Drawing from the personal tape recordings made during the presidency of Richard Nixon, we uncover and report in this paper new evidence that Nixon manipulated Arthur Burns and the Federal Reserve ...Bank into creating a political business cycle that helped secure Nixon's reelection victory in 1972. Nixon understood the risks that his desired monetary policy imposed but chose to trade longer-term economic costs to the economy for his own short-term political benefit.
This article examines the stock market response to acquisition announcements during and immediately after the conglomerate merger wave of the late 1960s. The main finding is that acquirer ...shareholders benefited from diversification acquisitions, which implies that diversification was not driven by managerial objectives. It is also shown that the market responded positively to bidders who retained the management of target companies and negatively to bidders who replaced target management. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the market favored acquisitions intended to exploit managerial synergies. It suggests that the market disliked takeovers that were motivated to discipline target management. Evidence on buyer and target price-earnings ratios is presented that is inconsistent with the conjecture that conglomerates were able to mislead investors by earnings-per-share manipulation.
This paper outlines a simple dynamic model of child health incorporating uncertainty to demonstrate the complexity of household decision rules concerning the allocation of resources to and across ...children when there is variation in child traits within the family and in healthiness across families. Empirical results informed by the model indicate that parental behavior responds to unanticipated health outcomes among children and is also significantly associated with more persistent health factors that vary across families. As a consequence, estimates of child health effects of parental decisions, or the fertility effects of child mortality that ignore the behavioral consequences of interfamily and intrafamily heterogeneity are biased.
THIS PAPER INVESTIGATES THE EFFECTS OF TRADE CREATION AND TRADE DIVERSON AMONG THE FOUR MDCS OF CARIFTA DURING THE PERIOD 1968-74. IT ATTEMPTS TO SHED SOME LIGHT ON SOME POSSIBLE COSTS AND BENEFITS ...OF ECONOMIC INTEGRATION TO THE INDIVIDUAL COUNTRIES AS WELL AS TO THE AREA AS A WHOLE. USING BALASSA'S METHOD, THE PAPER ESTIMATES INCOME ELASTICITIES OF IMPORT DEMAND, BEFORE AND AFTER INTEGRATION. THE RESULTS SHOW THAT TRADE CREATION FOR CARIFTA AS A WHOLE DID TAKE PLACE. HOWEVER, THE BENEFITS OF TRADE CREATION WERE UNEVENLY DISTRIBUTED. THE PAPER THEREFORE CONCLUDES THAT EFFECTIVE MECHANISMS MUST BE DEVELOPED TO MINIMIZE THE COSTS TO MEMBER COUNTRIES AND PREVENT ECONOMIC POLARIZATION.