ON THE CHOICE BETWEEN PROPERTY RULES AND LIABILITY RULES

When parties can bargain with each other in an externality situation, it is frequently argued that liability rules are preferable to property rules. The case for liability rules is thought to be strongest when the parties behave strategically, when the collective authority responsible for maximizing social welfare has perfect information, and when lump-sum transfers are not available. It is shown here that liability rules are not generally preferable to property rules in these circumstances because of their limited ability to redistribute income between the parties.     

NEW RULES TO THE OLD GAME: CUBAN SPORT AND STATE LEGITIMACY IN THE POST-SOVIET ERA

After the collapse of the socialist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Cuban state faced its greatest crisis. How the state managed to maintain sufficient legitimacy in light of the growing economic hardships and class restructuring Cuban society underwent in these initial post-Soviet years remains somewhat mysterious. A crucial element of the legitimating discourse of the Cuban state, domestically and internationally, has been the relative success of its sports teams in international competition. As symbols of the strength of the state and one of the few remaining “successes” of the Revolution, Cuban sports performances remain vital symbolic capital for current and future administrations. The problem that state officials continue to face is how to transform that symbolic capital into economic capital without sacrificing ideological principles. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Havana during the late 1990s and on interviews with sports officials, athletes, and coaches since then, this article examines Cuban officials' efforts to transform Cuban sport from a modern, centralized bureaucratic institution to a revenue generating industry within the neoliberal, capitalist, competitive, and post-Soviet world. In particular, I concentrate on the strategies pursued by Cuban sports officials in their efforts to maintain world-class sporting excellence and the ramifications of the emergence of Cuban sport as an export industry to provide a small suggestion of how legitimacy of the state was maintained and what the future of Cuban sport may hold.     

WOMEN'S ACCESS TO PENSIONS AND THE STRUCTURE OF ELIGIBILITY RULES:

Because many older women lack access to private pensions and rely solely on social security income, they are significantly more likely than men to have incomes below or near poverty level. Liberal feminists attribute women's failure to attain pensions to their discontinuous work histories, which preclude them from meeting requirements for length and continuity of service. Such a conclusion ignores the invisible gender-based distinctions arising from the organizational logic of the workplace. The key issue is not why women fail to satisfy pension rules but rather why the rules are structured to penalize women for their reproductive labor. This historical case study of the pension negotiation process in two unions, the United Auto Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, indicates that the price women pay in the market for their domestic labor is a social construction that arises from specific decisions in the workplace. The analysis suggests that women can improve their status relative to men if they are able to reveal the hidden dimensions of gender in societal institutions but that they cannot attain full equality until the distinction between social production and reproduction is eliminated.     

THE EXTENDED COASE THEOREM AND LONG RUN EQUILIBRIUM: THE NONEQUIVALENCE OF LIABILITY RULES AND PROPERTY RIGHTS

Many authors have held that in a world with reasonable positive transactions costs, the assignment of liability for pollution damages affects profits, thus long run equilibrium. Therefore, the Coase Theorem fails for such cases. Others have defended the Theorem in such situations .
This paper shows that the disagreement has its roots in a confusion of liability rules and property rights. A simple general equilibrium model is used to show that the Theorem is correct for property rights assignments, but not for liability rules. Liability rules are shown to be, in effect, incomplete property rights, which leads to inefficiency .     

A CROSS-SECTION ANALYSIS OF THE DEMAND FOR NEW AND USED AUTOMOBILES IN THE UNITED STATES

This paper investigates the effects of income and other family characteristics on the demand for new and used automobiles. The multinomial logit probability model is employed to explain a family's choice of age and number of automobiles. Two cross-section surveys are analyzed to ascertain how well these components of demand can be explained by socio-economic variables.     

NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS,POPULISM AND THE POLITICS OF THE LIFEWORLD

Since the 1960s, New Social Movements (NSMs) have been prominent as new actors on the political scene. But, by comparison with other radical political agents, they have made a relatively poor showing in mainstream political theory. Habermas, for example, criticizes NSMs, including second-wave feminism, for merely masquerading as new forms of radical political agency. By introducing some ideas from Laclau, I show how to counter Habermas's criticism. I then rethink NSMs as a new post-liberal form of democratic-emancipatory political agency, which by contrast with the politics of the public sphere that Habermas champions, is anchored in the less organized reaches of the lifeworld.     

NEW EVIDENCE ON INCOME AND THE VELOCITY OF MONEY

Time series and cross-country empirical results suggest that cash holding as a proportion of income rises, or equivalently that velocity falls, as income increases. Numerous cross sectional findings at many points in time, in several countries conclude oppositely. It is argued here that the former findings suffer from omitted variable bias by ignoring sociodemographic variables affecting the demand for cash balances. When one incorporates such demand shifters into the analysis the time series and cross-country findings are seen as consistent with the critically reexamined cross sectional result that velocity increases with income.     

AN EMPIRICAL CHARACTERIZATION OF THE DYNAMIC EFFECTS OF POLICE SPENDING ON VIOLENT AND PROPERTY CRIME

The study estimates the dynamic effects of shocks to police expenditures on measures of violent and property crime rates using annual U.S. state-level data for the period 1960–2015. We employ a structural panel VAR model and achieve identification by imposing the restriction that police spending responds to structural shocks to crime with at least a lag of 1 year. Results indicate that a shock to police spending leads to (a) persistent and significant decreases in violent and property crime rates and (b) significant and persistent negative impacts on crime rates in periods of high crime but little impacts in periods of low crime. Variance decompositions show that shocks to police spending account for moderate to large proportions of the variability of U.S. state-level crime rates. Our findings are robust across separate measures of violent and property crime rates, as well as to the inclusion of additional variables to the baseline panel VAR model. (JEL K42)     

NEW EVIDENCE ON THE RETIREMENT AND DEPRECIATION OF MACHINE TOOLS

This paper uses data from machinery dealers to estimate the retirement and depreciation patterns for a broad set of conventional machine tools. According to the dealers, the average service life of these machines at the survey date was about thirty years. Service lives were even longer in the mid-1970s, with the reduction over time likely caused by the diffusion of superior, computer controlled machines. Consistent with the relatively long average life, the conventional machines have depreciated slowly. I use the results to assess the average service life assumed by the Bureau of Economic Analysis to construct capital stocks for metalworking machinery.     

AUSTRIFYING EUROPE: ULTRARIGHT POPULISM AND THE NEW CULTURE OF RESISTANCE

The article investigates the political and cultural causes of the emergence of right-wing coalitions throughout the European Union, taking Austria as a symptomatic case of this return of political antagonism within a culture of consensus. It is argued that, methodologically and theoretically, a valid analysis of the phenomenon of xenophobic populism can only be achieved with the combined effort of both political and cultural theory,respectively of both political discourse analysis and cultural studies. Two axes of analysis have to be taken into account: the first being the relation between culture (or the popular) and politics (or the ‘people’), and the second concerning the even more fundamental relation or difference between politics and the political.     

EMPLOYER RECRUITMENT STRATEGIES AND THE LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES OF NEW HIRES

The results in this article suggest, among other things, a strong association between recruitment choices and starting wages. The theoretical framework motivating the empirical analysis is a wage‐posting game in which firms make wage offers and choose recruitment strategies while recognizing a trade‐off between hiring speed and match quality. Introducing this theoretical framework to the recruitment literature, I present new evidence on employers' choices of recruitment methods to answer the questions “How do employer recruitment choices vary by firm and vacancy characteristics and the skill requirements of jobs?” and “How do vacancy duration and starting wages vary with recruitment choices?”(JEL MS1)     

THE NEW ECONOMY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM:

Recent decades have seen major changes in economic conditions in the United States, including large-scale layoffs and downsizing, erosion of job quality for some workers, and increased reliance on nonstandard workers. Researchers have investigated the objective contours of this new economy, but few have investigated the consequences of these changes for popular attitudes about economic opportunity. Using data from the 1998 Indiana Survey of Workers in a Polarized Economy (N = 853), I investigate this new economic landscape and its effects on people's views about economic opportunity. I find that job deterioration and experiences with layoffs and job threats are creating pessimism about the American Dream among Indiana workers.     

THE IMPACT OF INFORMATION AND RISK PERCEPTION ON THE HURRICANE EVACUATION DECISION-MAKING OF GREATER NEW ORLEANS RESIDENTS

This article contributes to the current discussion on how residents living in vulnerable areas make the decision to evacuate when they are in harms way. Key in this discussion is the question, what role does information and risk play in shaping evacuation behavior? This study used a sample of respondents from the greater New Orleans region (Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard Parishes) of the Twelve Parish Survey (N = 1,207) conducted prior to Hurricane Katrina. The findings indicate that information sources are vitally important in the evacuation process. By examining the role of information from authorities, family, and friends; visual imagery; and the media we found that individuals use a variety of sources when they decide to evacuate. Further, the importance of visual imagery in the evacuation process is discussed. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of information dissemination and its importance to members of the media and public policy makers.     

TESTING THE THEORY OF THE NEW CLASS

This article tests the theory that a post-industrial economic order gives rise to an elite which has a class interest in the expansion of government: the New Class. Cluster analysis of large national surveys reveals the existence of such a group, identifiable by liberal policy preferences and a pattern of group identifications which clearly distinguish it from the traditional middle and working classes. This New Class is concentrated in the professions, and among those with high levels of education.     

THE SOCIOLOGY OF MORAL PANICS: TOWARD A NEW SYNTHESIS

There are two alternative theoretical perspectives developed in the sociological study of a moral panic: the moral perspective and the interest perspective. Using as illustration a May 1982 national moral panic about drugs that occurred in Israel, this article argues that both perspectives must be used and integrated into one coherent model for a better and fuller sociological explanation of moral panics. The article provides a detailed account of the Israeli panic and an analysis clustered along two axes. One axis uses the interest perspective to analyze the timing of the panic by focusing on the question of why it happened when it did. The other axis uses the moral perspective to interpret the specific content of the panic, focusing on why the panic was about drugs.     

NARRATIVE ANALYSIS AND THE NEW HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY

While many scholars assert the importance of the narrative mode in historical inquiry, none have demonstrated how it is used specifically to analyze historical events and social action in processual, action-oriented ways. In this essay, we examine recent research on capital-state relations and urban development to demonstrate how political sociologists and urban sociologists are using narrative mode to examine the interconnectedness of human agency and social structure and the temporality of historical events in processual ways. We find that this newest research is utilizing narrative to generate new meanings of causality and to redefine the role of theory and explanation. We conclude by considering the implications of these developments for the future of sociology.