"RENDER UNTO CAESAR WHAT IS CAESAR'S":

Previous research on the relationship between religiosity and involvement in illegal behavior overlooks Hirschi and Stark's original concern with religion as a sanctioning system. While Hirschi and Stark proposed that religion affects compliance with the law by promising heaven and threatening damnation, this study suggests that its sanctions are self-imposed shame and socially-imposed embarrassment. Shame and embarrassment are compatible with a rational choice perspective on illegal behavior—they lower the expected utility of crime and, thus, its likelihood. These two threats stem from two conceptually distinct dimensions of religiosity. People strongly self-identified as religious are more likely to feel ashamed if they violate the law; those involved in a social network based on religion are more likely to be embarrassed. An adult sample's responses to a question concerning the likelihood of cheating on income taxes in the future tests these hypotheses. The threat of shame emanating from religious identity salience is a stronger deterrent than that of embarrassment.     

SOCIAL DEATH AS SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY:

In his classic Passing On , David Sudnow described how the presumed social value of patients affects whether the staff will attempt to revive them. Since this study was published, the health care field has undergone dramatic changes and commentators have questioned whether the social rationing described by Sudnow is still relevant. Specifically, critics point to the increased rationalization of medical practice via protocols, a widely accepted resuscitation theory, and legal initiatives to promote resuscitative efforts and protect patient autonomy. Based on observations of 112 resuscitative efforts and interviews with forty-two health care workers, I demonstrate that the recent changes in the health care system did not weaken but instead fostered social inequality in death and dying.     

THE SUCCESS OF THE FED AND THE DEATH OF MONETARISM

We propose an explanation for the demise of monetarism in the United States. We show that optimal monetary policy would lead to zero correlation between monetary aggregates and inflation if the effect of monetary aggregates on inflation is known precisely and to negative correlations if there is coefficient uncertainty. From 1960 to 1982 the correlation of the monetary base and inflation was positive and so the variance in the growth rate of monetary base in the United States was clearly too large monetary base growth destabilized inflation. However, from 1983 to 2003 variations in monetary base growth were clearly stabilizing and could have been just right. ( JEL E52, E31, E32)     

PARENTAL DEATH AS A PRECIPITANT OF MARITAL CONFLICT IN MIDDLE AGE*

When a long-standing marriage suddenly becomes conflictual, one precipitant can be the recent death of the parent of one of the partners. The bereaved spouse can identify with the deceased parent, attacking or withdrawing from his or her partner; or he/she can become irrationally angry because the partner cannot replace an idealized parent. The main goal of therapy is to facilitate the bereaved partner's mourning of the dead parent. Choosing an effective therapeutic method depends on the couple's capacity for mutual empathy and support and their need for insight. Without marital therapy, unrecognized mourning may contribute to the breakdown of long-standing marriages.     

"THE STORY" OF A DEATH: THERAPEUTIC CONSIDERATIONS WITH BEREAVED FAMILIES

Facilitating and listening to bereaved families tell "The Story" of their loss is an important component of therapeutic work with bereaved families. Following a discussion of the general functions of stories, the authors use a variety of case examples to illustrate how "The Story" can be used as an assessment device, as an initial intervention, and as a gauge of the progress of treatment. Family stories of loss are conceptualized as constructions, and the emphasis is on how individual and family context affect and are affected by these stories. Throughout the paper, particular attention is paid to ways stories canbe useful for children in families.     

REPUTATION,PRICE, AND DEATH: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF ART PRICE FORMATION

We analyze how an artist's death influences the market prices of her works of art. Death has two opposing effects on art prices. By irrevocably restricting the artist's oeuvre, prices, ceteris paribus, increase when the artist dies. On the other hand, an untimely death may well frustrate the collectors' hopes of owning artwork that will, as the artist's career progresses, become generally known and appreciated. By frustrating expected future name recognition, death impacts negatively on art prices. In conjunction, these two channels of influence give rise to a hump‐shaped relationship between age at death and death‐induced price changes. Using transactions from fine art auctions, we show that the empirically identified death effects indeed conform to our theoretical predictions. We derive our results from hedonic art price regressions, making use of a dataset which exceeds the sample size of traditional studies in cultural economics by an order of magnitude. (JEL Z11, J24, G12)     

BAD NEWS FROM THE FRONT AND FROM ABOVE: BOMBING RAIDS,MILITARY FATALITIES AND THE DEATH PENALTY IN NAZI GERMANY

We examine how the decision-making of political elites respond to an imminent external threat to the existence of the state in times of war. To do so, we exploit exogeneous variation in exposure to battle deaths and bombing raids to estimate the effect of variation in the intensity of war on the probability that individuals charged with treason and/or high treason in Nazi Germany received the death sentence. A doubling of the number of military fatalities as well as bombing raids in the same week in which a defendant was sentenced increased the likelihood of receiving the death penalty by about 10 percentage points. (JEL K14, N44)