Robert A. Leone

Who profits : winners, losers, and government regulation

A Harvard economist shows how all public policies create winners and losers in the marketplace and how corporate managers and policy makers can use this knowledge to maximize their gains and minimize their losses.

Teaching management without cases

Many of the qualities of case method teachitig stem from the classroom method and not merely from the case. This article describes five noncase exercises designed to achieve purposes that cases are often used to accomplish, but which experience indicates, can do the job more easily. They are all based on the proposition that attention to the classroom method and not merely to the case will allow instructors to teach public management more effectively.

Restraining auto imports: Does anyone win?

The conventional wisdom suggests that import restraints help the protected domestic industry at the expense of consumers. In the longer term, however, trade restraint may encourage foreign firms to adopt new and more threatening business strategies, such as upgrading the quality of their products or moving plants to the United States. If these long-term dynamic effects of restraint are considered, trade restraints may prove harmful to the domestic industry as well as consumers.

Welfare reform and work

The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families or TANF program, which in 1996 replaced a program called Assistance to Families with Needy Children or what many called “welfare,” is just one of many government services, benefits, and programs that in some way add to the incomes of or provide services to many socio-economic groups in society. The program offers minimal cash benefits and has extensive rules about the work of public assistance recipients that govern everything from the requirement that women report the names of their children’s fathers to whether they may pursue education and training during hours when they are expected to be engaged in work activities in order to qualify for assistance.

Some complications in the measurement of environmental control impacts: A case study of water pollution controls

Abstract This paper examines several complications in the measurement of the impact of government regulations on industry. It focuses on problems of water pollution control, but its lessons apply to almost any exogenous and discontinuous change in factor costs whether regulation induced or not. Among the problems addressed are: estimation of industry cost curves; economic criteria for identifying the technical alternatives to be included in engineering studies of regulatory impact; choice of minimum cost abatement methods; sensitivity of findings to factor price changes; managerial criteria for selection of control methods; intra-industry disaggregation of impacts; dynamic economic process of adjustment to controls. The methods demonstrated are microanalytical in nature. This paper does not examine the larger social questions regarding the effectiveness of regulation.