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The article presents a study which analyzes the impact of tree shade on electricity consumption in the U.S. The study was administered by comparing the electricity consumption of two identical buildings with the same temperature and located in different shade conditions using regression model. The study reveals that shade from trees helps lower inside temperature and power consumption since trees serves as a natural complement to artificial air-conditioning.

In this article, the authors use data collected from nearly 4,000 single-family residences in Auburn, Alabama to investigate empirically whether nonpolitical expressiveness (displaying support for Auburn University's football team outside one's home) is related to the probability that at least one resident voted in the national/state/local elections held on November 7, 2006. Controlling for the assessed value of the property and the length of ownership, the authors find that the likelihood of voting by at least one person from a residence with an external display of support for Auburn University is nearly 2 times greater than from a residence without such a display. This suggests that focusing narrowly on voting as a reflection of political expressiveness may lead researchers to overstate the relative importance of expressiveness in the voting context and understate its more fundamental and encompassing importance in a variety of contexts, only one of which may be voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We explore the consequences of including both general and specific controls for spatial autocorrelation in country-level models of species imperilment. A general spatial autocorrelation term constructed as a binary contiguity matrix aggregates an unknown number of possible influences, some of which exert a negative impact on species imperilment in the referent country, others of which exert a positive impact. Adding spatial dependency measures that are based on specific cross-border effects can substantially change not only the size and statistical significance of the general spatial dependency term but also the size, sign, and/or statistical significance of the explanatory variables. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Assesses whether students who transfer into undergraduate forestry programs perform better as well as students who enter these programs as freshmen. Assessment of a bachelor of science graduates at Auburn University's forestry program in Alabama; Advice for recruitment efforts to consider applicants' entrance tests.

This paper briefly examines the causes and consequences of article popularity. Tracing subsequent citations to nearly 6,000 articles published during 1974-76 reveals that most articles are cited rarely, if ever. Over 90% are cited fewer than 20 times over the ensuing 6 years, whereas only 3/10ths of 1% are cited over 100 times. Regression analysis demonstrates that author reputation, article length, and quality of publishing journal are strong determinants of article popularity. The relative importance of various economics journals, though not their rankings, is sensitive to inclusion of "hit" articles; the differential impact of a journal may be more closely approximated by its ability to attract a significant proportion of the "hit parade" of articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a reply on the comment made by professor Otis W. Gilley on economics departments ranking in the U.S. made by the author. Variance of productivity in graduates; Derivation of faculty productivity; Type of criticism applicable to the rankings of economics departments; Fact that noneconomics department graduates as well as economics department graduates are well schooled enough to subsequently produce publishable research.

The article investigates the changing industrial organization of the economics journal market over the period 1970-1990. The authors collected detailed information on citations in 1970 for 50 selected economics journals indexed by the Index of Economics Articles. The findings suggest that the overall growth in citations to scholarly economics literature over the 1970-1990 period exceeded the growth in the quantity of published, scholarly, economics literature. In addition, the number of pages published in scholarly economics journals increased between 1970 and 1990. On the other hand, there was a steady decline in concentration of citations among the top economics journals over the period 1965-1990 due to existing journals taking market share from the premier journals.

Restriction of foreign ownership of U. S. farmland has an obvious cost of foregone capital gains to farmers. Yet their push to achieve state regulation of foreign investment in agricultural land has a sound economic basis. If required acreage expansion and high prices for land combine to force small, family farmers out of business, the value of their accumulated human capital falls precipitously, since it is soil-specific. With a large foreign demand for farmland which induces a tremendous rate of land-price inflation, capital gains on their land swamp potential human capital losses. However, marginal participation in the U.S. farmland market by foreigners creates capital gains on land which are insufficient to compensate farmers for lost human capital, and creates a rationale for regulation. The empirical results demonstrate that the pattern of legislative restrictions against foreign ownership of farmland is a function of the relative political power wielded by family farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that lawyers' sons follow in their parents' footsteps because the occupation lends itself to low-cost transfer of relevant skills and knowledge from one generation to the next, especially in the context of the family law practice. Analysis of Project Talent data reveals that knowledge about the law is transmitted from lawyers to their children and that this transmitted knowledge is a significant factor in a son's decision to follow in his father's legal footsteps. Second-generation lawyers who receive these human capital transfers experience greater earnings than lawyers who have not received such transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been observed from various experiences of many academic colleagues that transfer students who take micro and macro "Principles of Economics," from community colleges perform worse in upper-division economics classes than students who take the principles courses at the four-year institution. By state law many, if not most, of the four-year state colleges and universities in the United States are required to admit transfer students from community colleges in their state, without requiring that they take the Standard Achievement Test, which is a normal requirement of non-transfer applicants. If there were a quality-of-instruction difference between community colleges and four-year colleges and universities, students would be well advised to adjust accordingly in their decision to attend one type of educational institution or the other. In addition, the registrars of four-year colleges and universities might want to reconsider the policy of accepting transfer credit from community colleges. Obviously, these are significant implications that should not be acted upon unless and until our findings are substantiated by subsequent researchers.

Roughly 50 per cent of self-employed proprietors are second-generation proprietors. These individuals acquire informal business experience while growing up in the context of a family business. Since some of this informal experience substitutes for more formally acquired schooling, measured rates of return to the latter will not be as high as for wage/salary workers. Early acquisition of managerial human capital that can be acquired only through experience implies differentially greater proprietary success for second-generation proprietors compared with first-generation proprictors. We present evidence in favour of both hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. This note reports detailed information with respect to the publishing performance of Ph D-economics graduates of Canadian universities over the 1975-84 period. In terms of impact of material published, graduates of Western Ontario, Queens, and, to a lesser extent, Toronto, appear to have an edge over the others. With respect to volume of published output, graduates of the University of British Columbia outperform those of any other Canadian university, by a wide margin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journal editors who publish papers authored by colleagues and former graduate students have been charged with practicing favoritism, with the implication that the papers in question are of lower quality than those written by scholars with no ties to the editor. Using citation analysis, we find strong evidence that although journal editors occasionally publish subpar papers authored by colleagues and former graduate students, on balance their use of professional connections enables them to identify and "capture" high-impact papers for publication. This implies that a practice interpreted as "favoritism" by many scholars in fact serves to enhance efficiency in the market for scientific knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks at the membership dues structure of the American Economic Association (AEA). Payment of dues and distribution of income among members; ; Members' belief that the AEA possesses information about their incomes.

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to the article including "A Note from the President-Elect," by Zvi Griliches in the fall 1992 issue and a response by Zvi Griliches to the letters.

Abstract--Using data from a sample of the economic literature published over the years 1950 through 1988, we find substantial support for an environmental theory of idea entrepreneurship among economists. In particular, we show that the percentage of economic articles devoted to the topics of inflation and employment are related directly to the actual inflation and unemployment rates in the economy and indirectly to the growth rate of aggregate real income. Moreover, we are able to provide evidence of undirectional causality running from changes in the economic environment to changes in the composition of the economic literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Potential purchasers "demand" advertising as one means of reducing the time-price of consumption; sellers respond by "supplying'' advertising qua information. This simple theory, as presented by Ehrlich and Fisher (1982) and Nelson (1974) implies that advertising behavior of sellers can be predicted based upon characteristics of buyers. In this paper I find that signalling in the Yellow Pages occurs to a greater extent in the relatively mobile Washington, D.C area than in the more stable Baltimore, MD area where consumers develop alternative sources of product/vendor-related information. Also, high-price, infrequently purchased items are signalled more heavily than low-price, frequently purchased items [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper details resource expenditures on nonexchange, noncharity transfer activity in the United States in 1985 Expenditures designed to facilitate and inhibit nonexchange transfers, executed privately or through the state, are reported The numbers indicate that individuals plausibly invested nearly a trillion dollars in transfer activity that year Nominal GNP in 1985 was just over $4 trillion, which includes numerous transfer-related resource investments that arguably should be subtracted out Transfer activity thus apparently constitutes a much larger fraction of all economic activity conducted on the United States than previously recognized [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do referees employed by journals merely screen acceptable from unacceptable manuscripts or are they charged with an additional value-adding responsibility vis-à-vis the papers they review? Drawing from editorial correspondence provided by survey respondents, I address this question by examining the relationship between citations of published papers and comments provided by reviewers and editors. Referees' comments demonstrate a positive impact on subsequent citation of papers, while comments made by editors show no such impact. Value-adding by editors appears to derive principally from efficient matching of papers with reviewers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts to direct the attention of economists to the phenomenon of workplace mentoring. Focus on mentoring in the legal profession; Definition of mentoring; Explanations on the practice of mentoring; Level of incidence of mentor-protege relationships in certain occupations and industries; Theories of the mentoring function.

Investigates the degree to which peer review processes affect manuscript selection efficiency. Characterization of a single-blind review process by two types of errors; Comparison of performance between double-blind and single-blind review processes; Costs associated with each type of review process.

In this note, I compare average length of articles published by authors who share the same institutional affiliation as the journal editor versus those who do not share institutional affiliation with the editor, and find a substantial bias in favor of the former. The analysis proceeds as follows. General and specific models of the determinants of article length are presented in section II. Results of ordinary least squares estimation of the model specified in section II, across 5,880 articles and notes published in 39 leading economics journals over the period 1974-1976 are reported in section III. I find unmistakable and highly significant evidence that the average length of articles published by authors from the same school as the editor exceeds that of articles published by unaffiliated authors, controlling for revealed quality of material. These findings suggest, at a minimum, that departmental ranking schemes based on quantitative publishing performance are biased, and that future investigators must adjust for inhouse publishing proclivities of editors if they are to provide accurate rankings. Concluding thoughts are offered in section IV. Investigators who attempt to rank the top economics departments based on quantitative publication performance of faculty assume (implicitly) that the editorial and review process treats all submitters identically. The actual figures regarding length of articles published by authors who are at the same school as the editor of a journal versus unaffiliated authors tell a different story. Authors from the same institutional affiliation as the journal editor publish significantly lengthier articles in their home-grown journals than do outside authors, controlling for quality of reported work. Regressions similar to the ones reported in Tables I and II indicate that such favoritism exists with respect to members of the editorial board and former graduate students as well.[6] In a similar vein, McDowell and Amacher [7] argue... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the quantitative and qualitative publishing success of the top 50 economics departments (as reported by GMT) over the 13-year period 1971-83, as well as the quantitative and qualitative publishing success and placement success of graduates of those departments. Moreover, this paper presents findings regarding how departments are faring in these respects over time. My approach is somewhat of a radical departure from the one employed by previous researchers--rather than examine average productivity of a compositionally-variable department over that time period, I examine the publication performance record of the faculty current to the '83-'84 academic year. Average publishing performance (like average baseball performance) over some previous time period is not necessarily a good predictor of the future performance of the faculty of a given department (or the present baseball team), particularly since changes in size and/or composition of the faculty (team) may influence output greatly. From a measurement perspective, the real issue is, who are the George Steinbrenners of the economics profession--i.e., who has attracted the top talent at any given time t?[2] To the extent that departmental rankings truly serve the employment possibilities and quality-of-education screening functions (for would-be graduate students) outlined by GMT, then criteria upon which such rankings are based ought reasonably to reflect upon the degree to which, at least in an ordinal sense, these functions are fulfilled by the specified departments. In this paper, I argue that departmental rankings based on qualitative measures of faculty publishing performance, as well as measures of graduate student placement and publication success (qualitative and quantitative) may be equally revealing, if not superior to, rankings based solely on quantitative aspects of publishing performance, in terms of providing the information suggested previously. At the very least, these... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Failure to observe differences between men and women with respect to earnings and/or promotions does not preclude the possibility that employers discriminate against women on other, intangible margins. Since female lawyers are highly educated generally, and specifically with respect to legal remedies to overt sex discrimination, it seems unlikely that employers would discriminate against them on tangible margins. Indeed, drawing from the 1984 American Bar Association Survey of Career Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction, we find no evidence of discrimination against fe- male lawyers in terms of earnings or promotions. We do, however, find evidence of sex discrimination on several intangible margins and in terms of overall job satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we document a statistically significant, marginally greater probability of admittance into (at least one) medical school for children of doctors as compared to children of nondoctors. This fact can plausibly be explained as resulting from nepotism, in various forms, as well as from human capital transfers from first to (would-be) second generation doctors. After controlling for acquired human capital and other attributes of medical school applicants, we cannot reject nepotism as a cause--children of doctors are nearly 14 percent more likely to be admitted into medical school than are comparable nonfollowers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the concept of occupational inheritance in U.S. agriculture. Result of an examination of inter- and intragenerational occupational mobility in the U.S. farming sector in 1962; Ways in which human capital skills required for survival in any occupation may be acquired; Key issues in occupational inheritance in farming.

An introduction is presented for the August 2013 issue's special section of articles focusing on the interpretation of scholarly journal rankings, citing contributions by John Hudson, David Laband, and Daniel Sgroi.

The article responds to an article in the current 2007 issue which is critical of the authors' earlier publication in the journal. The authors agree that populations of most states are growing, that cities are sprawling, and that species around growing cities may be imperiled by urban population growth and expansion. To do an actual experiment using cities with a control would be unrealistic. The statistical findings of the authors was that there was no evidence that spatial-distribution aspects of sprawl are ecologically relevant, but that human population growth was the primary cause of species imperilment in the U.S.

The authors reflect on the suggestion to make the idea of sustainability actualized in the U.S. They cite the United Nations Brundtland Commission Report which says that development is sustainable if it meets the demand of the present without jeopardizing the need of the future generation. They mention that sacrifice is needed for sustainability to be realized. They note that sustainability means to decrease the usage of timber, petroleum and other natural resources.

The article focuses on a study that estimated a multi-product cost function for public institutions of higher education in the U.S. in relation to the provision of extension services. It discovered evidence of significant economies of scale with respect to the provision of such services. The report recommends the shifting of the provision of extension services from the largest institutions to smaller ones to improve cost-effectiveness.

Using the Environmental Scorecard ratings of Congressmen and Senators published annually by the League of Conservation Voters, we explore empirically whether political support for pro-environment legislation, aggregated across each legislative body, is sensitive over time to changing economic conditions — that is, whether there is a political trade-off between economic conditions and the environment. Using LCV scorecard ratings from 1970 to 2008, we find evidence, consistent across both the House and Senate, that political support for the environment is related to per capita income, but this general tendency can be decomposed into sharp differences by party. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Conservation biologists and others hypothesize that humankind's "ecological footprint" is affected not only by the sheer intensity of human activity but also by its spatial arrangement. We used a multivariate statistical model and state-level data to evaluate correlations between species imperilment and the level and spatial distribution of human settlement and infrastructure development in the United States. The level of human activity--measured by the number of people and households, incidence of roads, and intensity of nighttime lights--was significantly correlated with the ecological imperilment of species. Our regression models consistently showed that a 1% increase in the level of human activity across the United States was associated with about a 0.25% increase in the proportion of plant and animal species considered at risk of extinction by The Nature Conservancy. The distribution of human activity did not affect species imperilment. Our results point to rising levels of human activity--and not some particular (e.g., sprawling) distribution of human activity--as the most relevant anthropogenic factor explaining biodiversity loss in the United States.