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In this paper I examine the ability of the monocentric models to predict the mean length of commute in urban areas. I compare actual mean commute with that which is predicted by monocentric models and find that actual commuting distance is about eight times greater than that predicted by the model. Next I calculate the volume of commuting which would result if people chose their houses and jobs at random, making no effort to economize on commuting. This overpredicts actual commuting by about 25 percent. In Section I of the paper, I establish briefly the commuting rules consumers would follow if they behaved according to the optimization strategy of the standard monocentric models. Next I show that, both under complete centralization of employment and under dispersed employment, obedience of this optimization rule will result in assignment of households to houses and jobs in such a way that aggregate commuting for the urban area is minimized, given the locations of houses and jobs. (Home and job locations are taken as given throughout the work, and I do not explore determinants of density gradients.) In Section II, I estimate the mean length of commute implied by this optimization behavior for a sample of 14 cities in 1972. I also report Annual Housing Survey (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census 1979, 1980) estimates of actual mean length of commute for these cities (for 1975, 1976, or 1977, depending on the city). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional explanation for the pattern of commodity price adjustment to monetary change, which stresses factors affecting the short-run elasticities of supply and demand in different markets, does not take into account price flexibility. This paper offers an explanation for the pattern of commodity price adjustment to monetary change based on differing degrees of price flexibility across industries, where price flexibility is determined by contract length. An extension to product markets of the theory of implicit long-term wage contracts leads to a simple hypothesis which explains the pattern of industry and sectoral price response to monetary change by implicit contract length, the latter being determined by relative price variability. Tests of this hypothesis across broad sectors and industries using postwar U.S. data produce favorable results. Also confirmed by the empirical evidence is the pattern of industry and sectoral price response to monetary change suggested by the traditional approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a dynamic economic model of fertility behavior estimated with age-year-specific U.S. time-series data. The estimated model indicates that couples, on average, time their births to avoid periods when female wage rates are expected to be high, and that most of the observed effect of income and female wages on fertility rates is due to the indirect influence of these variables on couples' wage and income expectations. This paper also presents a decomposition of current fertility rates into timing and completed fertility components, allowing a comparison of current low fertility rates with couples' lifetime fertility plans. The estimates indicate that aggregate planned completed fertility is approximately equal to the fertility rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a new method for estimating economic losses from forecasting error. The method is an alternative to the traditional distributed lag approach to estimating expectations. An application to Kansas agriculture over the period 1874-1933 reveals significant variation in farmers' price forecasting performance across counties and over time. These differences can be explained in terms of market improvements, technological and geographical factors, and county characteristics suggestive of human capital differences. The magnitudes, timing, and cross-sectional pattern of the losses from forecasting error confirm the importance of forecasting skill and allocative ability in American agriculture during the period examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes U.S. time-series data in order to study the determinants of the choice between renting and homeownership. Special attention is focused upon changes in the relative prices of owning and renting induced by provisions of the federal personal income tax. The results suggest that about one-quarter of the growth in the proportion of homeowners in the post-World War II period is a consequence of the tax system's favorable treatment of owner-occupied housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fama (1975) concludes that the behavior of returns on U.S. Treasury bills is consistent with the hypotheses that (i) expected real returns on bills are constant through time, and (ii) in setting the prices of bills the market is efficient in the sense that any information on past rates of change in the purchasing power of money is correctly used to assess expected future rates of change. These conclusions are based on the findings that auto-correlations of real returns on bills are close to zero, and regressions of rates of change in the purchasing power of money on nominal interest rates indicate that all variation through time in nominal rates mirrors variation in correctly assessed expected values of future rates of change in purchasing power. This paper reexamines the hypothesis that expected real returns on bills are constant through time. We test for relationships between expected real returns and the uncertainty in real returns that can be traced to uncertainty about inflation. The proposition is that the inflation-related uncertainties in the real returns on bills are associated with the type of risk that the market compensates. This hypothesis is consistent with the early term structure literature, for example, Hicks (1946) and Kessel (1965), where the risks of bonds are equated with the uncertainty in their returns. In modern Markowitzian (1959) portfolio theory, however, risk and uncertainty of return are only equivalent for portfolios. The risk of a security in a portfolio is in part determined by the uncertainty of the security's return, but its contribution to the uncertainty in the return on a diversified portfolio usually depends more on how its return covers with the returns on other securities. The tests presented here nevertheless turn out to be interesting from the viewpoint of portfolio theory. It is, however, better to leave justification of this claim to the end of the paper where, with the evidence in hand, the issues are better ap... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A statistical definition of the natural unemployment rate hypothesis is advanced and tested. A particular illustrative structural macroeconomic model satisfying the definition is set forth and estimated. The model has "classical" policy implications, implying a number of neutrality propositions asserting the invariance of the conditional means of real variables with respect to the feedback rule for the money supply. The aim is to test how emphatically the data reject a model incorporating rather severe classical hypotheses. This paper estimates a small, linear, classical macroeconometric model for the postwar United States. One reason for estimating the model is to produce a simple device capable of generating unconditional forecasts of key economic aggregates such as the unemployment rate, the price level, and the interest rate. But a more important reason is that as part of the estimation process the hypotheses underlying the model are subjected to empirical testing. Since these hypotheses are very "classical" and sharply at variance with Keynesian macroeconomics, it would be useful to know at what confidence levels the data reject them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the great majority of Americans, the most important form of household wealth is the anticipated social security retirement benefits. In 1971 the aggregate value of these annuities was approximately $2 trillion or some 60 percent of other household assets. This paper uses an extended life-cycle model to analyze the impact of social security on the individual's simultaneous decision about retirement and saving. Econometric evidence, using an estimated time series of "social security wealth," indicates that social security depresses personal saving by 30-50 percent. Implications of this research for the theory of consumption and for the level and distribution of income are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the high value of human time. It deals with two widely different population equilibrium concepts. It extends the explanation of the secular increases in the value of human time. It takes a critical look at the usefulness of the household model in analyzing fertility in countries characterized by high birth and death rates and by substantial increases in national income in a context where the level of the economic value of human time is very low and not increasing much. The idea of a population equilibrium is viewed strictly as an analytical concept to guide economic thinking in deriving testable propositions pertaining to fertility. Two very different concepts of a population equilibrium are formulated. The first concept, as it was envisaged by the early English economists, has long been a standard part of economics. It assumes that the supply of land is fixed and that diminishing returns gradually increase the price of food as a consequence of population growth. The foundation of the second concept is the high price of human time relative to the price of the services of material factors and goods.

This paper has discussed possible mechanisms for achieving ex ante and ex post equality of political income. While any of the structural reforms could be implemented separately, it makes the most sense to combine, them. Indeed, the "equal-stake" criterion is to some extent a necessary condition for the implementation of a redistributive vote tax. A voter's winning percentage on an issue set cannot be regarded as an index of his political income unless each vote has an equal value ex ante to all voters. The idea of the state arising from a "social contract" formed by all citizens to achieve collective ends can imply the concepts of both ex ante and ex post political income equality. Of the two, only ex ante equality has received attention in the literature. Yet, to those who embrace the equalitarian ethic, the ex post equality of political income should be of even greater importance than ex ante equality of voting rights. This paper argues that the attainment of ex post equality of the political income distribution is conceptually plausible and quantitatively important. Further, a policy of vote taxation does not appear to be subject to as serious disincentive effects as taxation to obtain complete equality of ex post private economic income. This follows by analogy to elasticity conditions where voting takes very little time as opposed to the length of the work week, for example, and attempts to equalize realized private income. There do not appear to be any functional equivalents under present democratic systems to achieve ex post equality of political income. Indeed, taking the United States as an example of a two-party, geographic-based democratic system, one could argue that there are perverse mechanisms, such as monopolistic systems of committee power and the like, which tend to lead to greater inequality of realized utility for many voters. Many voters from lower income-education classes do not vote under the present system, which, although it does not... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on Walter J. Primeaux Jr.'s paper "The Newspaper Rate Differential: Another Element in the Explanation." Primeaux argues that the national rate is set higher by newspapers, acting under competitive pressures, in order to accommodate retail customers in their practice of double billing. Since most newspapers charge a higher rate to national advertisers, the presumption must be that they and their retail customers are engaged in a continuing collusion to bilk manufacturers. This has been going on for a very long time, and one might suppose that even if it had been ignored by the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission it might have come to the attention of the vendors who pay the cost but who are, according to Primeaux, "usually unaware that double billing is being employed." There is, moreover, on many papers a substantial difference between the maximum or open-line retail rate and the minimum rate that applies for a retail account that advertises with high volume and frequency.

The main objectives of our paper are to examine economic, political, social, demographic, and professional factors in the United States and Taiwan which may account for Chinese scholars' decisions to stay in the United States or their reluctance to return to Taiwan. Our paper is divided into five sections. Sections I and II provide background and definition of terms used in the paper. Sections III and IV present data and statistical analysis. The final section summarizes the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the narratives that guide the history of science? Certainly one of the more recent ones is "science in action," the emphasis on practices and the imperative of studying science as performed. Perhaps not surprisingly, this story itself has a history; it starts in the early 1960s, when the project "Sources for History of Quantum Physics" was established. The main task of Thomas S. Kuhn, John L. Heilbron, and Paul Forman's work, lasting three years, was to interview the old heroes of quantum mechanics and to archive the spoken word. While giving an account of the project's history, this essay will focus on the process of interviewing and characterize its wider context. Not only does their approach offer us important insights into the shaping of the persona of the scientist; it also represents an important step toward the post-Kuhnian way of doing history of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of digitization and the internet on libraries with regards to government information. Several issues of library and government are discussed including access, censorship and budgets. Despite, the financial challenges libraries face, the author is optimistic regarding the role of libraries in preserving the public's access to information. Although some believe the internet is making libraries and librarians obsolete, he argues that the unique skills and knowledge of librarians are vital to interpreting data.

The article presents news briefs on library preservation programs in the U.S. as of September 1, 1985. The National Endowment for the Humanities has undergone reorganization and has created a new Office of Preservation. Nine institutions have received Preservation Planning Grants from the Association of Research Libraries Office of Management Studies. The grant-in-aid program of the New Jersey Historical Commission made its first awards in March, which include awards for conservation. A five-week course, titled Conservation: Behind the Scenes at the Met, is being offered by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This paper examines how international politics affects trade in the absence of empires or wars.We first show that deterioration of relations between the United States and another country, measured by divergence in their United Nations General Assembly voting patterns, reduced U.S. imports from that country during 1962-2000. Though statistically significant, the magnitude of the effect of political distance on trade is small. Indeed, we show that except for petroleum and some chemical products, U.S. imports are not affected by international politics. American firms, however, diversify their oil imports significantly away from political opponents of the United States. Oil trade is often associated with backward vertical foreign direct investment that is subject to the expropriation risk. In contrast to the usual claim that oil is a strategic commodity, we provide suggestive evidence that trade in products when rents are appropriable is more likely to be affected by international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines sorting into interracial friendships at selective universities. We show significant friendship segregation, particularly for blacks. Indeed, blacks' friendships are no more diverse in college than in high school, despite the fact that the colleges that blacks attend have substantially smaller black populations.We demonstrate that the segregation patterns occur in part because affirmative action results in large differences in the academic backgrounds of students of different races, with students preferring to form friendships with those of similar academic backgrounds. Within a school, stronger academic backgrounds make whites' friendships with blacks less likely and friendships with Asians more likely. These results suggest that affirmative action admission policies at selective universities, which drive a wedge between the academic characteristics of different racial groups, may result in increased within-school segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As genotyping technologies have precipitously decreased in cost since the completion of the Human Genome Project, personal genetic testing has increasingly been marketed to consumers. Genetic testing is now available for an everexpanding list of genetic mutations associated with diseases—including breast cancer, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's—as well as traits such as ancestry, intelligence, and athleticism. Close examination of the direct-to-consumer personal genomic industry reveals several forms of potentiality at work that are informed by imagined and real power over bodily information. The marketing and consumption of personal genetic information relies on constructions of biological potential that result from struggles over the ability to control and act on individualized genetic information and to translate it into meaning. This paper explores the emerging discourse over personal genetic testing—and the marketing and consumption of the alluring and carefully tailored idea of potentiality that fuels American entrepreneurialism—and concepts of freedom and self-actualization. Policy debates over rights of access to genotyping fail to recognize the shifting landscape of human genomics in the United States. Genes in the marketplace are justified by liberalism, civic republicanism, and multiculturalism propelling a paradigm shift away from traditional models of governance toward open access to genetic testing and minimization of individual harm. The turn to the market emboldens the consumer and creates a new set of social meanings and ethical quandaries over who may harness the potential attributed to genetic information and for what purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the economics of diversity-enhancing policies. A model is proposed in which heterogeneous agents, distinguished by skill level and social identity, purchase productive opportunities in a competitive market. We analyze policies designed to raise the status of a disadvantaged identity group. When agent identity is contractible, efficient policy grants preferred access to slots but offers no direct assistance for acquiring skills. When identity is not contractible, efficient policy provides universal subsidies to skill development when the fraction of the disadvantaged group at the skill development margin is larger than their share at the slot assignment margin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which discrimination can explain racial wage gaps is one of the most divisive issues in the social sciences. Using a newly available data set, this paper develops a simple empirical test that, under plausible (but not innocuous) conditions, provides a lower bound on the extent of discrimination in the labor market. Taken at face value, our estimates imply that differential treatment accounts for at least one-third of the black-white wage gap. We argue that the patterns in our data are most naturally rationalized through a search-matching model in which employers statistically discriminate on the basis of race when hiring unemployed workers but learn about their marginal product over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federal estate taxes give very wealthy families incentives to transfer resources directly to distant generations in order to avoid taxes on successive rounds of transfers. Until recently such transfers were impeded by the rule against perpetuities, which prevented transfers to most potential not-yet-born beneficiaries. Many American states have recently repealed the rule against perpetuities, raising concerns that the combination of tax incentives and new legal rights encourages the devotion of vast wealth to perpetual trusts designed to benefit distant generations, avoid taxes, and maintain a degree of control over the financial affairs of descendants in perpetuity. This paper analyzes the incentives created by federal transfer taxes, finding the tax benefits from establishing perpetual trusts to be quite modest, in representative cases ranging from 9% to 25% of just one component of the cost. Contrary to popular claims, tax benefits decline as investment returns rise. While US states that have repealed the rule against perpetuities and adopted other policies to encourage trusts host substantial trust assets, evidence from tax returns suggests that perpetual trusts are unlikely to account for a significant portion of this business. Consequently, tax incentives may not be responsible for an important shift of assets into perpetual trusts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application for federal student aid is longer than the tax returns filled out by the majority of US households. Research suggests that complexity in the aid process undermines its effectiveness in inducing more students into college. A previous Tax Policy and the Economy paper showed that most of the data items in the aid application did not affect the distribution of aid and that the much shorter set of variables available in IRS data could be used to closely replicate the existing distribution of aid. This added momentum to a period of discussion and activity around simplification in Congress and the US Department of Education. In this article, we provide a 5-year retrospective of what has changed in the aid application process, what has not, and the possibilities for future reform. While there has been some streamlining in the process of applying for aid, it has fallen far short of its goals. Two dozen questions were removed from the aid application and a dozen added, reducing the number of questions from 127 to 116. Funding for college has also been complicated by the growth of a parallel system for aid: the tax system. A massive expansion in federal tax incentives for college, in particular the American Opportunity Tax Credit, has led to millions of households completing paperwork for both the IRS and the US Department of Education in order to qualify for college funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approximately 10% of school-age children in the United States are enrolled in private schools, relieving the financial burden on public school systems, and the taxpayers who support them, of the cost of their education. At present, the tax code does not allow families who provide this financial relief an income tax deduction, even though such relief is a gift to governments for exclusively public purposes and thus is analogous to a charitable donation. Using the Public Use Microdata Sample of the American Community Survey and the NBER Internet Taxsim calculator, this paper estimates that granting families who enroll their children in private schools an income tax deduction equal to the per-pupil expenditures in their public school district would cost the federal government an average of $7.75 billion per year over the 2006-10 period. This amount is less than 1% of federal income tax revenues. Because private school enrollment, public school expenditures, the likelihood of itemization, and marginal tax rates increase with taxpayer income, the dollar benefits of this change are positively related to income. At the margin, high-income taxpayers would receive about 35 cents in federal and state tax relief for each dollar of per-pupil expenditures forgone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how providing litigants with information about arbitrators' win/loss ratios affects arbitrators' incentives in deciding the cases before them in an impartial and unbiased manner. We show that if litigants are informed about arbitrators' past decisions, then arbitrators might want to make an incorrect decision when a correct decision would raise the suspicion that they are biased. Therefore, providing information about arbitrators' past decisions might create adverse incentive effects and reduce the accuracy of arbitration. We compare the accuracy of arbitrators' decisions under different arbitrator selection procedures and discuss the implications for the design of arbitration rules by arbitration and dispute resolution providers and by court-administered arbitration programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Williams v. Florida (399 U.S. 78 [1970]), the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case addressing the constitutionality of juries composed of fewer than 12 jurors, ruling that smaller juries are not inconsistent with the Sixth Amendment. In an effort to speed deliberation and reduce the rate of mistrials, 11 states have subsequently adopted juries of fewer than 12 in state felony trials, and 40 states have diminished their jury sizes for state misdemeanor trials. Curiously, however, contrary to the predictions of probability theory and common sense, these reductions in jury sizes have failed to deliver the expected reduction in mistrial rates. In this paper, we offer two interrelated explanations for this fact: informational cascades and the heterogeneity of jurors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model of judging, illustrating how case law evolves when two types of judges with different policy preferences decide cases narrowly. The model shows that case law is unlikely to reflect the midpoint of the judges' ideal points. The result challenges the conventional wisdom suggesting that balancing ideologically extreme judges will likely yield moderate laws. The model suggests that a centrist executive faced with a sitting extreme left-wing judge should appoint a moderate judge rather than an extreme right-wing judge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically examines the effects of network unbundling on retail prices in U.S. local telephone markets. Panel data for 7,604 wire centers in 43 states from 1996 to 2002 are used to estimate the price effects from the unbundling and entry-promoting conditions of the Telecommunications Act. Results show that Section 271 led to the rebalancing of prices between customer groups in which residential prices increased and the prices paid by small businesses decreased. There is some rebalancing of prices between urban and rural regions, with business prices decreasing by a larger amount in urban regions. Our results from all markets indicate that regulators responded rationally to competition by rebalancing prices to reduce cross subsidies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We empirically study formation-state choices of limited liability companies (LLCs). Most firms in our large sample of almost 20,000 LLCs are formed in the state where their principal place of business is located. As their size increases, firms become more likely to be formed outside that state, with Delaware emerging as the primary destination for LLCs that are not formed in the state of the principal place of business. We demonstrate that substantive law matters when LLCs choose their formation state. Limited liability companies are less likely to incorporate locally if their home state offers lax norms for minority-investor protection or creditor-friendly rules for veil piercing. In addition to contributing to the debate on regulatory competition in the law, this paper has implications for theoretical debates pertaining to choice of law in veil-piercing cases, the role of default rules, and the relationship between corporations and LLCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments are known for procrastinating when it comes to resolving painful policy problems. Whatever the political motives for waiting to decide, procrastination distorts economic decisions relative to what would arise with early policy resolution. In so doing, it engenders excess burden. This paper posits, calibrates, and simulates a life cycle model with earnings, life span, investment return, and future policy uncertainty. It then measures the excess burden from delayed resolution of policy uncertainty. The first uncertain policy we consider concerns the level of future Social Security benefits. Specifically, we examine how an agent would respond to learning in advance whether she will experience a major Social Security benefit cut starting at age 65. We show that having to wait to learn materially affects consumption, saving, labor supply, and portfolio decisions. It also reduces welfare. Indeed, we show that the excess burden of government indecision can, in this instance, range as high as 0.6% of the agent's economic resources. This is a significant distortion in and of itself. It is also significant when compared to other distortions measured in the literature. The second uncertain policy we consider concerns marginal tax rates. We obtain similar results once we adjust for the impact of tax rates on income. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the likely impact of a proposed formula apportionment system for corporation taxes in the European Union on the inbound investment of US multinational companies. We pay attention to tax planning strategies that may be employed by US multinationals and investigate whether effective tax rates in Europe of US companies differ from those of European companies. The proposal is for an optional system: we estimate the extent to which both European and US companies would be likely to choose it taking into account their existing structures and future investment incentives. The relative position of US and European companies depends crucially on the taxation of foreign passive income. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The tax preference for employer-sponsored health insurance contributes to the very high level of health spending in the United States. In this paper, we consider the consequences for spending of one approach to reducing this preference: giving people with health insurance an additional deduction for their expected out-of-pocket spending, that is, an additional deduction that declines as the actuarial value of their insurance rises. We show that this approach would reduce health spending more and have a smaller budget cost than the deduction for actual out-of-pocket spending analyzed by Cogan, Hubbard, and Kessler by encouraging a shift to higher-copayment health insurance. We estimate that a deduction for expected out-of-pocket expenses would reduce private health spending by $86 billion in 2010 at a budget cost of approximately $5 billion. We conclude that, under reasonable assumptions about consumers' valuation of this incremental spending and the cost of public funds, such a deduction would be welfare improving. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1929 and 1934-1935, the physical anthropologist Harry L. Shapiro voyaged in the South Seas on the Mahina-I-Te-Pua and the Zaca, measuring mixed-race islanders, including the descendants of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island. His research in Polynesian hybridity reflects the growing cultural and scientific investment of the United States in the Pacific during this period. Shapiro's oceanic adventures and intimate encounters prompted him to discount typological speculation and emphasize instead the liberal Boasian program in physical anthropology, giving him the confidence to refigure his evaluations of racial difference. The seaborne investigatory enterprise came to influence U.S. racial thought, adding impetus to the condemnation of racism in science. On his return from the South Seas, Shapiro tried to get his fellow physical anthropologists to issue a manifesto opposing the harnessing of their science to racial discrimination and prejudice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present an overview of an increasingly global community of physical (biological) anthropologists as it pertains to the study of living human variation (human biology) and as it is represented in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA), focusing especially on the period of 2001-2007, when Clark Spencer Larsen served as editor in chief. The journal was founded by Aleš Hrdlička in order to provide professional identity of physical (biological) anthropology as practiced in the United States. By the mid-twentieth century, the journal editorship under T. Dale Stewart called for greater presence of international research collaboration and publication in AJPA. By 1960, international collaboration and non-U.S. authorship began to have significant presence in the journal, a pattern that has continued to the present. As in the pre-2000 period, although non-U.S. contributions cover all major topics in human biology, they tend to focus on population genetics and population history. For the period of 2001-2007, there is an increased presence of multinational collaborative research and non-U.S. authorship, a trend that will likely increase. The recent rise in non-U.S. submissions and authorship is due in large part to increased international collaboration and electronic access to the submission process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper synthesizes two models of immigrant assimilation: "positive assimilation" if earnings rise with duration as destination-relevant skills are acquired and "negative assimilation" if immigrants with highly transferable skills experience declining earnings as their economic rent diminishes. Hypotheses are developed and tested with earnings of adult male immigrants in the 2000 U.S. Census. "Linguistic distance" from English of an immigrant's mother tongue is the index of skill transferability. Only immigrants from English-speaking developed countries experience negative assimilation. Immigrants from other countries experience positive assimilation, the degree of assimilation increasing with linguistic distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a unique historical data set of more than 8,000 British and American innovations at world's fairs between 1851 and 1915 to explore the relationship between patents and innovations. The data indicate that the majority of innovations-89 percent of British exhibits in 1851-were not patented. Comparisons across British and U.S. data also show that patenting decisions were unresponsive to differences in patent laws. Cross-sectional evidence suggests that high-quality and urban exhibits were more likely to be patented. The most significant differences, however, occurred across industries: inventors were most likely to use patents in industries in which innovations are easy to reverse engineer and secrecy is ineffective relative to patents. In the late nineteenth century, scientific breakthroughs, including the publication of the periodic table, reduced the effectiveness of secrecy in the chemical industry. Difference-in-differences regressions suggest that this change resulted in a significant shift toward patenting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After 9/11, the United States and its allies took measures to protect their citizens from future terrorist attacks. While these measures aim to increase security, they have often been criticized for violating human rights. But violating rights is difficult in a constitutional democracy with separated powers and checks and balances. This paper empirically investigates the effect of the post-9/11 terror threat on human rights. We find strong evidence of a systematic increase in rights violations in the United States and its ally countries after 9/11. When testing the importance of checks and balances, we find that this increase is significantly smaller in countries with independent judicial review (countermajoritarian checks) but did not depend on the presence of veto players in the legislative branch (majoritarian checks). These findings have important implications for constitutional debates on rights protection in times of emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents history of science-related news briefs on topics including the History of Science Society Annual Meeting which was held in 2018, Science History Institute Haas Postdoctoral Fellow Ingrid Ockert's receipt of the 2018 2018 HSS/NASA Fellowship in Aerospace History. It states that historian Owen Hyman's won the Ronald Rainger Prize for his essay "Anxieties of the Plastic Age: Cotton Culture, White Supremacy, and Tenant Forestry in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, 1935–1953."

In his pathbreaking article "The Nature of the Firm," Ronald H. Coase postulated that the structure of production was determined by the comparative advantage between contracting and hierarchy in securing and coordinating complementary resources for production. While Coase considered the possibility that regulation might also influence the way production is structured, he considered the problem only very generally. This paper suggests that airline deregulation has profoundly affected the structure of firms that operate airline networks by affecting contractual conditions under which airlines purchase labor inputs, removing constraints on the extent and nature of the firm's route network, and changing the competitive environment in which airline firms operate. Where a stable uniform firm structure existed under regulation, airline networks now are organized with a variety of firm structures, and individual networks have changed as particular conditions have changed over time. No single structure dominates, although some are more common than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effect of race on deliberations inside congressional committees. It investigates whether black representatives are more or less likely to use liberal policy frames and mention marginalized groups during committee debates. The results suggest that black legislators are more likely than whites to present liberal policy frames for black interest bills and they often take a more active role during committee debates. However, black legislators are no more likely than white Democrats to mention blacks and other marginalized groups during committee deliberations. When it comes to mentioning marginalized groups during committee deliberations, party is the most important explanatory factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, I examine how immigrants perform in activities likely to increase U.S. productivity, according to the type of visa on which they first entered the United States. Immigrants who entered on a student/trainee visa or a temporary work visa have a large advantage over natives in wages, patenting, and publishing. Much of the advantage is explained by immigrants' higher education and field of study. Immigrants who entered with legal permanent residence do not outperform natives for any of the outcomes considered. Immigrants are more likely to start companies than similar natives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fraction of GDP devoted to health care in the United States is the highest in the world and is rising rapidly. Recent economic studies have highlighted the growing value of health improvements, but less attention has been paid to the efficiency costs of tax-financed spending to pay for such improvements. This paper uses a life cycle model of labor supply, saving, and longevity improvement to measure the balanced-budget impact of continued growth in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The model predicts that top marginal tax rates could rise to 70% by 2060, depending on the progressivity of future tax changes. The deadweight loss of the tax system is greater when the financing is more progressive. If the share of taxes paid by high-income taxpayers remains the same, the efficiency cost of raising the revenue needed to finance the additional health spending is $1.48 per dollar of revenue collected, and GDP declines (relative to trend) by 11%. A proportional payroll tax has a lower efficiency cost (41 cents per dollar of revenue averaged over all tax hikes, a 5% drop in GDP) but more than doubles the share of the tax burden borne by lower-income taxpayers. Empirical support for the model comes from analysis of OECD country data showing that countries facing higher tax burdens in 1979 experienced slower health care spending growth in subsequent decades. The rising burden imposed by the public financing of health care expenditures may therefore serve as a brake on health care spending growth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines the cultural significance of "ambulatory maps" in the Atlantic world between 1700 and 1800. Comparing stationary and portable maps, the essay in particular explores the emergent genre of the commercial pocket map. As "things-in- motion," pocket maps occupied a unique place in American material life. Used for mapping people's transits while at the same time being objects in transit, pocket maps constituted a unique visual and literary experience that affected early American engagements with space and spatial ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Supreme Court's decision to invalidate a legislative enactment involves both the choice to strike as well as the choice whether to invalidate the statute on its face or as applied. Both choices implicate the possibility of counteraction by the legislature. In this paper, we evaluate the justices' choices to invalidate a state or federal enactment on its face or as applied and find that the justices are responsive to congressional preferences concerning the substance of the legal challenge at both stages of judicial review. Other factors systematically affect the justices' decisions as well, including the legal basis for the challenge, the statutory scope of the constitutional challenge, the president (through the solicitor general), and interest groups' amicus filings. These findings suggest that the Court's exercise of judicial review is significantly influenced by Congress and by other contextual, legal, and political factors, both as to the choice to strike as well as to the method of constitutional enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]