GRAVITY REDUX: MEASURING INTERNATIONAL TRADE COSTS WITH PANEL DATA

Barriers to international trade are known to be large but because of data limitations it is hard to measure them directly for a large number of countries over many years. To address this problem, I derive a micro‐founded measure of bilateral trade costs that indirectly infers trade frictions from observable trade data. I show that this trade cost measure is consistent with a broad range of leading trade theories including Ricardian and heterogeneous firms models. In an application I show that U.S. trade costs with major trading partners declined on average by about 40 between 1970 and 2000, with Mexico and Canada experiencing the biggest reductions. (JEL F10, F15)     

An Attempt to Assess a New Design in Residential Homes for the Elderly

Summary A comparison of the residents of three county council homesfor the elderly is undertaken. The three homes differ both intheir architectural design, and in the role of the staff. Themeasures used are mainly concerned with the residents' dailyactivities, and information is collected both by questionnaireand by personal observation. The results show significant differencesin the three groups and tend to support the authors' predictionsconcerning the residents' behaviour, based on the differencesin the physical design and staff role in the homes     

NONLINEAR BUSINESS CYCLE DYNAMICS: CROSS-COUNTRY EVIDENCE ON THE PERSISTENCE OF AGGREGATE SHOCKS

We look for asymmetries in the dynamics of real GDP growth for the G7 countries, using a model by Beaudry and Koop that allows the depth of a recession to influence the rate of growth of output. We find evidence supporting these nonlinearities in four countries, including the United States, but we do not find evidence that the asymmetries are common even among the four countries exhibiting asymmetric behavior. A modification of the model to distinguish between the recession and recovery phases of a business cycle does not change this general finding. The asymmetries discovered by Beaudry and Koop do not appear to be common among the G7 nations. (JEL E32)     

SIMULTANEOUS DETERMINATION OF CHURCH CONTRIBUTIONS AND CHURCH ATTENDANCE

In a standard model of household allocation of time and income, church attendance and church contributions are determined simultaneously. There are life-cycle aspects to both attendance and contributions, as Azzi and Ehrenberg (1975) and Ehrenberg (1977) have argued, and contributions behavior is affected by tax treatment and by a potential free-rider problem as well. This paper motivates an econometric specification which recognizes these features and estimates the parameters with a data set of over 2000 Protestant church members.     

OCCUPATION AND ELECTORAL SUCCESS IN CANADA: THE 1974 FEDERAL ELECTION*

Des données professionnelles sont examinées pour les candidats au Parlement en 1974. Pour tous les parties politiques, les professions de rang élevéétaient sur-représentées, par comparaison aux données du marché du travail, et principalement dans les parties Libérale et Conservateur. Uniquement dans le cas du Crédit Social, a-t-on rencontré une majorité numérique de candidats venants de professions de rang inférieur. En examinant le succes électoral, on a trouvé que indépendamment de l'attache politique, un candidat d'une profession de rang élevé a presque une probabilité deux fois plus grande d'être élu qu'un candidat d'une profession d'un rang inférieur. Les données montrent un phénomène double, dans le sens que premièrement l'ensemble de tous les candidats constitute une plus grande proportion de personnes de rang élevé que la population adulte du Canada et deuxièmement les membres finalement élus constituent encore une plus grande proportion de personnes de rang élevé. Occupational data were examined for all candidates for Parliament in 1974. For all parties, high status occupations were over-represented, relative to labour force statistics, expecially in the Liberal and the Progressive Conservative parties. Only in the Social Credit party did we find a numerical majority of lower status candidates. In examining electoral success, it was found that regardless of political affiliation, a high status candidate had almost twice as high a probability of election as a low status candidate. The data illustrate a two-step phenomenon, wherein the pool of all candidates contains a larger proportion of higher status persons than the total adult Canadian population, while the elected members contain yet a larger proportion of high status persons.     

The News Media in Children's Political Socialization

The research reported examines the impact of the news mediaas an agent of political socialization on children's politicalknowledge, their attitudes toward political parties and electoralsystems, and their activities relative to politics. Childrennews media use and level of political knowledge function asprimary sources of causal effects for each other. They are consistentlymore important in their effects on the attitudes and types ofparticipation studied in this research than are the parentaland educational system socialization indicators or the structuralvariables of grade and gender.     

The changing experience of researching family and intimate relationships

A small-scale study to explore the possibility of obtaining information about small companies' charitable giving through telephone interviews provided challenges on three research design issues: selecting a target sample, telephone interviewing, and sensitive research topics. This article explores the general lessons derived from the study. First, it considers suitable sampling frames for identifying and contacing small companies. Second, it discusses the consequences for response rates of the telephone warfare between telemarketers and small companies. Third, it reviews what contributes to the sensitivity of research topics and ways of overcoming this.