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Chronicles technological changes in the pulp and paper industry in the United States between 1915 and 1940. Patterns of changes that have been identified; Presentation of a theoretical framework for induced innovation.

The article presents an analysis of the geographic distribution of research papers submitted within the academic finance associations of the United States in the 1970s. The seven U.S. financial associations are identified and characterized by regional- or national-based status. Questions are raised regarding the legitimacy of such divisions, exploring the regional origins and influences of their participating members. It is suggested that the membership of all associations are broadly diverse and therefore are all national in character.

The article presents a comment on the article "Housing Choice and Relative Tenure Prices," by William B. Brueggeman and Richard B. Peiser, published in the November 1979 issue of the "Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis." The author takes issue with the fact that the authors overlooked the more interesting and difficult implications of their work, such as why a bias for home ownership exists, are markets imperfect and what is the length of lag time in adjustment, what impact does taxation have on the bias, what is the impact of changing prices and expectation on the bias and adjustment process, and what are the consequences of joint investment-consumption aspects of ownership.

Discusses the relationship between state-issued currency and the ratification of the United States Constitution. Significance of paper money on the economic policies of the colonial legislatures; Role of the constitution on the regulation of money; Importance of state paper money on the money supply of the colonies in the 1700s.

The article discusses the exact amount of the money issued by the United States Congress for the financing of the American Revolution. During the revolution, Congress released paper money otherwise called Continental dollars to finance its expenditures. Past literatures have claimed the exact amount spent but they left behind unclear and conflicting estimates. The article traces back the transactions that took place from the enactment to disbursement of the dollars. The article presents supporting tables on estimates and cumulative total net emissions of the continental dollars.

A Surgical Wound Infection (SWI) Task Force was convened by The Society for Hospital Epidemiology of America (SHEA) to evaluate how SWI surveillance should be done and to identify where more information is needed. The Task Force reached consensus in the following areas. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) definitions of SWI should be used for routine surveillance because of their current widespread acceptance and reproducibility. The CDC definitions have been clarified in an accompanying article ("Report From the CDC"). Direct observation of wounds and traditional infection control surveillance techniques are acceptable methods of case finding for hospitalized patients. The optimal method for case finding postdischarge or after outpatient surgery is unknown at this time. SWI rates should be stratified by surgical wound class plus a measure of patient susceptibility to infection, such as the American Society of Anesthesiology (ASA) class, and duration of surgery. Surgeon-specific SWI rates should be calculated and reported to individual surgeons.

Explores how the banks chartered by states in the United States (U.S.) provide a source of flexibility in state public finance following the decision of the U.S. Constitution to remove the states' power to issue paper money. Role of investment earnings and tax revenues derived from banks in state public finance; Importance of state-bank relationships to public finance.

Empirical studies and much marketplace opinion have it that the spread between private money market rates and the U.S. Treasury bill rate of comparable maturity is due to differential default risk, liquidity risk, and relative supplies. This paper presents an argument and empirical evidence that the bulk of the systematic and medium-term differential between privates rates---in this case, domestic CDs, commercial paper, bankers' acceptances, and Eurodollar CDs---and the T-bill rate is due to the exemption of interest on Treasury securities from state and local taxation. In the case of Eurodollar CDs, the additional and major systematic factor explaining the spread (visa vis T-bills) is the exemption of Eurodollar CDs from the Federal Reserve's "tax" via reserve requirements. An empirical section confirms the role of standard default risk, liquidity risk, and market "absorption" variables in determining short-term deviations from tax-adjusted parity. The tax-adjusted parity condition, however, remains the major systematic and medium-term determinant---certainly more important than has been suggested previously in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on an article about private banking in the United States. Discussion on the work of economist Herman Kross; Details of economic history; Perception on the role of private bankers.

Comments on articles about economic and business history in the United States. Details of private banking; Views on capital accumulation.

The article presents commentary on two articles, "An Appraisal of Residential Property Tax Regressivity," by Robert H. Edelstein and "A Study of the Demand for Housing by Low Versus High Income Households," by James R. Follain, published in the November 1979 issue of the "Journal of Financial and Qualitative Analysis." The author discusses the commonalities of the two articles: they both address income elasticity of housing and U.S. housing policy. The author breaks down the two discussions and how they inform housing policy as it relates to income elasticity of housing, property tax administration, and the housing demand equation.

Comments on an article about the agricultural productivity of Pennsylvania in 18th century. Discussion on economic development; Details of income distribution; Performance of the agriculture sector in the state.

This paper provides further evidence of the holiday effect in stock returns and additional insight into the effect. This paper reports abnormally high returns on the trading day before holidays in all three of the major stock markets in the U.S.: the NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ. The holiday effect is also present in the U.K. and Japanese stock markets, even though each country has different holidays and institutional arrangements. This study finds that the holiday effects in the U.K. and Japanese stock markets are independent of the holiday effect in the U.S. stock market. Unlike the other seasonal patterns in stock returns, such as January and weekend effects, this investigation of size decile portfolios shows that the size effect is not present in mean returns on preholidays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on an article about the pattern of population growth in farm areas of northern United States. Discussion on population history; Application of cross-sectional analysis; Details of farm settlements.

Although seafood is considered to be an important part of a balanced diet, many national food consumption surveys suggest that seafood is not consumed in sufficient amounts. As consumers are moving to diversify their diet from animal-based protein, it is important to understand the factors influencing consumption of marine foods. This review aims to assess the characteristics of seafood consumers as well as the influences on seafood consumption in Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Systematic search strategies were used to identify relevant journal articles from three electronic databases (PubMed, Web of Science and Embase). Three searches were carried out and identified 4405 unique publications from which 121 met the criteria for the review process. The reviewed studies revealed that seafood consumers were more likely to be older, more affluent and more physically active and were less likely to smoke compared with non-seafood consumers. Sex and BMI did not appear to have a directional association with seafood consumption. The most commonly reported barriers to seafood consumption were cost, followed by sensory or physical barriers, health and nutritional beliefs, habits, availability and cooking skills. The most commonly reported influences were beliefs about the contribution of seafood to health, environmental influences and personal preferences. Based on the findings of this review, future intervention strategies to increase seafood consumption may need to consider affordability and education in terms of health, nutrition and cooking skills. More research is needed to explore the effectiveness of specific interventions at increasing the consumption of seafood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Justin Crowe has written an accessible, thorough, and compelling history of the institutional development of the US Supreme Court and the federal judiciary it sits atop, from their inconspicuous inception in February 1790 to their current status as, perhaps, the most powerful judiciary in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a comparison of the colonial monetary policy during the Seven Years' War. Effect of the standards used by states to finance the war; Factors to be attributed to the success of war finance in Pennsylvania, New York and South Carolina.

The article reports on foreign exchange rates with commentary on the paper, "Issue of Foreign Exchange Management in U.S. Multinationals" by Rita Rodriguez. Rodriguez examines decision making in foreign exchange management through defining foreign exchange risk, the attitudes of management towards foreign exchange risk, and the finance function. Around 50 different multinational corporations in the U.S. were surveyed and interviewed during the research for the paper.

Comments on an article about wealth inequality in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries. Discussion on income distribution; Intergenerational wealth rankings in the country; Criteria on the aggregate wealth of rich families.

Recent theoretical models derive return continuation in a setting where investors have heterogeneous beliefs or receive heterogeneous information. This paper tests the link between heterogeneity of beliefs and return continuation in the cross-section of U.S. stock returns. Heterogeneity of beliefs about a firm's fundamentals is measured by the dispersion in analyst forecasts of earnings. The results show that momentum profits are significantly larger for portfolios characterized by higher heterogeneity of beliefs. Predictive cross-sectional regressions show that heterogeneity of beliefs has a positive effect on return continuation after controlling for a stock's visibility, the speed of information diffusion, uncertainty about fundamentals, information precision, and volatility. The results in this paper are robust to the potential presence of short-sale constraints and are not explained by arbitrage risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on essays about ethnic discrimination and immigrant mobility in the United States. Wage discrimination in the case of Japanese immigrants; Impact of community characteristics on occupational mobility of immigrants; Mobility of Jewish immigrants.

Using stock transactions data along with detailed stockholdings for a comprehensive sample of U.S. actively managed equity mutual funds from 1993 to 2002, this paper empirically examines the effect of liquidity and investment style on the relation between fund size and fund performance. Consistent with Chen, Hong, Huang, and Kubik (2004), I find a significant inverse relation between fund size and fund performance. Further, this inverse relation is stronger among funds that hold less liquid portfolios. The inverse relation between fund size and fund performance is also more pronounced among growth and high turnover funds that tend to have high demands for immediacy. Overall, this paper's findings suggest that liquidity is an important reason why fund size erodes performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an abstract of the paper `The Company Town, the Union, and the Mine Wars: The Role of Institution and Conflict in West Virginia's Early Mine-Labor Market,' by Lawrence W. Boyd, during the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

Presents an abstract of the paper `Establishing a Monetary Union: The United States's Experience,' by Arthur J. Rolnick, Bruce D. Smith and Warren E. Weber, presented at the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

The chain of events that led to the disagreement between the White House and Congress over the increase of the federal debt limit from mid-October 1995 to March 1996 caused a default potential for Treasury securities. We examine the effect of this event chain on the yield spread between commercial paper and Treasury bills and find that both the three- and six-month yield spreads were reduced during the event period. The results suggest that the market charged a default risk premium to the Treasury securities. There is no evidence that these events had a sustained effect on T-bill rates since the yield spread during the post-event period resumed its pre-event level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: (i) To determine the current state of online grocery shopping, including individuals' motivations for shopping for groceries online and types of foods purchased; and (ii) to identify the potential promise and pitfalls that online grocery shopping may offer in relation to food and beverage purchases. Design: PubMed, ABI/INFORM and Google Scholar were searched to identify published research. Setting: To be included, studies must have been published between 2007 and 2017 in English, based in the USA or Europe (including the UK), and focused on: (i) motivations for online grocery shopping; (ii) the cognitive/psychosocial domain; and (iii) the community or neighbourhood food environment domain. Subjects: Our search yielded twenty-four relevant papers. Results: Findings indicate that online grocery shopping can be a double-edged sword. While it has the potential to increase healthy choices via reduced unhealthy impulse purchases, nutrition labelling strategies, and as a method to overcome food access limitations among individuals with limited access to a brick-and-mortar store, it also has the potential to increase unhealthy choices due to reasons such as consumers' hesitance to purchase fresh produce online. Conclusions: Additional research is needed to determine the most effective ways to positively engage customers to use online grocery shopping to make healthier choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests the null hypothesis of no difference in the probability of a trade occurring at the ask using a new database containing intraday bid-ask quotes and transaction prices on both U.S. and Canadian Exchanges. We use LOGIT analysis to test the hypothesis across days of the week, price-stratified portfolios, and times of the day. We find systematic patterns in the probability of a trade at the ask resembling previously documented returns anomalies and conclude that the findings of previous weekend and intraday returns studies may be overstated. The significance of this conclusion substantially increases as one moves from the use of interday to intraday data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this paper is to provide such analyses, using a lifecycle model of consumer choice first developed by Tobin and Dolde and later applied to housing by Dolde. The household is assumed to choose the levels of housing and nonhousing goods so as to maximize the present value of utility over a fixed period. The constraints facing the household include an intertemporal budget constraint and a series of financial or liquidity constraints that depict the difficulties facing the household in borrowing in the mortgage market. Application of numerical methods allows calculation of the optimal household choices under a variety of assumptions about household income and wealth, the rate of inflation, and, most importantly, the mortgage instrument available to the consumer. In addition, various measures of the household's willingness to pay for AMIs are presented. It is worth emphasizing that the focus here is on consumer choice in a certain world; that is, lender behavior is taken as exogenously determined, and the consumer is assumed to know the future path of prices, income, and interest rates. The paper also addresses a related question: what is the effect of fully anticipated inflation on a consumer's housing decisions? Here the direction, as well as the magnitude of the impact, is uncertain. On a theoretical level, Ranney and Schwab find that an increase in the rate of anticipated inflation may have differing effects on the size of the house purchased, depending on the current mortgage market conditions, the financial constraints facing the household, and the level of inflation. In contrast, Wheaton demonstrates that inflation always increases housing demand, even in the presence of borrowing restrictions that require wealth to be nonnegative. However, he assumes that the household may continuously borrow against the capital gains on the house. On an empirical level, Hendershott and Rosen and Rosen suggest that an increase in inflation stimulates... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains that the property tax-income elasticity is a composite outcome, generated by the interaction of market value, housing expenditures, normal income, and assessment practices variables. The empirical findings demonstrate that for our sample of counties, taken from five major United States SMSAs, the residential real estate property tax often appears to be (at least slightly) regressive because of assessment practices. This is true despite the recent theoretical arguments to the contrary--that the property tax is progressive--such as Aaron [1,2] or Musgrave [17]. while the value of housing in our sample counties usually increases faster than household income, this is frequently offset sufficiently by a declining rate of property tax collections per dollar of market value as value increases to create an overall income regressive property tax. Although it is difficult to say whether these results "generalize" to other jurisdictions, it would not be surprising to find that assessment practices do in fact favor more expensive residential properties. Finally, the research in this paper is not intended to be definitive; rather it is intended to be highly suggestive for further work in variations in assessment practices and for empirical work on the distributive effects of the property tax system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on an article about the development of textile industry in the southern region of the United States in 1800s. Discussion on textile labor force; Details of milling operations; Condition of the labor market in the industry.

The article focuses on the formation of neoconservative anticommunist in America. The issue of communism has led to the presence of anticommunist movement. Arno J. Mayer, of Yale University, found two groups constituting this movement which include the Social Democratic League of America and the Anticommunists of the Anglo-American Right. However, the primary aim of the groups has brought them to unite and form the neoconservative anticommunist, to interfere with communist activities.

The article reports on the massive protests of the labor union against oppressive tactics of J.P. Stevens & Co., a giant textile company in the United States. Thousands of people from across the United States took part in a massive protests against Stevens. Massive protests were witnessed against a giant textile company that was constantly violating the law. The company was reluctant to recognize its workers' right to organize. Many companies across the United States have emulated the tactics that J.P. Stevens had initiated in the 1960s and 1970s.

Presents an abstract of the study `Possession is Nine Points of the Law: Land Auctions, Squatting, and the Preemption Acts,' by Mark T. Kanazawa, during the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

This paper compares the newer uniform-price U.S. Treasury auctions to the traditional discriminatory mechanism and examines the extent to which the auction mechanisms are responsible for underpricing. Empirically, I find that even for the newer uniform-price auctions, the average price received by the Treasury is less than the price of the same securities in the concurrent secondary market although this underpricing is reduced by half relative to the older mechanism. From the summary statistics released by the Treasury, I calibrate common value auction models for the two mechanisms and predict the level of underpricing in each auction. I find that the observed magnitude of underpricing in the auctions is consistent with the model's predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a number of firms and banks have decided to "go dark," i.e., deregister with the Securities and Exchange Commission and delist from the major exchanges despite having a large number of outside shareholders. This paper seeks to answer two important questions: Why do firms choose to go dark? What are the consequences for shareholders? We find that firms with fewer valuable growth opportunities, greater insider ownership, lower institutional ownership, higher leverage, and lower market momentum are more likely to go dark. Furthermore, the cost of regulatory compliance is a driving force behind the going dark phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Price discrimination is widespread in the American economy and sometimes can be defended as achieving socially preferable economic outcomes. However, the separation of markets required for price discrimination is often difficult to sustain. Sometimes those whom the seller wishes to charge higher prices are identified by imprecise markers. (Thus, as one example, airlines have traditionally attempted to identify business travelers willing to pay higher fares as those travelers unwilling to stay at their destination over a Saturday night.) Imprecise targeting complicates efforts to prevent strategies of circumvention and sellers sometimes resort to claiming that buyers are morally bound to observe rules which sellers cannot otherwise enforce. This paper examines whether buyers can be morally bound by sellers to put themselves into discriminated-against classes. This paper takes the position that if, as often seems to be the case, there is a social consensus that consumers would not be morally obliged to sort themselves into categories precisely designed to achieve the goals of price discrimination, then there is, a fortiori, a social consensus that consumers are not morally obliged to sort themselves into categories which are only crudely designed to achieve the goals of price discrimination, and which may in fact be counterproductive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews and extends definitions and properties of the three classical performance statistics (the Sharpe Ratio, the Treynor Index, and Jensen's Alpha) by locating them in a more general framework: the Asymmetric Response Model. This allows various notions of beta, which can be related to downside risk, to be employed, and includes, as special cases, a market timing model and the mean-variance CAPM. Due to the general lack of data on fund performance in practice, our emphasis is on small sample analysis where possible. We illustrate our results empirically using data on 15 U.S.-based emerging markets investment funds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an abstract of the paper `The Regional Distribution of Patents in the United States: Invention and Uneven Regional Development,' by Ross Thomson, during the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

Examines the role of fiscal and monetary policies in determining the changing value of the continental, and the consequences for real currency supply during and after the American Revolution. Approach taken by British colonies in the United States to address monetary scarcity.

The article provides commentary on the conference paper "Multiperiod Pension Plans and ERISA," by T. C. Langetieg, M. C. Findlay, and L. F. J. da Motta, which appears in this issue. The author feels that the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and the attendant government corporation, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), have a level of complexity not addressed by the model created in the paper. She feels the paper only dealt with defined benefit plans and disregarded ERISA's tax implication, actuarial considerations, and the potential for lump sum distributions.

The article reports on the political activity of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and discusses the paper, "The Re-Politicization of the Fed" by Edward J. Kane. Kane states that the Fed chairman, Arthur Burns has made the Fed more influenced by politics. However, the author feels that this was necessary for the Fed to create effective monetary and economic policies. He also does not feel that Kane supports his claims that monetary policy during this period became counterproductive due to the politicization.

This paper develops a nonparametric model of interest rate term structure dynamics based on a spot rate process that permits only positive interest rates and a market price of interest rate risk that precludes arbitrage opportunities. Both the spot rate process and the market price of interest rate risk are nonparametrically specified so that the model allows for maximal flexibility in fitting into the data. Marginal density of interest rates and historical term structure data are exploited to provide robust estimation of the nonparametric term structure model. The model is implemented using U.S. data, and the estimation results are compared to those in the available literature. Empirical results not only provide strong evidence that most traditional spot rate models and market prices of interest rate risk are misspecified, but also confirm that the nonparametric model generates significantly different term structures and prices of common derivatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the high frequency reaction of the DEM/USD exchange rate to publicly announced macroeconomic information emanating from Germany and the U.S. By using data sampled at a five-minute frequency, we are able to identify significant impacts of most announcements on the exchange rate change in the 15 minutes post-announcement, although the significance of these effects decreases rapidly as the interval over which the post-announcement change in exchange rates is increased. The direction of the exchange rate response conforms, in general, with a reaction function interpretation whereby reactions to macroeconomic news are driven by the likely operations of monetary authorities in domestic money markets. Further, we detect influences of German monetary policy decisions on the reaction of the exchange rate, and also differences between U.S. and German announcements in the exchange rate reaction time pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the genesis, development, and impact of Military Keynesianism in the U.S. Its impact on the civilian sector is examined in terms of: geographical distribution of military spending, sectoral militarization, labor market and occupational distortion, the militarization of R & D, R & D's impact on American competitiveness in the international market, the parasitic role of the military contract system and the unethical and exploitative role of military contractors. This paper examines the issues related to disarmament and economic conversion with special reference to bills pending before the Congress. The author suggests a redefinition of "national security" in tune with the INF Treaty and the end of cold-war ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that business can be helpfully conceived of as a mediating institution. Drawing upon neo-conservative theology, the author argues that mediating institutions serve a vital function in a free society to provide social justice out of an expanded civil society and provide a framework for a flourishing free market. Such institutions also nourish the attitudinal orientation of solidarity in applying the principle of subsidiarity by which self-interest becomes fulfilled through concern for others. The author further argues that businesses also be conceived of as mediating institutions and thereby be held to criteria of meeting associational needs. In addition to normative reasons for revising the social contract so that businesses do serve the role of mediating institutions, contemporary management theories demonstrate that businesses can also meet their social obligations of creating wealth while meeting associational needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]