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The steady rise in the premiums charged to art buyers at auction (above hammer price) has been underway since 1992. This article, using a stable and bounded sample of repeat purchase of American works created before 1950, reveals that this tact has reduced hammer prices for that art. However, renewed and hyper-competitive efforts to bring more and higher quality art to market by the two main houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have resulted in general profitability. Nevertheless, we calculate that a rise in buyers’ premia at Sotheby’s, a publically traded company, has reduced revenues and profits below their potential in the absence of such increases.

Effect of Nb doping in the range of 0∼4 at% on 1 μm thick highly {100}-textured Pb1.1(Zr0.52,Ti0.48)O3 films has been investigated. Texturing of {100} as high as 97% is obtained for all the films due to the incorporation of a few nanometers thick Pb1.05TiO3 seeding layer. Overall, maximum polarization, remanent polarization, squareness, and coercivity decrease with Nb doping level. The PZT film with 3% Nb shows the maximum effective transverse piezoelectric coefficient −e 31,f of 12.9 C/cm2, which is 5∼15% higher than those films with other doping levels.

In support of Fomby and Murfin's (2005) article published in this journal, we demonstrate empirically, rather than theoretically, the severe consequences of using Heteroscedasticity and Autocorrelation Consistent (HAC) SEs in regression-based financial event studies. Applying an event study to a recent merger, we show that the use of HAC SEs render misleading conclusions. Critical values for t-tests on the event dummy variables are about 15 times larger than the nominal values using only a year of daily return data. Even with samples of only 100 returns, critical values exceed nominal critical values by a factor of 10.

Financial event studies using daily stock returns are frequently used to evaluate antitrust policy and to ‘predict’ the consequences of mergers. Although there is ample evidence that daily stock returns are not normally distributed, traditional asymptotic results are often used for hypothesis testing. We suggest some general results concerning the conditions under which using ±1.96 as critical values for hypothesis testing under or over state the true significance levels. Further, we investigate the cause of non‐normal event study residuals and find that a possible alternative explanation to one in which non‐normality of residuals is the consequence of omitted events.

With third country bonds added to the monetary model of exchange rate news, third country news would have a theoretical effect on exchange rate news. The present paper uncovers empirical evidence of third country (USA) news for a number of exchange rates. Further, insignificant income, interest rate, and inflation variables in the two country model become significant with third country news, suggesting model misspecification. The unexplained variance of exchange rates may not be due to speculative bubbles as supposed, and foreign exchange markets may not be as efficient as they have appeared.

Using a point-to-point model of toll demand, this paper provides estimates of own-price demand elasticities for international message telephone service. The study improves on previous studies by using more recent data and endogenizing price. Consistent with earlier studies, the demand for IMTS is found to be price inelastic, about −0.28 on average, in the short-run and near unitary elastic, −1.04 on average, in the long run. Both the level and the elasticity of demand are found to be positively related to the size of the telephone network. The own-price elasticity of demand for a select group of countries is provided.

Good estimates place ‘hard core’ smoking rates in the United States at approximately 25%, with little change over the decade of the 1990s. This paper examines the possibilities of ‘harm reduction’ with the use of smokeless tobacco. Specifically, using an econometric model we seek to determine whether an increase in the use of smokeless tobacco would lead to reduced smoking rates in the United States. Applying our model to the NHANES III (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) we find that the use of smokeless tobacco by an average U.S. male smoker would increase the average probability of smoke cessation by over 10%. Approximately 3 million additional ‘quits’ would result for 26 million smokers. Our study permits an examination of cessation by age groups and we find that males who use smokeless tobacco between 16 and 65 have a 10–14% probability of quitting but that the probability falls beyond age 66. Important implications for life extension and health costs would attend these results with, u...

In sweeping revisions the US Telecommunications Act of 1996 relaxed rules respecting broadcast TV ownership regulations. In particular Congress directed the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to conduct a rulemaking on whether the 'duopoly rules' preventing businesses from owning multiple broadcast stations in the same market should be relaxed, modified or eliminated. Naturally, this directive raises questions concerning competition. Specifically, would concentration and consolidation of local media firms have deleterious effects on advertising rates, output and consumer choice? In the present paper we examine, using own-price and cross-price elasticity demand estimates, the question of whether local TV markets constitute a separate market for advertising. Our structural tests, with appropriate caveats, reveal that local TV advertising is not, by itself, a distinct market - one relevant for antitrust action.

In March 1997, the Supreme Court upheld the must-carry provisions of the 1992 Cable Act on the grounds that they insured the survival of the "free" over-the-air television. This article empirically evaluates the efficacy of must-carry in preserving free television and shows that non-network broadcast stations were able to increase viewer share after must-carry, lending support to the preservation rationale. The empirical analysis also indicates that this increase came exclusively from network stations, not cable programming.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, we warn analysts against the use of structural coefficient estimates alone for deducing quantitative inferences concerning many policy experiments. Second, we offer a potential solution to the problem by proposing a mutatis mutandis approach to deducing the ‘full effect’ of a policy change on the endogenous variables of the model. Finally, we show that this approach yields consistent estimates of the reduced form parameters, the true solution to the difficulty. An illustration is provided.

We examined phosphorothioate oligodeoxyribonucleotides (ODNs) directed against bcr in exon 3 or exon 2, which are rearranged with exon 2 of abl (B3A2 and B2A2) at t(9;22) of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Since these ODNs are designed to be CML cell specific, we studied their effects on the human CML cell line K562, which is known to have B3A2 rearrangement, and leukemic cells from patients, as well as normal hematopoietic stem cells in vitro. In vitro experiments were performed to determine a potential role of these two ODNs as ex vivo purging agents. Incubation of B3A2 antisense at 40, 80, and 120 micrograms/ml with K562 CML cells for 72 hours at 37 degrees C resulted in 44%, 56%, and 63% reduction of CFU-L as compared to controls. In contrast, B3A2 sense and B2A2 antisense had no significant growth inhibitory effect on K562 cells. Incubation of B3A2 and B2A2 antisense ODNs at concentration of 80 micrograms/ml at 37 degrees C for 36 hours with normal peripheral blood stem/progenitor cells (PBSC) resulted in 124% and 98% CFU-GM formation as compared to untreated controls, respectively. However, incubation of PBSC with B3A2 and B2A2 sense-ODNs resulted in a 22% and 44% reduction in CFU-GM, respectively. In order to determine the ex vivo purging effects of bcr-abl ODNs, the K562 cells were mixed with PBSC from normal donors at a ratio of 1:20 (CML:PBSC). The mixture of cells was then incubated with B3A2 antisense at 80 micrograms/ml for 36 hrs at 37 degrees C. After incubation, no CML cells were detected by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) as compared to untreated controls. These results were confirmed by RT-PCR using bcr-abl primers and mRNA isolated from the mixture of cells. Further, these results support the hypothesis that bcr-abl antisense ODNs are potentially effective agents for ex vivo purging of autologous stem cells before transplantation to eliminate/reduce the burden of leukemic cells. No significant toxicity to normal hematopoietic stem/progenitor cell population by the bcr-abl antisense ODNs was observed. Although unanticipated reductions in normal hematopoietic progenitor cells (CFU-GM) were observed with sense ODNs, no reduction in CFU-GM was observed with unrelated phosphorothioate ODN controls.

Studies of the causes of absence from work tend to indicate uniformly that smokers miss more work than non-smokers. Some estimates of this increased smoker absenteeism range as high as 32%, or about 81 million additional lost days of work per year in the US alone. Unfortunately these studies, in the main, employ only a simple means difference test as a statistical basis for their deductions, and hence are incapable of determining whether smokers miss more work because they smoke or for other reasons common to smokers as a group. In this study, we posit a native model of absenteeism and employ Tobit analysis to estimate its response to various determinants using data from the 1968 PSID. We than empoly a Blinder-type decomposition technique to attempt to determine the amount of absenteeism attributable directly or indirectly to smoking behaviour of workers. Our results suggest that smokers miss no more work than non-smokers because they smoke. Rather smokers tend to be younger, heavier drinkers, blue collar...

(1976). Instrumentality versus authenticity: A comparative study of language contact in Tecumseh, Ontario and Lachute, Quebec. Paper in Linguistics: Vol. 9, Language Use in Canada, pp. 39-90.

The traditional approach to measuring the extent of discrimination by decomposing group mean differences into endowment and residual differences implicitly treats estimated coefficients as deterministic. Since these estimates are affected by sampling variability, they are, in part, stochastic. Hence, procedures are available to test the statistical significance of these differences. This paper shows that Chow-type tests can be used as direct tests of the statistical significance of the residual difference. Further, it demonstrates that the application of these formal inferential statistical tests to models of wage and salary discrimination can lead to interpretations of the results which differ from earlier interpretations. Two studies, Blinder (1973) and Hirsch and Leppel (1982), are replicated and the testing criteria suggested in this paper is used to determine results. The conclusions of these earlier studies are not supported by the statistical analysis presented in this study. There is no statistica...