Should rules be simple?

The principal argument of the paper is that in an incomplete information setting, where the private sector lacks information of government objectives and has to learn about the policy rule by direct observation and estimation, simple ‘sub-optimal’ rules may outperform the more complicated rule which is optimal under complete information. This result is demonstrated by simulations using an overlapping contract rational expectations model. The paper thus provides some formal reasoning to support arguments for simplicity associated with credibility and the need for the private sector to be able to monitor policy.     

Sovereign state at bay

Among his books are Conservative Millenarians; The Search for Historical Meaning;and a monograph on Carl Schmitt.     

Alienation and the adversary culture

He is author of The Many Faces of Socialism; Soviet and American Society: A Comparison: Political Pilgrims;and, most recently. The Survival of the Adversary Culture.     

Family processes and the competence of adolescents and primary school children

Associations were examined between 12 measures of family process and 6 measures of personal and social competence for 102 adolescents aged 15–16 and 99 children aged 8–9. Canonical correlations analysis revealed that general competence among primary school children was associated with high levels of support from parents, a high allocation of household responsibility, a high level of parental control, and a low level of parental punishment. Among adolescents, general competence was associated with a high level of support from parents, a low level of parental control, a high allocation of household responsibility, parental use of induction, a low level of parental punishment, high-quality sibling relationships, and high family cohesion. The findings suggest that as children enter adolescence, general competence becomes more closely bound up with the quality of sibling relations and the degree of parental control, and less closely bound up with support from parents.The data reported herein were collected as part of the Children in families Study, designed by Gay Ochiltree (fellow) and Don Edgar (director) of the Australian Institute of Family Studies. This article is based on a paper presented at the Second Australian Family Research Conference, November 1986, Melbourne, Australia.Paul R. Amato obtained his Ph.D. in psychology from James Cook University in Australia. His interests lie in social psychology, socialization, and family interaction.     

A Count Data Model of Technology Adoption

This paper investigates the main determinants of the adoption of flexible production technologies (FPTs), using a plant-level dataset of Portuguese manufacturing industry. Besides using a new dataset, this paper extends the framework of previous studies on technology adoption by taking into account the effect of demand uncertainty as an additional determinant of adoption. In order to examine this relationship, several econometric models for count data are estimated. These models deal with the discrete nature of the dependent variable and firm specific unobservable characteristics arising from the cross-section context. The main findings of the paper are: (i) rank effects and technological regimes are important determinants of technology adoption, as put forward in previous models of technology diffusion; (ii) demand uncertainty has a significant positive impact on the likelihood of adopting FPTs, which suggests that technological heterogeneity is important when modelling firms' investment decisions; (iii) the estimates were improved after controlling for excess zeros and overdispersion that characterizes our data.