AEAweb: JEL: Contents: September 1999

Journal of Economic Literature
Vol. 37, No. 3, September 1999

Contents

Nash Equilibrium and the History of Economic Theory
Roger B. Myerson      1067

Child Labor: Cause, Consequence, and Cure, with Remarks on International Labor Standards
Kaushik Basu      1083

An Essay on Fiscal Federalism
Wallace E. Oates      1120

Macroeconomic Performance and Collective Bargaining: An International Perspective
Robert J. Flanagan      1150

John Nash's formulation of noncooperative game theory was one of the great breakthroughs in the history of social science. Nash's work in this area is reviewed in its historical context to better understand how the fundamental ideas of noncooperative game theory were developed and how they changed the course of economic theory.

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The paper brings together the abundant and somewhat anarchic literature on child labor, isolating its central findings and analytical insights. The investigation is especially directed at the micro economics of why child labor occurs and the sort of policy that is likely to succeed in eradicating it. The paper also outlines new directions for analyzing the dynamics of child labor, the possibility of "child-labor traps" and the circumstances in which voluntary contracts should be banned. Various arguments for and against declaring child labor illegal are examined. A final section explores the economics of international child labor standards.

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This paper is a selective survey of fiscal federalism. It begins with a brief review and some reflections on the traditional theory of fiscal federalism: the assignment of functions to levels of government, the welfare gains from fiscal decentralization, and the use of fiscal instruments. It then explores a series of important topics that are the subject of current research: laboratory federalism, interjurisdictional competition and environmental federalism, the political economy of fiscal federalism, market-preserving federalism, and fiscal decentralization in the developing and transitional economies.

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This paper critically reviews the research on how collective bargaining systems influence macroeconomic performance in industrialized countries. The review considers effects of bargaining level, coordination, and corporatist institutional arrangements. Key empirical results turn out to be quite fragile, and much of the paper explores issues of measurement and specification that account for the fragility. The paper concludes that complementarities between key institutions and between institutions and the economic environment may be more important for macroeconomic performance than the effects of individual institutions, and it suggests research strategies.

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