ECONOMICS AND 100 YEARS OF ANTITRUST: INTRODUCTION

Editor's Note: I wish to thank the symposium editors, George Bittlingmayer, Associate Professor, and Gary Walton, Professor, Graduate School of Management, University of California Davis, Davis, CA., for their special efforts and valuable input as they shepherded these papers through the refereeing and editorial process. I also wish to thank Rodney T. Smith, Professor of Economics, Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate School and Coeditor of Economic Inquiry, who served as coordinator of the symposium efforts, and Carolyn Williams, assistant to the editor, who served as liaison between Economic Inquiry, the symposium editors and the authors. These combined efforts have resulted in the exciting collection of papers that follow.     

THE ECONOMICS OF CARPOOLS

The paper shows how separate parts of a work trip enter the decision to carpool, and examines how the size of a carpool is related to the gasoline price, the wage rate, speed limits, and other factors. The paper also suggests that policies designed to promote carpooling may produce perverse effects on gasoline consumption.     

THE ECONOMICS OF TERRORISM

This paper treats terrorism as an economic phenomenon— as a way to understand it and to control it. It uses the tools of substitution, innovation, and cycles and concludes by noting the importance of intelligence and that the most valuable approach to defeating terrorism is that of denying resources to the terrorists rather than attempting to protect assets at risk. It notes that we are probably not any safer than before the implementation of the post–9/11 strategies and emphasizes that new initiatives must be undertaken to prevent terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction.     

THE ECONOMICS OF AEROBICS

This study presents a simple model that weighs the benefits and costs of aerobic exercise to the individual. The model assumes that adding years to life serves as the primary benefit of exercise, and that hours of exercise over a lifetime serve as the cost. Given previous estimates of individual rates of time preference this study finds that people act rationally when they choose to watch a track event rather than choose to run themselves. (JEL I1)     

THE IMPACT OF CLASSROOM EXPERIMENTS ON THE LEARNING OF ECONOMICS: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

This paper provides limited evidence on the effectiveness of a simple classroom experiment. In different courses in environmental economics or public finance, a brief take-some game was performed. Students who took part in this classroom experiment, as well as those who just watched it, were more successful in answering a multiple-choice test on the "tragedy of the commons" than control groups from the same courses.     

THE INFLUENCE OF IDEOLOGY ON CONGRESSIONAL VOTING

This paper investigates the influence of ideology on congressional voting. The conceptual framework is based on the assumption that the congressman's objective is the maximization of the expected value of his office. A comparative analysis of voting on two proposed floor amendments to the U. S. House Administration Committee's 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act bill indicates that congressmen will ignore ideological considerations when the opportunity cost of not ignoring them is sufficiently high. Voting on one of these amendments is found to be consistent with shirking as broadly defined.     

THE ECONOMICS OF EMERGENCY MEETINGS

In this article, we examine the timing of emergency meetings. Meetings are critical to the success of organizations, allowing them to coordinate information, discuss strategies, and realign policies to meet their objectives. We treat the emergency meetings between scheduled meetings as real options. The optimal strategy involves time‐varying threshold values that, when exceeded, trigger an emergency meeting. The model explains why organizations need both scheduled and emergency meetings. The model also predicts more frequent emergency meetings during periods of high volatility and a hump‐shaped distribution for the timing of emergency meetings. We find empirical support for these predictions using data from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and the Federal Open Market Committee of the U.S. Federal Reserve system. (JEL C44, C61, C63)     

THE RISE OF THE CHICAGO PACKERS and THE ORIGINS OF MEAT INSPECTION and ANTITRUST

The Meat Inspection Act of 1891 and the Sherman Act of 1890 are closely tied. This link makes clearer Congress' intent in enacting the legislation. Both laws were products of economic conditions after 1880 and reflected, in part, widespread concern about the market power of Chicago meat packers. The concerns of local slaughterhouses, which were being displaced by new, low-cost refrigerated beef, and of farmers, who sold livestock to the large Chicago packers, were echoed elsewhere by other small businesses and farmers, who feared for their livelihood during a time of structural change in the economy.     

THE POLITICAL ECONOMICS OF THE ARAB SPRING

There were large differences in the responses of Arab dictators to the Arab Spring protests. To understand these differences, I present a stylized model of how a dictator responds to mass protests for democratization in a polarized country with two ethnic or religious groups. In this model, the dictator's response crucially depends on oil revenues and his affiliation to either the majority or the minority group. I document that the model's predictions are consistent with the observed differences in the Arab dictators' responses. Hence, ethnic politics and religious divides may play an important role in political transitions and regime changes. (JEL D72, D74)     

THE ECONOMICS OF FAMILY FORMATION*

In this article an economic model of the determinants of first marriage is formulated and then empirically tested. The model incorporates household production theory and search theory in order to explain the incentives to marry and the determinants of the age at first marriage. Age at first marriage is viewed as depending on the determinants of entry into the marriage market and the duration of search for a spouse. Empirical results from the 1967 Survey of Economic Opportunity show a negative effect of male wages and a positive effect of female wages on own age at marriage. Additionally, education and urbanization are found to have positive effects and number of children a negative effect.     

THE INFLUENCE OF RELATIONSHIP ENHANCEMENT TRAINING ON DIFFERENTIATION OF SELF

The effectiveness of the Relationship Enhancement (RE) program (Guerney, 1987a) in increasing functional and basic levels of differentiation of self (Bowen, 1987a) was examined. Participants were 20 married couples who received training in relationship enhancement skills over six 2 1/2-hour sessions. Measures of differentiation of self, quality of relationship, and anxiety were obtained before and after training and at follow-up. The data show that significant increases in the functional and basic levels of differentiation of self occurred, a significant increase in the quality of relationship occurred, and significant negative correlations were found between differentiation of self and anxiety.     

THE LAW OF ONE PRICE REVISITED: NEW EVIDENCE ON THE BEHAVIOR OF INTERNATIONAL PRICES

This paper is an empirical investigation of the long-run behavior of international prices at the microeconomic level. It analyzes the time-series behavior of a unique set of carefully matched, disaggregated export prices for manufactured goods from the U.S., Gemany, and Japan over the period 1974–90. The results provide little evidence of a long-run linear relationship between global prices of similar export goods from different sources, casting doubts on the empirical relevance of the law of one price.