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The historiographic emphasis upon Faith and Edward Deming Andrews in the early twentieth-century rediscovery and promotion of Shaker material culture has undervalued the importance of the Index of American Design. Ruth Reeves, Holger Cahill, and their colleagues within this New Deal government agency were equally influential during the 1930s in selecting key objects that would comprise the sect's canons of furniture and architecture. By excluding ornamental furnishings and fancywork that diverged from the standard of simplicity, the Index conflated Shaker design with modernism and nationalism and continues to inform how Americans view the group to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a typological contribution by describing a stress system that uses syllabic trochees while also displaying characteristics more typically associated with a quantity-sensitive language. The description comes from Tohono O'odham. The rhythm of this language is quantity-insensitive and trochaic, although the language also displays characteristics often associated with quantity-sensitivity (i.e., long vowels, gemination). Examined together, the facts illustrated here demonstrate the prosodic inconsistency of Tohono O'odham: that rhythm and prosodic morphology offer different perspectives on the role played by quantity, and that Tohono O'odham is the first language documented to split its rhythm and prosodic morphology along quantitative lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One possible explanation for the difficulty in controlling the budget is that a major component of spending—tax expenditures—receives privileged status. It is treated as tax cuts rather than as spending. This paper explores the implications of that classification and illustrates how it can lead to higher taxes, larger government, and an inefficient mix of spending (too many tax expenditures). The paper then analyzes alternative budgeting approaches that would explicitly incorporate and measure tax expenditures. It concludes by analyzing ways to control tax expenditures (and other spending) and the special challenges presented by tax expenditures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. physical anthropologists imagined Hawai'i as a racial laboratory, a controllable site for the study of race mixing and the effects of migration on bodily form. Gradually a more dynamic and historical understanding of human populations came to substitute for older classificatory and typological approaches in the colonial laboratory, leading to the creation of the field of human biology and challenges to scientific racism. Elite U.S. institutions and philanthropic foundations competed for the authority to define Pacific bodies and mentalities during this period. The emergent scientific validation of liberal Hawaiian attitudes toward human difference and race amalgamation or formation exerted considerable influence on biological anthropology after World War II, but ultimately it would fail in Hawai'i to resist the incoming tide of continental U.S. racial thought and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investors value the liquidity and safety of US Treasuries. We document this by showing that changes in Treasury supply have large effects on a variety of yield spreads. As a result, Treasury yields are reduced by 73 basis points, on average, from 1926 to 2008. Both the liquidity and safety attributes of Treasuries are driving this phenomenon. We document this by analyzing the spread between assets with different liquidity (but similar safety) and those with different safety (but similar liquidity). The low yield on Treasuries due to their extreme safety and liquidity suggests that Treasuries in important respects are similar to money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs a new empirical approach for identifying the impact of government spending on the private sector. Our key innovation is to use changes in congressional committee chairmanships as a source of exogenous variation in state-level federal expenditures. We show that fiscal spending shocks appear to significantly dampen corporate investment activity. This retrenchment occurs within large and small states and is most pronounced among geographically concentrated firms. The effects are economically meaningful, and the mechanism--entirely distinct from interest rate and tax channels--suggests new considerations in assessing the impact of government spending on private-sector economic activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The projected path of the U.S. national debt is the major challenge facing American economic policy. Without changes in tax and spending rules, the national debt will rise from 62% of GDP now to more than 100% of GDP by the end of the decade and nearly twice that level within 25 years. This paper discusses three strategies that, taken together, could reverse this trend and reduce the ratio of debt to GDP to less than 50%. The first strategy, which focuses on the current decade, would reduce the administration's proposed spending increases and tax reductions that would otherwise add $3.8 trillion to the national debt in 2020. The second strategy, which would augment the tax-financed benefits for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid with investment-based accounts, would permit the higher future spending on health care and pensions with a relatively small increase in saving for such accounts. The third strategy focuses on "tax expenditures," the special features of the tax law that reduce revenue in order to achieve effects that might otherwise be done by explicit outlays. Tax expenditures now result in an annual total revenue loss of about $1 trillion; reducing them could permanently reduce future deficits without increasing marginal tax rates or reducing the rewards for saving, investment, and risk taking. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the high debt to GDP ratio after WorldWar II was reversed and how the last four presidents ended their terms with small primary deficits or primary budget surpluses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses a multicountry macroeconometric model to analyze possible macroeconomic consequences of large future U.S. federal government deficits. The analysis has the advantage of accounting for the endogeneity of the deficit. In the baseline run, which assumes no large tax increases or spending cuts and no bad dollar and stock market shocks, the debt/GDP ratio rises substantially through 2020. The estimates from this run are in line with other estimates. Various experiments off the baseline run are then performed. If the dollar depreciates, inflation increases, but the effect on the debt/GDP ratio is modest. It does not appear that the United States can inflate its way out of its debt problem. If U.S. stock prices fall, this makes matters worse since output is lower because of a negative wealth effect. Personal tax increases or transfer payment decreases of 3% of nominal GDP stabilize the debt/GDP ratio, at a cost of a real output loss of about 1.6% over the next decade. The Fed's ability to offset these losses is modest according to the model. Introducing a national sales tax is more contractionary than is increasing personal income taxes or decreasing transfer payments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper develops a model of directed search on the job in which transitions of workers between unemployment and employment and across employers are driven by heterogeneity in the quality of firm-worker matches. The equilibrium is such that the agents' value and policy functions are independent of the endogenous distribution of workers across employment states. Hence, the model can be solved outside of the steady state and used to measure the effect of cyclical productivity shocks on the labor market. Productivity shocks are found to generate large fluctuations in workers' transitions, unemployment, and vacancies when matches are experience goods, but not when matches are inspection goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically investigates the institutional determinants of whether a tribal government invests in a casino. I find that the presence of Indian casinos is strongly related to plausibly exogenous variation in reservations' legal and political institutions. Tribal governments that ;an negotiate gaming compacts with multiple state governments, because tribal lands span state borders, had more than twice the estimated probability (.77 versus .32) of operating an Indian casino in 1999. Tribal governments of reservations where contracts are adjudicated in state courts, rather than tribal courts, have more than twice the estimated probability (.76 versus .34) of investing in an Indian casino, ceteris paribus. These findings suggest that states' political pressures and predictable judiciaries affect incentives to invest in casinos. This study contributes, more generally, to the empirical literature on the effects of institutions by providing new evidence that low-cost contracting is important for taking advantage of substantial investment opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the elections of 1980 to 2004 to illustrate that political candidates from opposing parties face different incentives in mentioning foreign policy during campaigns and in taking foreign policy positions. The paper demonstrates that citizens connect their own foreign policy views clearly to their evaluations of Republican candidates, but these same foreign policy opinions are much less likely to affect evaluations of the Democratic party and Democratic candidates. In addition, this paper reveals another significant asymmetry—in a threatening environment, Americans reward candidates and parties perceived to hold hawkish positions but even more severely punish candidates perceived to be dovish. Using two datasets, I find that Americans' opinions on defense spending and diplomacy mattered significantly for the type of political leadership the public preferred at election time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the legal doctrine of market share liability from an economic perspective. It explains the underlying economic, or quasi-economic, basis for the doctrine: to obtain appropriate cost internalization of harm-causing behavior where it is not possible to identify which of many producers of identical harm-causing products harmed any single victim. The paper discusses the recent extension of the concept in the lead paint litigation in the U.S. in both products liability and public nuisance cases. The article discusses the very particular requirements necessary for the doctrine to appropriately internalize costs. It also discusses the implications of the passage of time as between manufacture and harm for the application of the doctrine and addresses the view that market share liability can effectively provide a form of insurance for loss. The article shows that application of the doctrine of market share liability serves in many contexts--including with respect to lead paint--chiefly as a form of taxation, which cannot generally be defended on social welfare grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the newspapers of freedom schools, independent schools opened in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, known as the Freedom Summer. It examines the newspaper the "Freedom News" of Holly Springs, Mississippi. The author comments on the schools' efforts to educate black youth about citizenship and freedom and on public schools' censorship of discussions about civil rights. The civil rights organization the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is also considered.

This paper develops a model of comparative advantage in labor markets in which workers with heterogeneous skills choose the occupations that best use those skills. Application to immigration suggests that the occupational differences between U.S. natives and immigrants arise from human capital differences. This principle makes it possible to estimate the human capital endowments of immigrants along five dimensions, including cognitive ability and physical skills, which are difficult to measure directly. Counterfactual simulations describe the distributional implications of immigration for native wages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a model of saving for retired single people that includes heterogeneity in medical expenses and life expectancies, and bequest motives. We estimate the model using Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old data and the method of simulated moments. Out-of-pocket medical expenses rise quickly with age and permanent income. The risk of living long and requiring expensive medical care is a key driver of saving for many higher-income elderly. Social insurance programs such as Medicaid rationalize the low asset holdings of the poorest but also benefit the rich by insuring them against high medical expenses at the ends of their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the debate between the ''consensus'' school of American politics and its various critics, all participants have shown themselves capable of shedding light on different historical periods or particular political conflicts; and, of course, given the complexity of public discourse, many American political controversies lend themselves to elucidation by more than one of them. This paper's purpose is to suggest yet a further way of interpreting American political discourse, one that carries the capacity to illuminate a kind of discursive structure in American politics that goes undiscerned by both the consensus school and its critics. The paper illustrates this alternative approach by using it to interpret discourse leading up to and following the 1996 welfare reforms. It concludes by suggesting that since welfare debate lends itself well to this interpretation, the question of whether other American political debates might also do so is a worthwhile project for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how best to balance the pursuit of security with the protection of civil liberties has been heavily debated in recent years. This paper challenges the conclusions reached in that debate. It argues that although theorists have identified important subsidiary causes of imbalance, they do not address the structural dilemma posed by state secrecy, which creates an information asymmetry that allows officials to manipulate safeguards meant to secure an appropriate balance. Since this asymmetry cannot be easily resolved, imbalance remains a perennial danger that often can be addressed only retrospectively. Unfortunately, retrospection too can be stymied by the executive's control over state secrets, and it can also be undermined by partisanship, even when the relevant information becomes available. With this in mind, the paper identifies mechanisms to limit the abuse of state secrecy and indicates institutional features that may temper the adverse effects of partisanship.Polity (2009) 41, 166–188. doi:10.1057/pol.2008.27; published online 19 January 2009 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Hispanic voting behavior in the 2004 Presidential election. Our research makes a significant contribution to the literature on Hispanic politics, as this is the first study to apply theories of issue and economic voting to a nationwide sample of Hispanic voters. We demonstrate that, similar to Anglos, issues and ideology were highly influential in the vote choice of Hispanics in the 2004 election. However, using the best available data on Hispanic voting behavior for this election, a statewide aggregation of the National Election Pool (NEP), we demonstrate that in this election Hispanic voters placed more emphasis on moral values issues and national security than on traditional domestic issues such as the economy and education. This accounted for Republican gains beyond the overall increase in Bush's vote share from 2000 to 2004. We also show that moral values and national security had roughly equal importance in Bush's victory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines hours worked in continental Europe and the United States from 1956 to 2003. The empirical work establishes two results. First, hours worked in Europe decline by almost 45 percent compared to the United States over this period. Second, this decline is almost entirely accounted for by the fact that Europe develops a much smaller market service sector than the United States. A simple model of time allocation is used to understand these patterns. I find that relative increases in taxes and technological catch-up can account for most of the differences between the European and American time allocations over this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies of nineteenth-century voting behavior have focused on how economic variables influenced elections during this period. Employing underutilized individual-level data from the 1870s, this paper argues that such studies overstate the influence of economic variables upon electoral behavior. Specifically, Democratic voters principally cast ballots on the basis of economic issues and divisions, while Republicans were primarily concerned with religious and cultural issues. These results suggest that the Democratic and Republican parties attracted voters on the basis of different policy dimensions, indicating that both ethnocultural and economic considerations affected both political parties, albeit in divergent ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems of multicandidate races in U.S. presidential elections motivated the modern invention and advocacy of approval voting; but it has not previously been recognized that the first four presidential elections (1788–1800) were conducted using a variant of approval voting. That experiment ended disastrously in 1800 with the infamous Electoral College tie between Jefferson and Burr. The tie, this paper shows, resulted less from miscalculation than from a strategic tension built into approval voting, which forces two leaders appealing to the same voters to play a game of Chicken. Because the Burr Dilemma poses a significant difficulty for approval voting, this paper urges that researchers give more attention to “instant runoff” reform options, especially the alternative vote and the Coombs rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Household investment leads nonresidential business fixed investment over the U.S. business cycle. Because real business cycle theory has not been able to account for this observation, it represents a potent challenge to the view that transitory productivity disturbances are the main source of aggregate fluctuations. This paper reconciles RBC theory with the investment dynamics by extending the traditional home production model to make household capital complementary to business capital and labor in market production. Empirical evidence suggesting that household capital is a complementary input in market production is also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the activities that happened in 2006 for the American Society of Naturalists. The executive meeting held June 23, 2006 emphasized on the success of the three-editor system and electronic papers of the society's publication. The business meeting of the society focused on the presentation of the anti-wedge document to the Joint Council, which establishes medium-term and long-term goals to defend and promote the teaching of evolutionary biology. The next meeting of the joint committee pointed on the support of the Joint Council to the anti-wedge document.

This paper proposes and estimates a static transferable utility model of the marriage market. The model generates a nonparametric marriage matching function with spillover effects. It rationalizes the standard interpretation of marriage rate regressions and points out its limitations. The model was used to estimate U.S. marital behavior in 1971/72 and 1981/82. The marriage matching function estimates show that the gains to marriage for young adults fell substantially over the decade. Unlike contradictory marriage rate regression results, the marriage matching function estimates showed that the legalization of abortion had a significant quantitative impact on the fall in the gains to marriage for young men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on the dynamic linkages between international financial markets focused on bivariate interequity or intercurrency relationships and do not allow a specific role for the currency or equity market, respectively. In this paper, we hypothesize that there are important, yet not well understood, dynamic relationships between international equity and currency markets and these are driven by information spillover via the mechanism of currency order flow. Using a trivariate asymmetric GARCH framework, we find that the relationships between equity and currency markets are significant, bidirectional, and pervasive. These relationships, which coexist with the relationships between U.S. and foreign equity markets, are much stronger in the volatilities than in the means. Importantly, we find strong support for our information spillover hypothesis where currency order flow is the economic mechanism by which information is transmitted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the similarities and differences in the determinants of the three mutual fund exit forms: liquidation, within-family merger, and across-family merger. All defunct mutual fund portfolios have smaller size and lower inflows. A family is less willing to liquidate a portfolio but more likely to merge a portfolio within the family if it offers more share classes. Large families are more likely to merge portfolios within the family, while a family with poor performance is more likely to sell relatively unique portfolios to other families to stay focused. This paper also compares within-objective mergers with across-objective mergers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the determinants and consequences of Latino political representation in the field of K-12 education. The first task is to examine the association between Latino population and the Latino presence on school boards. We then investigate if Latino representation is affected by the electoral structure of school boards, as scholars have reached differing conclusions on whether at-large and ward systems hinder or enhance minority descriptive representation. The next step examines the consequences of Latino representation, specifically whether board membership is associated with the share of Latino school administrators and teachers. The regression results show that Latino population positively affects Latino board representation, but that at-large systems hinder descriptive representation. The primary determinant of Latino administrators is Latino school board membership, and the primary determinant of Latino teachers is Latino administrators. In sum, at-large elections negatively influence Latino educational representation, which produces a ripple effect that ultimately reduces the share of Latino teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about several publications. One of the publications Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy, by John Gilliom, focuses on everyday, individual effects, and broadens the discussion over issues of privacy and surveillance, finding that rights-based language and concerns give way among these women to personal strategies for coping with the control that such surveillance imposes. Detained: Immigration Laws and the Expanding I.N.S. Jail Complex, by Michael Welch, examines the United States government's attitudes toward immigration, focusing on the context in which the 1996 immigration laws were enacted and the affects of that legislation. The State of Nonprofit America in the United States, half of all hospitals, more than one-quarter of the nursing homes, and 90 percent of all orchestras and opera companies fall into the broad category of the nonprofit sector.

Theories of government spending driven by a common-pool problem in the fiscal revenues pool predict that greater districting of a political jurisdiction raises the scale of government. This paper presents evidence on this and related predictions from a cross section of city governments in the United States. The main finding is that, when other plausible determinants of government spending are controlled for, greater districting leads to a considerably greater scale of government activity. The results also show that at-large electoral systems do not, and forms of government that concentrate powers in the office of the executive do, break this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents empirical evidence based on the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey that accounting for limited asset market participation is important for estimating the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. Differences in estimates of the EIS between asset holders and non-asset holders are large and statistically significant. This is the case whether estimating the EIS on the basis of the Euler equation for stock index returns or the Euler equation for Treasury bills, in each case distinguishing between asset holders and non-asset holders as best as possible. Estimates of the EIS are around 0.3–0.4 for stockholders and around 0.8–1 for bondholders and are larger for households with larger asset holdings within these two groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a case study of the origins of American exobiology which focused on the actions and motivations of the life scientists who participated in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences' Space Science Board during the early days of the space program. Information on how exobiology's creators positioned their work in comparison to other space sciences and science fiction; Discussion on Joshua Lederberg's presentation of exobiology as a problem of contamination; Role of life science in space.

This paper estimates a dynamic model of schooling attainment to investigate the sources of racial and ethnic disparity in college attendance. Parental income in the child's adolescent years is a strong predictor of this disparity. This is widely interpreted to mean that credit constraints facing families during the college-going years are important. Using NLSY data, we find that it is the long-run factors associated with parental background and family environment, and not credit constraints facing prospective students in the college-going years, that account for most of the racial-ethnic college-going differential. Policies aimed at improving these long-term family and environmental factors are more likely to be successful in eliminating college attendance differentials than short-term tuition reduction and family income supplement policies aimed at families with college age children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police checking for illegal drugs are much more likely to search the vehicles of African-American motorists than those of white motorists. This paper develops a model of police and motorist behavior that suggests an empirical test for distinguishing whether this disparity is due to racial prejudice or to the police's objective to maximize arrests. When applied to vehicle search data from Maryland, our test results are consistent with the hypothesis of no racial prejudice against African-American motorists. However, if police have utility only for searches yielding large drug finds, then our analysis would suggest bias against white drivers. The model's prediction regarding nonrace characteristics is also largely supported by the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To offer a possible interpretation for recent empirical findings on earnings growth, this paper constructs a simple model with endogenous human capital investment, a distribution of natural abilities, and unbiased technological progress. The model predicts that in the long run, average earnings within any education group will grow more slowly than average wages overall. It also predicts that average earnings in high-education groups ultimately will rise relative to average earnings in low-education groups. In the model, these processes do not imply secular increases in the degree of inequality in the overall cross-sectional distribution of earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's views on a paper related to the abundant sources of imagery in the archaeological record by Rosemary A. Joyce, an American anthropologist. The author appreciates Joyace's paper saying it shows that an archaeology of symbolism can be illuminating when it stimulates interests in establishing types and defining styles. According to the author, Joyce holds that the object of symbolic archeology is the mutual definition of motifs and conventions.

The article presents news and updates on the preservation of art library sources and materials in the U.S. Two courses will be conducted at the Columbia School of Library Service in New York City. The Council on Library Resources has selected twelve members for the Preservation Advisory Committee. A standard for paper has been adopted by the American National Standards Institute.

The article offers news briefs on art libraries in the U.S. as of September 1984. The first newsletter of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association was issued in April. Patricia Batten, librarian for Columbia University, has contributed an article to the book "Priorities for Academic Libraries." Lynn Bentley-Kemp was appointed as the editor of the periodical "PhotographiConservation."

Provides information on several papers about libraries published in the U.S. from 1978 to 1982. "Small Academic Libraries in a Network Setting," by Jovanna Brown; "Telefacsimile Use in U.S. Libraries," by Hans Engelke; "A National Interlibrary Loan Network: The OCLC Approach," by Mary Ellen Jacob.

This paper examines a range of possibilities and offers examples for implementing elements of the Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative in schools and departments of social work. The intent is to identify how deans, directors, and faculty champions can conceptualize actions and roles that engage students, faculty members, schools, and university systems in grand challenges activities. Because there is no precedent in social work for connecting science, practice, and a universal social agenda such as the grand challenges initiative, these ideas are fledgling and emergent in character rather than prototypic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces readers to four invited articles comprising a special section on implementing the Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative. We highlight key contributions made by the authors of each article, which collectively explore implications of the grand challenges initiative for social work education, science, campus leadership, and campus-community collaboration. We describe how substantive points raised in the special section connect to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary literature on the implementation of grand challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a description and an interpretation of what elementary and secondary teachers do to create interest in learning. Generation of interest as a major aspect of teaching; Hands-on activities; Use of personalized content, student trust and group tasks; Rare use of content facts and concepts as a means to establish interest.

This paper analyzes the application of liability to large-scale, long-term hazards. The key features distinguishing such hazards are the long temporal separation between exposure to a hazard and disease and the large damages when injuries finally emerge. The large scale of damages creates a strong incentive to avoid liability payments, and the long temporal separation creates numerous avenues through which parties can avoid paying possible damage awards. The analysis focuses on the incentive to avoid paying damages by vertically divesting production tasks associated with serious occupational risks. Such divestiture can lower liability costs if the small firm operating the risky stage goes out of business before latent injuries emerge or has insufficient assets to pay damages and declares bankruptcy when suits are filed. The paper then presents an empirical regression analysis of small-firm entry into the U.S. economy between 1967 and 1980, the period in which liability laws were changing. The point estimate is that, ceteris paribus, liability changes appear to have led to a large increase in small corporations in hazardous sectors. Hence the empirical analysis shows widespread attempts to avoid liability by shielding assets through divestiture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many have argued that if labor income is difference stationary, the permanent income hypothesis predicts that consumption should be relatively volatile. In U.S. aggregate data, labor income is well characterized as having a unit root; however, consumption turns out to be relatively smooth. This anomaly is known as Deaton's paradox. I resolve Deaton's paradox by providing decompositions of labor income into permanent and transitory components. These preserve the univariate dynamic properties of labor income. However, when agents distinguish permanent and transitory movements in their labor income--as the rational expectations hypothesis asserts they should--the permanent income hypothesis correctly predicts the observed smoothness in consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes theoretically and empirically the role and significance of occupational mobility in the labor market focusing on individuals' careers. It provides additional dimensions to the analysis of investment in human capital, wage differences across individuals, and the relationships among promotions, quits, and interfirm occupational mobility. It is shown that part of the returns to education is in the form of higher probabilities of occupational upgrading, within or across firms. Given an origin occupation, schooling increases the likelihood of occupational upgrading. Furthermore, workers who are not promoted despite a high probability of promotion are more likely to quit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends Stigler and Pehzman's approach to regulation by incorporating a legislature. The model yields comparative statics results and hence testable implications. The paper then tests between two opposing approaches about regulatory agency behavior. The first assumes agencies operate independently of the legislature and hence exercise discretion; the second assumes that Congress controls agency decisions. The recent behavior of the Federal Trade Commission provides the empirical setting. Substantial evidence is found for the specific predictions of the model, including the hypothesis of systematic congressional influence over FTC decisions. In this paper, we develop a model of agency decision making based on the premise that agencies are controlled by the legislature. We argue, therefore, that to understand the genesis of agencies, as well as the stability and change in agency policy, we must understand the underlying legislative politics. With this in mind, we develop a model of legislative choice. The model characterizes the nature of policy equilibrium and, perhaps more important, it yields comparative statics results that lead to predictions about policy change. Following the theoretical development of the model, we turn to an empirical application that tests the specific assertions of our model as well as the hypothesis of legislative control. The recent changes occurring at the FTC and the relation of these changes to Congress provide the setting for our tests. We find substantial evidence for both the hypothesis of legislative control and the predictions of our specific model of Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noting that a suggested measure of natural resource scarcity, resource rent, is unobservable, we show that rent is linked to (observable) marginal exploration cost. A two-period model of extraction and exploration reveals that rent is equal to this cost when discovery is certain. Under risky exploration, cost data can be used to bound rent. The model also indicates how exploration uncertainty affects the competitive firm's extraction and exploration decisions. Finally, the behavior of U.S. oil and gas exploration costs suggests that these costs were rising in the postwar era, which has different implications for scarcity than indicated by other measures of scarcity. In Section II of this paper we develop a model of exploration and extraction that suggests a close link between rent and the (observable) cost of finding an additional unit of the resource. Under certain circumstances the two measures can in tact be shown to coincide. More generally, in the uncertain environment of resource exploration, cost can be used only to bound an estimate of rent. After working through these arguments we present, in Section III, some findings concerning the behavior of exploration costs for our most important extractive resources, oil and gas. It turns out that these costs have been rising (in real terms), which has rather different implications for scarcity than some earlier findings of steady or declining extraction costs and prices, and rising reserves. Although we agree with the criticisms that have been made of the measure of scarcity used in The Limits to Growth (and indeed with other criticisms of that work), our model and related casual observation do suggest that a concern for increasing scarcity may not be misplaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates a general equilibrium model of suppressed inflation using quarterly U.S. data for the sample period 1942:IV-48:II. It finds that the price level was reduced by at least 30.4 percent and that this suppression of inflation reduced employment by at least 11.7 percent and output by at least 7.1 percent. It also finds that monetary policy could have been equally successful in combating inflation but would not have had the side effect of reducing employment and output. In this paper, I look at the effects of price controls during World War II. I find that general price controls worked in the sense that the price level and the inflation rate were substantially lower than they would have been in the absence of price controls. General price controls, however, failed to work in the sense of maintaining a high level of employment and output. I find that a tight monetary policy could have been equally successful in preventing inflation and that such a monetary policy would have resulted in at least 11.7 percent more employment and 7.1 percent more output.[1] Therefore, even if one could solve all the problems of administering general price controls, they would be no bargain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]