John C. Moorhouse

Is Tullock correct about Sunday closing laws

ConclusionThe evidence presented in this note suggests that, other things equal, the imposition of a Sunday closing law reduces the number of food stores in a given market. This finding directly contradicts Tullocks hypothesis about the long-run effects of Sunday closing laws on investment in food stores. By implication, the evidence also casts doubt on the appropriateness of using Sunday closing laws as an example of a government sanctioned privilege that generates no long-run benefits even to those who sought the grant of privilege in the first place. But there is little surprise in all this, particularly if the real impetus behind blue laws comes, not from store keepers seeking higher profit margins, but from those of certain religious convictions. As the preamble to the Arkansas statute says, ‘Keeping a grocery open on Sunday is a temptation to vice ....’ (p. 569). However, while Tullocks particular illustration may be a poor one, his main thesis concerning ‘the transitional gains trap’ remains a useful insight.

Property Rights, Technology, and Internet Distribution

Lost in the discussion of the rapid growth of e-commerce is the role of the Internet as a means for the direct distribution of electronic goods and services. Any product that can be reduced to a string of digital code—text, images, and data—is capable of being transmitted over the Internet. These information intensive goods fall into three broad and overlapping categories: information goods, professional services, and entertainment goods. This paper discusses the implications of Internet distribution for competition, product quality, and pricing in consumer markets and how encryption technology addresses the property rights questions raised by online distribution.

The effects of selective decontrol in the NYC rental housing market

During the past decade, over 200 cities in the United States have imposed rent control [Baird, t980, pp. 54-7]. Although most likely a response to the accelerating inflation of the 1970s, this second generation of rent control has been justified on the grounds of the existence of a housing crisis. In different locales the crises are described variously as arising from a housing shortage, low vacancy rates, rent increases, tenant hardship, housing deterioration, lack of new construction, or environmental necessity [Baar and Keating, 1975, p. 490]. Invariably, newly enacted rent control ordinances are presented as temporary measures. Presumably, policymakers view the imposition of rent control and its concomitant effects as reversible after the housing crisis, however defined, has passed. But is this assumption correct? Does decontrol restore market rents, maintenance levels, optimal crowding, and tenant mobility? Or are housing units permanently altered by virtue of their having been under rent controls? These are important issues in evaluating rent control as a feature of local housing policy. Surprisingly little empirical work has been done on the relationship between rent control and housing quality, crowding, and tenant turnover. Furthermore, the authors have found no empirical studies dealing with decontrol. The purpose of this paper is to make a modest contribution to understanding the efficacy of decontrol by exploring the effects of selective decontrol in New York City (NYC). The data used in this study are taken from the 1968 Special NYC Housing

Some Properties of R. G. D. Allen's Treatment of Kalecki's 1935 Model of Business Cycles

More than sixty-five years have passed since Michal Kalecki (1935) published one of the first formal mathematical models of business cycles. His paper presents a closed-form analytic solution. This characteristic, among others, sets Kaleckis work apart from that of contemporary literary business cycle theorists such as Friedrich A. Hayek (1935) and John Maynard Keynes (1936).