatibility between its old and new machines if one were to ask the typical man in the street to explain what is happening in these markets he would not hesitate before giving the following answer in economists terminology he would say that for the above firms the incentive to introduce new products that make old units obsolete is too high i e the firms have an incentive to practice planned obsolescence of course just as is true for the man in the street economists have also long observed and commented on the speed with which new products are introduced for example galbraith 1958 suggests that the annual model changes of automobile manufacturers are socially wasteful while fisher griliches and kaysen 1962 provide empirical estimates of the costs of these changes there have also been numerous theoretical attempts to model the idea of planned obsolescence or the related idea of killing off the market for secondhand goods but most of these models have in fact considered the choice a monopolist faces concerning how much durability to build initially into his product rather than the monopolist s incentive to introduce new versions of his product over time 1 in this paper i consider planned obsolescence from the standpoint of a firm that can change the nature of what it sells and show that the man in the street is in fact correct in many settings the incentive for a durable goods monopolist to introduce new products that make old units obsolete will be above that which is socially optimal

why do some countries get better wto accession terms than others the process by which countries accede to the world trade organization wto has become the subject of considerable debate this article takes a closer look at what determines the concessions the institution requires of an entrant in other words who gets a good deal and who does not i argue that given the institutional design of accession proceedings and the resulting suspension of reciprocity accession terms are driven by the domestic export interests of existing members as a result relatively greater liberalization will be imposed on those entrants that have more valuable market access to offer upon accession something that appears to be in opposition to expectations during multilateral trade rounds where market access functions as a bargaining chit the empirical evidence supports these assertions looking at eighteen recent entrants at the six digit product level i find that controlling for a host of country specific variables as well as the applied protection rates on a given product prior to accession the more a country has to offer the more it is required to give moreover i show how more democratic countries in spite of their greater overall depth of integration exhibit greater resistance to adjustment in key industries than do nondemocracies finally i demonstrate that wealth exhibits a curvilinear effect on the one hand institutionalized norms lead members to exercise observable restraint vis a vis the poorest countries on the other hand the richest countries have the greatest bargaining expertise and thus obtain better terms the outcome as i show using a semi parametric analysis is that middle income countries end up with the most stringent terms and have to make the greatest relative adjustments to their trade regimes

access to protection domestic institutions and trade policy in democracies previous institutional explanations of trade policy have focused on the role of proportional representation on the promotion of free trade this explanation generates numerous unsolved anomalies and provides limited guidance in explaining the difference between proportional representation countries and between majoritarian countries as well as within country variation in trade policy this article introduces a more general institutional theory that argues that the number of access points provided by institutions is the crucial institutional feature as increasing the number of access points makes lobbying less costly which benefits protectionists from this i hypothesize that the number of parties in government the number of electoral districts the nature of the vote and other such institutions affect the level of protection and that once these factors are controlled for proportional representation has no impact on trade policy i test this theory on tariff data in the post world war ii developed democracies and find broad support for these hypotheses this article was previously presented at the 2004 annual meetings of the midwest political science association i would like to thank alan deardorff rob franzese matt golder mike hanmer jude hays cherie maestas corrine mcconnaughy will moore james d morrow won ho park and jeff staton for advice and comments and yoshi ono for excellent research assistance all errors of course remain my own

delegation ratification and u s trade policy why divided government causes lower tariffs recent research on executive legislative relations concludes that divided government causes higher tariffs and inhibits international cooperation i find that divided government leads to lower u s

network externality compatibility choice and planned obsolescence this paper attempts to provide a formal theory of planned obsolescence based on incompatible technologies in the presence of network externalities the author explores how a monopolist s ability to make the new product incompatible with the old version of a product constrains the optimal dynamic behavior of the monopolist the social optimum and the market equilibrium are compared finally the possibility of quality distortion is considered as a commitment mechanism to the future compatibility choice copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

politics institutions and welfare spending in industrialized democracies 1960 82 electoral turnout as well as left and center governments increase welfare effort that the welfare efforts of governments led by particular types of parties show significant differences and vary notably with the strength of oppositional and junior coalitional parties and that relatively neocorporatist centralized and traditionalistic polities are high on welfare effort overall our findings suggest that contrary to many claims both partisan and nonpartisan facets of democratic politics and political institutions shape contemporary social welfare effort

how states ration flexibility tariffs remedies and exchange rates as policy substitutes a close look at the commitments of world trade organization wto members presents a striking paradox most states could raise their duties significantly before falling afoul of their wto obligations moreover such binding overhang varies between countries some could more than double the amount of trade protection they offer overnight whereas others are tightly constrained what accounts for this variation the author argues that more flexibility is not always better obtaining it and subsequently using it are both costly rather than maximize flexibility states thus seek an optimal amount if they have access to policy space through other means such as currency devaluations and trade remedies they will exercise restraint in seeking binding overhang the same supply side logic holds at the domestic level governments strategically withhold binding overhang from industries that are able to rely on trade remedies despite the fact that these tend to have the greatest political clout

power control and the logic of substitution in institutional design the case of international climate finance how do powerful states control international organizations ios in contrast to the conventional wisdom that treats weighted voting rules as the primary means that powerful states use to codify their asymmetric control in institutional design we propose that funding rules are equally important our framework develops a logic of substitution whereby permissive earmark rules that allow donors to stipulate how their contributions to an io are used are a design substitute for weighted voting from wealthy states perspective whether asymmetric control is incorporated in design through voting or funding rules depends on whether egalitarian norms emphasizing political and legal equality or shareholder norms emphasizing influence commensurate with financial power govern voting and representation rights at the io focusing on the domain of climate finance we demonstrate that weighted voting rules are used at international climate finance institutions icfis associated with multilateral development banks but that wealthy states pursued permissive earmark rules at icfis within the united nations system where egalitarian norms are strong in this way powerful donors can exert control over resource allocation even when developing states appear to hold equal influence on governing bodies in addition to providing a reassessment of how power translates into control at ios our framework offers insight into forum shopping behavior and sheds light on substitution dynamics that involve other dimensions of design across a range of issue areas

is german domestic social policy politically controversial this paper investigates empirically the influence of government ideology on social policy using german data examining the funding and the benefits of social security and public healthcare policy my results suggest that policies implemented by governments dominated by left and rightwing parties were similar over the 1951 2007 period leftwing governments however spent more in the 1970s and rightwing governments did so after german reunification in 1990 since policy convergence encourages new parties to enter the political arena and party platforms on social policy matters are likely to undergo further changes in light of demographic change the observed pattern may thus be a transitory phenomenon

the institutional environment for infrastructure investment the empirical evidence that links political institutions to economic outcomes has grown dramatically in recent years however virtually all of this analysis is undertaken using data from the past three decades this paper extends this empirical framework by performing a two century long historical analysis of the determinants of infrastructure investment in a panel of over 100 countries the results demonstrate that political environments that limit the feasibility of policy change are an important determinant of investment in infrastructure copyright 2002 oxford university press

divided government and u s trade policy theory and evidence if different parties control the u s congress and white house the united states may maintain higher import protection than otherwise this proposition follows from a distributive politics model in which congress can choose to delegate trade policymaking to the president when the congressional majority party faces a president of the other party the former has an incentive to delegate to but to constrain the president by requiring congressional approval of trade proposals by up or down vote this constraint forces the president to provide higher protection in order to assemble a congressional majority evidence confirms that 1 the institutional constraints placed on the president s trade policymaking authority are strengthened in times of divided government and loosened under unified government and 2 u s trade policy was significantly more protectionist under divided than under unified government during the period 1949 90

balladurette and juppette a discrete analysis of scrapping subsidies this paper studies the effects of subsidies on durable goods markets in particular we focus on a recent policy in france in which the governments of balladur and juppe subsidized the replacement of old cars with new ones to study this policy we construct a dynamic stochastic discrete choice model of car ownership at the household level the resulting decision rules and equilibrium conditions are used to estimate the underlying parameters of the model using aggregate data these policy functions are used to evaluate the short and long run effects of the french policies we find that these policies do stimulate the automobile sector in the short run but through the induced changes in the cross sectional distribution of car ages create the basis for subsequent low activity further while these policies increase government revenues in the short run revenues in the long run are lower relative to a baseline without intervention

antidumping and retaliation threats abstract we propose and test two ways in which retaliation threats may dampen the antidumping ad activity we observe first the threat of retaliatory ad actions may make a domestic industry less likely to name a foreign import source in an ad petition second the prospect of a gatt wto trade dispute may make government agencies less likely to rule positive in their ad decision using a nested logit framework we find evidence that both retaliation threats substantially affect us ad activity from 1980 through 1998

durable goods monopoly increasing marginal cost and depreciation this paper combines increasing marginal cost and depreciation in a continuous time model of a durable goods monopolist in contrast to the case of increasing marginal cost but no depreciation analysed by kahn and the case of depreciation with constant marginal cost analysed by bond and samuelson steady state output in this model is less than in the competitive case a turnpike result shows that choice of a long enough time horizon can make the equilibrium path of output in a finite horizon game arbitrarily close to the path of the infinite horizon game

seasonality in the u s motion picture industry the observed seasonality of box office revenues reflects both seasonality in underlying demand for movies and seasonality in the number and quality of available movies i separately identify these aspects by estimating weekly demand for movies using movie fixed effects a long panel of movies weekly revenues and restrictions on their decay pattern i find that the estimated seasonality in underlying demand is much smaller and slightly different from the observed seasonality of sales the biggest movies are released at times when demand is highest amplifying the underlying seasonality price rigidities in the industry may facilitate this amplification effect

durable good monopolies with rational expectations and replacement sales a monopoly producer of a durable good is examined under the previously uninvoked assumption that the good depreciates and hence that replacement sales must occur if a fixed stock of the good is to be maintained we find two ways in which the no depreciation result that the monopoly will always at least eventually produce a stock equal to that produced by a competitive market may not hold if the length of the trading period is nonzero the limiting stock produced by the firm will be lower than the competitive stock to ensure the profitability of future replacement sales if the firm is able to constrain its production capacity it may choose a constraint that always binds in the sense that it will be impossible for the firm to achieve a stock equal to the competitive stock

welfare state retrenchment revisited entitlement cuts public sector restructuring and inegalitarian trends in advanced capitalist societies in recent years it has become commonplace for comparativists to emphasize the resilience of welfare states in advanced capitalist societies and the failure of neoliberal efforts to dismantle the welfare state challenging some tenets of the resilience thesis this article seeks to broaden the discussion of welfare state retrenchment the authors argue that a sharp deceleration of social spending has occurred in most oecd countries since 1980 that welfare states have failed to offset the rise of market generated inequality and insecurity and that welfare programs have become less universalistic they stress the distributive and political consequences of market oriented reforms of the public sector

dynamic product diversity the goal of this paper is to study the frequency of new product introductions in monopoly markets where demand is subject to transitory saturation we focus on those types of goods for which consumers purchase at most one unit of each variety but repeat purchases in the same product category the model considers in nitely lived forward looking consumers and rms we show that the share of potential surplus that a monopolist is able to appropriate increases with the frequency of introduction of new products and the intensity of transitory saturation if the latter is su ciently strong then the rate of introduction of new products is higher than socially desirable excessive dynamic product diversity jel classi cation numbers l12 l13

the dynamic provision of product diversity under duopoly abstract this paper builds a dynamic duopoly model to examine the provision of new varieties over time consumers experience temporary satiation and hence higher consumption of the current variety lowers demand for future varieties the equilibrium can be characterized by a combination of monopolistic pricing and nearly zero profits competitive timing in particular if the cost of producing a new variety is not too low then firms tend to avoid head to head competition and set the short run profit maximizing price however firms tend to introduce new varieties as soon as demand has grown sufficiently to cover costs from a second best perspective the equilibrium may exhibit excessive product diversity however if firms coordinate their frequency of new product introductions then consumers are likely to be harmed it is also shown that equilibrium prices are moderated by two factors first consumers option value of waiting reduces their willingness to pay second competition reduces firms incentives to engage in intertemporal price discrimination

the origins of financial openness a study of current and capital account liberalization theory we assess the determinants of the national regulation of international finance or the comparative degree of national financial openness or closure hypotheses partisanship interacts with a nation s factor endowments to account in part for different international financial policies by governments of the same partisan hue methods we offer a quantitative measure of international financial openness or current and capital account regulation for 21 member countries of the organization for economic cooperation and development for 1950 88 we use regression analysis employing panel corrected standard errors to discover the determinants of financial openness results our main finding is that political partisanship substantially explains openness but does so in complex ways differences in both political institutional arrangements and types of political economy also account for part of the differences in international financial regulation

loosening the ties that bind a learning model of agreement flexibility how can states credibly make and keep agreements when they are uncertain about the distributional implications of their cooperation they can do so by incorporating the proper degree of flexibility into their agreements i develop a formal model in which an agreement characterized by uncertainty may be renegotiated to incorporate new information the uncertainty is related to the division of gains under the agreement with the parties resolving this uncertainty over time as they gain experience with the agreement the greater the agreement uncertainty the more likely states will want to limit the duration of the agreement and incorporate renegotiation working against renegotiation is noise that is variation in outcomes not resulting from the agreement the greater the noise the more difficult it is to learn how an agreement is actually working hence incorporating limited duration and renegotiation provisions becomes less valuable in a detailed case study i demonstrate that the form of uncertainty in my model corresponds to that experienced by the parties to the nuclear non proliferation treaty who adopted the solution my model predicts

the neo luddite s lament excessive upgrades in the software industry we examine two reasons why a monopoly supplier of software may introduce more upgrades than is socially optimal when the upgrade is backward but not forward compatible so users who upgrade reduce others network benefits one explanation involves a commitment problem profits and social welfare may suffer because ex post the monopolist will want to sell the upgraded product to new consumers the second involves consumer heterogeneity here oversupply arises from the difference between the externality that upgrades impose on the marginal and average consumer and from the effect of upgrades on sales of the base good

the modern history of exchange rate arrangements a reinterpretation we develop a novel system of reclassifying historical exchange rate regimes one key difference between our study and previous classifications is that we employ monthly data on market determined parallel exchange rates going back to 1946 for 153 countries our approach differs from the imf official classification which we show to be only a little better than random it also differs radically from all previous attempts at historical reclassification our classification points to a rethinking of economic performance under alternative exchange rate regimes indeed the breakup of bretton woods had less impact on exchange rate regimes than is popularly believed