DYNASTIC POLITICAL PRIVILEGE AND ELECTORAL ACCOUNTABILITY: THE CASE OF U.S. GOVERNORS, 1950–2005

This paper examines the impact of dynastic political privilege on the behavior of incumbents. Incumbents have opportunities to serve themselves at the expense of voters, but society can design political institutions to mitigate these principal‐agent problems. Dynastic political privilege may be one such mechanism. We argue that the possibility that opportunistic behavior in office may damage family members' political prospects disciplines incumbents. We test this hypothesis using data for 1950–2005 on U.S. governors, including a new data set on the family relationships of politicians, and find that dynastic political privilege increases incumbent accountability. (JEL H71, H10)     

Effects of Question Wording and Format on Political Attitude Consistency

Numerous studies in the past decade have suggested that theAmerican voter has become increasingly sophisticated, ideologically,and that this is due largely to the separate or combined impactof the growing educational attainments of the U.S. public andthe greater salience of politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Thisstudy, however, hypothesizes that much of the change might bedue to a simple methodological artifact—changes in questionwording and format—and reports data from a recent nationalexperiment which strongly supports such an interpretation. Thegeneralizations derived from The American Voter may, therefore,not be quite as "time-bound" as the current literature wouldlead us to believe.     

BUILDING THE POM CURRICULUM FOR A PRIVATIZING ECONOMY: AN EVALUATION FROM MANUFACTURERS‘ PERSPECTIVES

Manufacturing in Eastern European countries is in transition to open-market competition. One transitional issue is university education for operations managers from the perspective of business practitioners. Survey responses by 203 manufacturing professionals from 83 companies provide recommendations for operations management education at the University of Sibiu in Romania. The recommendations substantially reorient curricula that traditionally prepared students for professions in centrally controlled economies rather than for open-market competition. The redesigned curriculum has an educational advantage in its integration of production, marketing, and engineering, all under one college of engineering. However, the curriculum is inconsistent with some tenets of quality management and just-in-time production. Also, survey data imply a need for coverage of competitive manufacturing strategy that, currently, is underrepresented in the curriculum.     

PROCESS IMPROVEMENT: AN EXPLORATORY DATA ANALYSIS APPROACH WITHIN AN INTERVAL-BASED OPTIMIZATION FRAMEWORK

This article revisits an old problem; “systematically explore the information contained in a set of operating data records and find from it how to improve operational performance by taking the appropriate decisions in the space of operating conditions,” thus leading to continuous process improvement. A series of industrial case studies within the framework of the internships in the Leaders for Manufacturing (LFM) program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology led us to a reexamination of the traditional formulations for the above problem. The resulting methodology is characterized by the following features: (1) problem statement and solutions are expressed in terms of hyperrectangles in the decision space, replacing conventional pointwise results; (2) data-driven, nonparametric learning methodologies were advanced to produce the requisite mapping between performance and decisions; (3) operating performance is in essence multifaceted, leading to a multiobjective problem, which is treated as such. The proposed methodology has been applied to a number of industrial examples and in this paper we provide a brief overview only of those that can be discussed in the open literature.     

A NEW LEARNING APPROACH TO PROCESS IMPROVEMENT IN A TELECOMMUNICATIONS COMPANY

Redesigning and improving business processes to better serve customer needs has become a priority in service industries as they scramble to become more competitive. We describe an approach to process improvement that is being developed collaboratively by applied researchers at US WEST, a major telecommunications company, and the University of Colorado. Motivated by the need to streamline and to add more quantitative power to traditional quality improvement processes, the new approach uses an artificial intelligence (AI) statistical tree growing method using customer survey data to identify operations areas where improvements are expected to affect customers most. This AI/statistical method also identifies realistic quantitative targets for improvement and suggests specific strategies predicted to have high impart. This research, funded in part by the Colorado Advanced Software Institute (CASI) to stimulate profitable innovations, has resulted in a practical methodology used successfully at US WEST to help set process improvement priorities and guide resource allocation decisions throughout the company.     

THE CYCLICAL BEHAVIOR OF PRICES AND RELATIVE PRICES

Price and output shock correlations provide information concerning macroeconomic shocks. Previous research generally finds small or negative correlations between real gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP deflator shocks but positive correlations between industrial production (IP) and consumer price index (CPI) shocks at short forecast horizons. We show that mismatched price and output correlations may have different magnitudes or signs than matched pairs. Matched and mismatched correlations between disaggregated prices and output from the GDP accounts indicate the procyclical price of nondurables to durables makes correlations between mismatches misleading. Thus, there is reason to be skeptical of results based on IP and the CPI. (JEL E31, E32)     

ECONOMICS AND 100 YEARS OF ANTITRUST: INTRODUCTION

Editor's Note: I wish to thank the symposium editors, George Bittlingmayer, Associate Professor, and Gary Walton, Professor, Graduate School of Management, University of California Davis, Davis, CA., for their special efforts and valuable input as they shepherded these papers through the refereeing and editorial process. I also wish to thank Rodney T. Smith, Professor of Economics, Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate School and Coeditor of Economic Inquiry, who served as coordinator of the symposium efforts, and Carolyn Williams, assistant to the editor, who served as liaison between Economic Inquiry, the symposium editors and the authors. These combined efforts have resulted in the exciting collection of papers that follow.     

Adult Perspectives on Children's Autonomy

A representative sample of 1,002 Los Angeles adults respondedto vignettes on parent-child conflict by indicating their supportfor the position of either the parent or the child. Adults'perspectives on children's rights to autonomy were examinedin the nine substantive areas of education, privacy, appearance,religion, economics, sexual conduct, access to media, politicalparticipation and public responsibility, and social participation.In all these areas, there is a lack of consensus about children'srights among adults. Social characteristics of the sample, however,correlate with views on this issue in ways consistent with ageneral liberal-conservative orientation.