OPTION VALUE: A GENERAL APPROACH

This article examines a potential bias if expected consumer surplus is used to measure the benefits of a price change under uncertainty. This bias, which is called option value, may be positive or negative. A general framework is developed for analyzing the determinants of the sign of option value, and this framework is applied to three types of uncertainty: income uncertainty, quality uncertainty, and uncertainty over consumer tastes. In the first two cases, option value has a determinate sign; however, in the last case, option value may be positive, negative, or zero in an unpredictable fashion.     

Transnational social movements and changing organizational fields in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries

Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in the global political arena, including shifts in geopolitical arrangements, increases in popular mobilization and contestation over the direction of globalization, and efforts by elites to channel or curb popular opposition. We explore how these factors affect changes in global politics. Organizational populations are shaped by ongoing interactions among civil‐society, corporate and governmental actors operating at multiple levels. During the 1990s and 2000s, corporate and government actors promoted the ‘neoliberalization of civil society’ and the appropriation of movement concepts and practices to support elite interests. Not all movement actors have been passive witnesses to this process: they have engaged in intense internal debates, and they have adapted their organizational strategies to advance social transformation. This article draws from quantitative research on the population of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) and on qualitative research on contemporary transnational activism to describe changes in transnational organizing at a time of growing contention in world politics. We show how interactions among global actors have shaped new, hybrid organizational forms and spaces that include actors other than states in influential roles.     

Equitable Taxation and the Provision of Health Insurance Subsidies

Current U.S. income tax laws allow many taxpayers to exclude from taxable income part or all of the cost of acquiring health insurance through an employer‐sponsored benefit plan. This favorable tax treatment generally applies regardless of whether the employer or employee actually pays the health insurance premiums. We describe the effects of this tax policy on the U.S. tax system's horizontal and vertical equity. We also explain how taxpayers covered by employer‐sponsored plans are significantly subsidized by the government in acquiring health insurance, whereas taxpayers who acquire health insurance by other means or who are not covered by health insurance at all receive no such government assistance. We conclude that any prospective health‐care policy initiatives, including modifications to the 2010 health‐care reforms, should contemplate both the horizontal and vertical equity of the tax treatment of health insurance premiums.     

ACCESS TO TECHNOLOGY AND THE TRANSFER FUNCTION OF COMMUNITY COLLEGES: EVIDENCE FROM A FIELD EXPERIMENT

Access to information may represent an important barrier to learning about and ultimately transferring to 4‐year colleges for low‐income community college students. This article explores the role that access to information technology, in particular, plays in enhancing, or possibly detracting from, the transfer function of the community college. Using data from the first‐ever field experiment randomly providing free computers to students, we examine the relationships between access to home computers and enrollment in transferable courses and actual transfers to 4‐year colleges. The results from the field experiment indicate that the treatment group of students receiving free computers has a 4.5 percentage point higher probability of taking transferable courses than the control group of students not receiving free computers. The evidence is less clear for the effects on actual transfers to 4‐year colleges and the probability of using a computer to search for college information (which possibly represents one of the mechanisms for positive effects). In both cases, point estimates are positive, but the confidence intervals are wide. Finally, power calculations indicate that sample sizes would have to be considerably larger to find statistically significant treatment effects and reasonably precise confidence intervals given the actual transfer rate point estimates. (JEL J24, O33, I23, I24)