On the Evolution of Competitive Balance: The Impact of an Increasing Global Search

The Coase theorem maintains that where free-market precepts exist, the allocation of property rights does not impact the distribution of resources. An application to Major League Baseball suggests that institutions such as free agency and the reverse-order amateur draft would not impact player distributions and therefore would not impact competitive balance. The present study finds that the distribution of wins is generally consistent with the precepts of the Coase theorem and therefore suggests a course for those who wish to alter the level of competitive balance: Major League Baseball should increase its focus on expanding the size of its labor pool. (JEL O15 , L83 , C22 )     

Goodness of fit for the inverse Gaussian distribution

For testing the fit of the inverse Gaussian distribution with unknown parameters, the empirical distribution-function statistic A² is studied. Two procedures are followed in constructing the test statistic; they yield the same asymptotic distribution. In the first procedure the parameters in the distribution function are directly estimated, and in the second the distribution function is estimated by its Rao-Blackwell distribution estimator. A table is given for the asymptotic critical points of A². These are shown to depend only on the ratio of the unknown parameters. An analysis is provided of the effect of estimating the ratio to enter the table for A². This analysis enables the proposal of the complete operating procedure, which is sustained by a Monte Carlo study.     

Immigrants and alien workers

VII. Conclusion The number of immigrants now coming to the United States is proportionally only a fraction of the number that came in earlier years, and there is nothing in those numbers to suggest a difficult absorption burden. Immigrants, both legal and illegal, more than pay for the services they use with the taxes they pay, leaving a considerable net surplus that benefits American citizens. Immigrants raise productivity and do not cause an observable amount of unemployment of citizens. Admitting far more immigrants into the country than the law now allows would have positive effects on the incomes of citizens, and would enhance the continuing vitality of the United States.     

Campus attitudes toward alcohol and drugs in a deep southern university.

In our zeal to deal with alcohol and drug abuse, we may have a distorted picture of what the majority of college students actually think about alcohol and drug use. Students in this study done at a public university located in the Deep South report being generally intolerant of substance abuse.     

A modified random-effect procedure for combining risk difference in sets of 2×2 tables from clinical trials

Summary Meta-analyses of sets of clinical trials often combine risk differences from several 2×2 tables according to a random-effects model. The DerSimonian-Laird random-effects procedure, widely used for estimating the populaton mean risk difference, weights the risk difference from each primary study inversely proportional to an estimate of its variance (the sum of the between-study variance and the conditional within-study variance). Because those weights are not independent of the risk differences, however, the procedure sometimes exhibits bias and unnatural behavior. The present paper proposes a modified weighting scheme that uses the unconditional within-study variance to avoid this source of bias. The modified procedure has variance closer to that available from weighting by ideal weights when such weights are known. We studied the modified procedure in extensive simulation experiments using situations whose parameters resemble those of actual studies in medical research. For comparison we also included two unbiased procedures, the unweighted mean and a sample-size-weighted mean; their relative variability depends on the extent of heterogeneity among the primary studies. An example illustrates the application of the procedures to actual data and the differences among the results. This research was supported by Grant HS 05936 from the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research to Harvard University.     

THE STRUCTURE OF FAMILY PARADIGMS: AN ANALYTICAL MODEL OF FAMILY VARIATION

The theory of family paradigms provides an integrative framework for under-standing and systematizing the diverse ways that families organize and make sense of family life. Using formal methods of analysis based on logical and geometrical arguments, the priecise implications of models of family types can be investigated and compared. The paradigmatic framework can thus be refined and extended to form a more rigorous theoretical grounding for family typologies is explored and a miltidimensional model is derived the geometry of which is equivalent to, but more succinctly captures, the underlying structure of uariation in family para-digms. In Part II, the resulting model is interpredtd and explored in terms of implications for family theory, theory construction, and family therapy. Clarifying the basic dimensions of the paradigmatic framework also permits more precise exploration of interrelationships among related models of family types, which can be understood as reduced models derivable from the complete geometry of the paradigmatic framework.     

Working with Deaf People

Whilst 17% of the population experience some degree of hearing loss, sociology has largely neglected the study of services to this group. This article attempts to move the debate from a sociology of the deaf community to a sociology of deafness that includes an examination of how professionals define the needs of hearing impaired people. Despite differences between different constructions, deafness workers offer a combination of social work, information, and interpreting services. Practice rules have been developed by deafness workers to control workloads, and to work in their preferred way. This article is based on a multi-layered approach with a contextual analysis, a survey of 123 deafness workers, 32 semi-structured interviews, and my own personal experience of deafness work.     

The Farm Crisis and Mental Health: A Longitudinal Study of the 1980s1

Abstract This paper examines rural/urban differences and trends in mental health during the farm crisis of the 1980s in a large panel sample from a midwestern state. A community research perspective, which attributes differences to life styles, culture, and community context, is contrasted with an economic stress perspective, which focuses on individual differences in economic circumstances as determinants of rural-urban differences in mental health. Survey samples from 1981, 1986, and 1989 are used to examine differences among seven categories of community type. Multiple regression analysis of the trend and panel data provide support for both the individual economic distress and community context models.