BARRIERS TO ENTRY IN THE MARKET FOR STUD SERVICES: GOVERNMENT AND "NON-PROFIT" INSTITUTIONS IN COLLUSION

Modern technologies are banned in the breeding of Thoroughbred horses. These practices have been banned by the states defining a Thoroughbred as a horse registered by the Jockey Club of New York, and by the Club refusing to register horses bred "unnaturally." Modern technologies would vastly increase the number of high quality foals and lead to a decline in industry prices and profits. The breeding restrictions protect the wealth of owners at the expense of consumers, potential input suppliers, and new breeders. Because of the distribution of costs and benefits in the political process, we foresee no end to legislatively mandated stagnation.     

Unified Conditional Frequentist and Bayesian Testing of Composite Hypotheses

Testing of a composite null hypothesis versus a composite alternative is considered when both have a related invariance structure. The goal is to develop conditional frequentist tests that allow the reporting of data-dependent error probabilities, error probabilities that have a strict frequentist interpretation and that reflect the actual amount of evidence in the data. The resulting tests are also seen to be Bayesian tests, in the strong sense that the reported frequentist error probabilities are also the posterior probabilities of the hypotheses under default choices of the prior distribution. The new procedures are illustrated in a variety of applications to model selection and multivariate hypothesis testing.     

AUTOMOBILE FUEL EFFICIENCY: MEASUREMENT AND EXPLANATION

This paper extends the hedonic technique of adjusting for quality change to a new area: the construction of a quality-adjusted automobile fuel efficiency index. This index, which holds constant a wide range of characteristics that affect observed fuel economy, rises by over 20 percent from 1949 until the late 1960s. The advent of increasingly stringent antipollution regulations coincides with its decline through the mid-1970s. Thereafter, the constant-quality index rises sharply. This paper will demonstrate that the fall and rise over the last decade coincide with the reductions in allowable automobile exhaust emissions and the rising relative price of petroleum, respectively.     

THE COMPOSITION AND CONSTRUCTION OF MONETARY AGGREGATES

An economic monetary aggregate is composed from a set of monetary goods that are at least weakly separable from other goods in the optimizing agent's utility function. We construct such an aggregate using a Divisia index number. We demonstrate that through the middle of the 1980s forecasts of the inflation rate based on our economic monetary aggregate are superior to forecasts based on the simple sum monetary aggregates M1 or M2.     

Responding to Empire: Liberal Nationalism and Imperial Decline in Scotland and Québec1

Abstract This article emphasises the role of empire in explaining the emergence of “liberal nationalism” in Scotland and Québec in the early twentieth century. That period witnessed a relative decline in the British Empire's geopolitical standing. In response British governments implemented policies which sought to redress its decline. The article focuses on three policies – the South African War, tariff reform and imperial defence – and the response of the Young Scots' Society and the self‐ascribed Nationalistes. Both groups espoused a “liberal nationalism”. Yet their liberal nationalism was expressed differently: emphasis was placed on “liberal” in Scotland, and on “nationalism” in Québec, reflecting contrasting relationships with empire.     

DISCONTINUITIES IN PENSION BENEFIT FORMULAS AND THE SPOT MODEL OF THE LABOR MARKET: IMPLICATIONS FOR FINANCIAL ECONOMISTS

In their analysis of corporate pension plans, financial economists typically invoke the simplest and the most tractable model of the labor market. This is the spot model, where the worker's cash wage plus accruing pension benefit equals the value of his marginal product in each and every period. This paper provides evidence against the empirical validity of the spot model, and uses provisions common to most pension plans to do so. These findings are relevant to the appropriate measurement of pension liabilities and thus to the present controversy surrounding the termination of overfunded plans and the recapture of surplus assets by the employer. The existence of incentive effects, ruled out by the spot model, may help to unravel certain well known "puzzles," such as the failure of employers to fully fund their plans in spite of the tax advantages of doing so.     

INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT AND OPINION CHANGE IN NEW ZEALAND

Conflict between groups, including nations, seemingly leadsto solidarity among the people in each collectivity. Testingthis proposition at the international level is difficult owingto methodological problems of data gathering. This paper reportsupon the impact of an international controversy upon nationalopinion consolidation. After the New Zealand government bannednuclear-capable ships from the country, the United States retaliatedthrough public denunciation of this action and mild sanctions.Poll information suggests that, as a result of this dispute,New Zealanders put aside their preexisting political and socialdifferences on the issue of nuclear weapons in their countryand rallied behind their government. Over time, however, thisconsolidation effect shows signs of disintegration: social and,especially, political cleavages have begun again to discriminateopinion on the question of nuclear weapons in New Zealand.     

The Current Efficiency of List-Assisted Telephone Sampling Designs

List-assisted random digit dialing (RDD) designs became popularin the late 1980s and early 1990s. Work done by the Bureau ofLabor Statistics and the University of Michigan in 1993 resultedin the development of the underlying theory for these designsas well as the evaluation of various alternative sampling plansto optimize the method. Recent research to reevaluate thesedesigns in light of the significant changes in the telephonesystem over the past decade is presented in this article. Thearticle provides background on the development of list-assisteddesigns, and recent changes in the U.S. telephone system arereviewed. Using 1999 data from Survey Sampling, Inc., an analysisof the current state of the telephone system is presented, anda reoptimization of the earlier designs is undertaken. Resultsfrom the earlier work are compared with findings from the 1999data.