Minimizing the Price of Tranquility: How to Discourage Scotland's Secession from the United Kingdom

What some view as overly-generous funding of the Scottish parliament results from Scotland.s credible threat to secede from the United Kingdom. Scotland is shown to benefit from a second mover advantage in a non-cooperative sequential game over the allocation of public funds. Various reform proposals are criticized for not recognizing that reform of Scottish government finances must be consistent with Scotland.s credible threat. Fiscal autonomy -- in which the Scottish parliament finances a much greater proportion of its spending from Scottish-sourced taxes, is demonstrated to be a viable reform within the existing political context and, in some circumstances, could remove Scotland.s second mover advantage. We also use a cooperative bargaining game model to demonstrate that an Australian style grants commission would not be a viable reform in the British context.

Macroeconomic Rationality and Lucas' Misperceptions Model: Further Evidence from Forty-One Countries

Several researchers have examined Lucas's misperceptions model as well as various propositions derived from it within a cross-section empirical framework. The cross-section approach imposes a single monetary policy regime for the entire period. Our paper innovates on existing tests of those rational expectations propositions by allowing the simultaneous effect of monetary and short run aggregate supply (oil price) shocks on output behavior and the employment of advanced panel econometric techniques. Our empirical findings, for a sample of 41 countries over 1949 to 1999, provide evidence in favor of the majority of rational expectations propositions.

Input Price Variation Across Locations and a Generalized Measure of Cost Efficiency

We propose a nonparametric model for global cost minimization as a framework for optimal allocation of a firm's output target across multiple locations, taking account of differences in input prices and technologies across locations. This should be useful for firms planning production sites within a country and for foreign direct investment decisions by multi-national firms. Two illustrative examples are included. The first example considers the production location decision of a manufacturing firm across a number of adjacent states of the US. In the other example, we consider the optimal allocation of US and Canadian automobile manufacturers across the two countries.