POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE SOCIAL MARGINAL COST OF PUBLIC FUNDS: THE CASE OF THE MELTZER‐RICHARD ECONOMY

In previous studies on the social marginal cost of public funds (SMCF), the existing tax system has been assumed to be either arbitrary or optimal. This note explores another possibility: the existing tax system itself represents a political equilibrium. Our exploration proceeds in Meltzer and Richard’s (1981) political economy of redistributive taxation. An interesting feature of our finding is that the degree of income inequality as measured by the ratio of mean to median income can play an important role in estimating the SMCF and judging whether the level of redistribution is excessive or inadequate. (JEL D61, D72, H21)     

Children's Vocational Development: A Research Rationale

Vocational development research and interventions have focused primarily on adolescents and young adults. The lack of attention to career development antecedents in children has led to a serious neglect of this period of life when the foundation is laid for career choices and outcomes in later life. A harmful by‐product is the frequent preclusion of gender‐atypical occupational pathways by boys and especially by girls. To address this situation, the authors recommend identifying a core set of constructs that describe children's vocational development and developing sound instruments to measure them, leading to a longitudinal study ranging from childhood to early adulthood.     

Sequence Comparison Via Alignment and Gibbs Sampling: A Formal Analysis of the Emergence of the Modern Sociological Article

Various substantive literatures in sociology seek small regularities in sequences: turning points in the life course, catalytic moments in organizational change, sharp turns in occupational trajectories, and the like. Commonly these are turning points, but they may also be simple local patterns. This paper reports a method for discovering such regularities even when they are quite faint, applying that method to rhetorical regularities in sociological articles. The paper begins by analyzing the overall sequence structure of such articles and then gives a basic introduction to Gibbs sampling, one member of the broader class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. It then reports an algorithm employing Gibbs sampling to find local sequence regularities and applies that algorithm to demonstrate the subsequence regularities present in sociological articles. Substantively, the paper shows that the rhetorical structure of sociological articles changed from one pattern to another in the period 1895–1965 and that certain faint but standard rhetorical subsequences became characteristic of articles in the later period. Methodologically, it introduces a broad class of methods that provide effective approaches to a number of previously intractable statistical questions.     

Mortality of American Troops in the Iraq War

We estimate the death rate of United States troops deployed to Iraq from the beginning of the US invasion through 30 September 2006. Eighty percent of the deaths in Iraq were combat‐related. The death rate in Iraq is lower than that of the civilian population of the United States but substantially higher than that of young adults. It is much lower than the death rate of US troops in Vietnam, in part because a much smaller fraction die among those wounded in Iraq. We also estimate relative mortality levels for US troops according to numerous demographic variables through 30 November 2006. The risk of death in Iraq per deployment is shown to be highest for Marines; Naval and Air Force personnel in Iraq have lower death rates than the civilian population of comparable age. Other categories with above‐average mortality in Iraq are enlisted troops, males, younger persons, and Hispanics.     

Reaching Men who have Sex with Men in Australia. An Overview of AIDS Education: Community Intervention and Community Attachment Strategies

This paper outlines the principles underlying the Australian AIDS strategy and offers an explanation for its success in reducing the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) among homosexual and bisexual men in Australia's gay communities. A brief outline of the AIDS education activities offered by the gay-community AIDS organisations is followed by results from the Social Aspects of the Prevention of AIDS (SAPA) research project based at Macquarie University. This research confirms the importance of the community-intervention strategies utilised by gay AIDS organisations. The paper then assesses progress in the development of community-attachment strategies for men who have sex with men but who are not attached to organised gay communities.     

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)     

Behaviour Exchange Systems Training: The ‘BEST’ Approach for Parents Stressed by Adolescent Drug Problems

Parents are challenged in the adolescent years by attempts to increase adolescent responsibility while also managing separation issues. Adolescent drug use can exacerbate parental concerns. Parental fears and anxieties surrounding adolescent drug use can undermine opportunities to respond effectively. This paper describes the theoretical rationale for, and early experience of delivering, a brief intervention program designed to assist parents coping with adolescent drug problems. The program emerges out of a hybrid of systems and behaviour therapy principles and has been designed to address issues associated with parenting characterised by a high level of emotional involvement and/or ineffective parental control. Group work encouraging more adolescent responsibility-taking can assist parents disabled by feelings of guilt and failure. As parents develop emotional independence from adolescent behaviour, an appropriate expectation for adolescent control is established.