Life Years Lost at Hazardous Waste Sites: Remediation Worker Fatalities vs. Cancer Deaths to Nearby Residents

We present a hypothetical case study using the Years of Potential Life Lost (YPLL) metric to compare cancer risks incurred by residents living near a Superfund site to occupational fatality risks incurred by workers employed in that site's remediation. Since cancer occurs late in life, and because we assume its mortality rate is 60%, each case results in 8.8 YPLL. Each occupational fatality, which typically occurs earlier in life, results in 38.1 YPLL. In our case study, the residential population of 5000 incurred 1.3 YPLL, compared to 5.7 YPLL incurred by the 500 workers. Several uncertain assumptions may influence our calculations; moreover, occupational risks may be viewed as more "voluntary" than risks incurred by residents. However, because the magnitude of the YPLL incurred by workers and residents may be comparable, risk managers should consider occupational risks when evaluating remedial alternatives.     

TAXES, TORTS, AND THE TOXICS RELEASE INVENTORY: CONGRESSIONAL VOTING ON INSTRUMENTS TO CONTROL POLLUTION

Theories of rational political ignorance and congressional voting imply that Congress members may take different interests into account when they vote on technical amendments than when they vote on a bill's final passage. This article uses votes on Superfund reauthorization to examine what factors influence politicians' support for different instruments to control pollution and how the interests Congress members take into account vary with the anticipated degree of electoral scrutiny. Controlling for a legislator's general support for environmental programs, a representative's votes on specific policy instruments in Superfund legislation depended on the district-level costs and benefits of the instruments.     

Response Effects in Sex Surveys

Two potential problems in sex surveys—respondent refusalsand invalid reporting—are examined for national and areaprobability samples of males and females. Little support isfound for the contention that sexual topics constitute a sensitiveresearch area in terms of respondent cooperation and candor.It is found that (1) respondent cooperation, as indicated byrefusals and terminations, is neither more nor less problematicin sex research than in surveys on other topics; (2) respondentreports of sexual matters are not systematically related tointerviewer characteristics such as gender, sexual experience,or technical competence; (3) respondent candor, when self-reported,also is not associated systematically with either interviewercharacteristics or demographic and sexual characteristics ofrespondents. This analysis does identify, however, evidencethat (4) sexual matters often are sensitive topics for interviewersand principal investigators, leading both to interviewer turnoverand the creative construction of unobtrusive data collectionprocedures.     

DO MORAL COMMUNITIES PLAY A ROLE IN CRIMINAL SENTENCING? Evidence from Pennsylvania

Religion and social control have been a sociological concern since Durkheim and Weber, and the relationship between religion and punishment has long been the subject of speculation. However, surprisingly little empirical research exists on the role of religion or religious context in criminal justice, and almost no research on the role of religious context on actual sentencing practices. We conceptualize the potential relationships between religious context and sentencing severity by drawing from the focal concerns and court community perspectives in the sentencing literature and from the moral communities theory developed by Rodney Stark. We suspect that Christian moral communities might shape notions of perceived blameworthiness for court community actors. Such moral communities might also affect notions of community protection—affecting perceptions of dangerousness, or perhaps rehabilitation, and might influence practical constraints/consequences (e.g., local political ramifications of harsh or lenient sentences). We examine these questions with a set of hierarchical models using sentencing data from Pennsylvania county courts and data on the religious composition of Pennsylvania counties from the Associated Religion Data Archives. We find that county Christian religious homogeneity increases the likelihood of incarceration. In addition, Christian homogeneity, as well as the prevalence of civically engaged denominations in a county condition the effects of important legally relevant determinants of incarceration. Furthermore, we find evidence that Christian homogeneity activates the effect of local Republican electoral dominance on incarceration. We argue that Christian homogeneity affects sentencing practices primarily through local political processes that shape the election of judges and prosecutors.     

Household migration and the labor market position of married women

The present paper conceptualizes labor force participation among U.S. wives as both a determinant and consequence of household migration. A theoretical justification is provided for decomposing these relationships by occupational position of the wife. Applying log-linear models to data from the 1970 One-in-a-Thousand Public Use Sample, we corroborate previous research in that, on the average, the likelihood of interstate migration between 1965 and 1970 was greatest among families in which the wife was not employed prior to the move. However, among employed wives, those classified as professionals or managers were also found to accentuate the probability of household migration, particularly if the husband was not employed in 1965. The implication is that all types of employment by the wife need not limit family mobility as previous studies have suggested. Although migration was found to have a disrupting effect on the continuity of employment among most wives, this effect was most in evidence among wives employed in blue collar occupations. The data suggest the need for a careful reappraisal of traditional economic notions of migration, particularly as they apply to married women.     

WORK‐RELATED ACCIDENTS AND THE LEVEL OF MARKET COMPETITION: AN ANALYSIS OF WORKER INJURY RATES AT U.S. STEEL CORPORATION, 1907–1939

We investigate the relationship between accident rates and industry structure for the United States’ steel industry during the first four decades of the 20th century. We develop a dominant firm theoretical model linking accident rates to number of competitors, showing a positive correlation between accident avoidance and the number of fringe competitors. We then test this theory empirically and, when controlling for other influences, find that reductions in the dominant firm’s market share reduce worker injury rates substantially. (JEL L13, L61, N62, N82)     

Cyclic tournaments and cooperative majority voting: A solution

A new solution concept is axiomatically characterized for tournaments that represent cooperative majority voting. The predicted set of outcomes lies inside the top-cycle set, the uncovered set, and the Banks set.This research was supported by NSF grants SES 8612120 and SES 8896228. I thank Georges Bordes, Gary Cox, Bhaskar Dutta, Richard McKelvey, Nicholas Miller, Emerson Niou, Peter Ordeshook, and Peyton Young for helpful comments. Niou is responsible for the example in Sect. 4. Presented at the Public Choice Society Meetings, Tucson, March 1987, and at the Jacob Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behaviorial Sciences, UCLA, October 1988.     

A concept of an integrated transport model

This paper is one of a series being produced on the application of Operational Research techniques in the integrated planning of public service resource provision and consumption. It describes a conceptual basis for planning transportation services within the context of a public service, the others are related to Health Services, Educational Services and community development services.Two sub-models, a linear sub-model and a dynamic sub-model are linked to form the integrated approach to the planning problem. The overall concept is to evaluate in terms of penalties and benefits the alternative plans of resource provisions.It is of interest to know that the principles of the Linear model described here has been applied to long range planning in the Health Service in the U.S.A. and U.K., and has been reported at the NATO conference, Portugal (1974). The Dynamic model has been used, in a more unstructured fashion than described here, by the Greater London Councils. The model in this paper is to form the basis of a more detailed evaluation of alternative transportation plans.