Deterrence, expected cost, uncertainty and voting: Experimental evidence

We conduct laboratory experiments to investigate the effects of deterrence mechanisms under controlled conditions. The effect of the expected cost of punishment of an individual’s decision to engage in a proscribed activity and the effect of uncertainty on an individual’s decision to commit a violation are very difficult to isolate in field data. We use a roadway speeding framing and find that (a) individuals respond considerably to increases in the expected cost of speeding, (b) uncertainty about the enforcement regime yields a significant reduction in violations committed, and (c) people are much more likely to speed when the punishment regime for which they voted is implemented. Our results have important implications for a behavioral theory of deterrence under uncertainty.     

Strike Lengths: Correcting for Prestrike Announcements and the Ratio of Bargaining Size to Firm Size

Anticipating the duration of a labor strike can be vital for both sides of the dispute, as well as outside observers. The methods of a pair of studies using Canadian data are surveyed to analyze labor strikes in the United States from 1992 to 2008. Corrections are made for strikes with predetermined lengths (“one-day” strikes and the like), whose durations are more a function of the prior announcements than of other factors, such as number of employees striking and macroeconomic conditions. Strikes are found to be generally shorter when the striking unit represents a larger portion of the firm’s total workers, a proxy for its bargaining power. This ratio provides a better understanding of the strike dynamics (including expected length) than do sheer bargaining unit size or sheer firm size.     

Altruism and Market-Like Behavior: An Analysis of Willingness to Pay for Recycled Paper Products

The contrast between self-interested behavior guided by rational choice and altruistic behavior guided by normative considerations is a central theme in the social sciences. This study suggests that market and market-like behavior, the context where self-interest is expected to dominate, is in fact often motivated by altruism. This argument is tested by examining a willingness to pay measure, a surrogate for the market that is finding substantial use in analyses of public policy. In particular, the ability of the Schwartz model of altruism to explain willingness to pay for recycled products is examined. Findings indicate that even as the Schwartz model has explained many purely altruistic behaviors, it also can explain self-reported willingness to pay. While economists often have noted the importance of rational choice in even the most intimate of human decisions, this study notes the importance of normative altruism in even the most calculated.     

A New Model of Trend Inflation

This article introduces a new model of trend inflation. In contrast to many earlier approaches, which allow for trend inflation to evolve according to a random walk, ours is a bounded model which ensures that trend inflation is constrained to lie in an interval. The bounds of this interval can either be fixed or estimated from the data. Our model also allows for a time-varying degree of persistence in the transitory component of inflation. In an empirical exercise with CPI inflation, we find the model to work well, yielding more sensible measures of trend inflation and forecasting better than popular alternatives such as the unobserved components stochastic volatility model. This article has supplementary materials online.     

Poverty Dynamics among Recent Immigrants to Canada1

This paper examines two issues: (1) poverty dynamics among successive cohorts of entering immigrants to Canada, and (2) whether rising educational attainment and increasing share in the “skilled” class since the early 1990s has resulted in improvements in poverty entry, exit, and chronic poverty. The entry to poverty is very high during the first year in Canada, but low in subsequent years. The dramatic move toward more labor‐market friendly characteristics of entering immigrants had only a very small effect on poverty outcomes, in part because the relative advantage of holding a degree diminished, and “skilled economic” class immigrants were more likely to enter poverty than their “family” class counterparts.     

SexualPrejudice and Gender: Do Heterosexuals' Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men Differ?

This article explores the question of whether and how heterosexuals' attitudes toward lesbians differ from their attitudes toward gay men. Data from a 1997 national survey are presented to show that heterosexual women generally hold similar attitudes toward gay men and lesbians, whereas heterosexual men are more likely to make distinctions according to gender. Moreover, men's attitudes toward lesbians are susceptible to situational manipulations. Nevertheless, the underlying unity of attitudes toward lesbians and gay men is demonstrated by the fact that they are highly correlated for both heterosexual men and women. It is suggested that heterosexuals' attitudes toward gay people are organized both in terms of minority group politics and personal sexual and gender identity and that attitudes toward lesbians are most likelyto be differentiated from attitudes toward gay men in the latter realm.     

Life satisfaction and family strengths of older couples

The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between family interaction quality of married elderly and their offspring and life satisfaction of older persons. Information was obtained by means of mailed questionnaires completed by both spouses of 68 married, retired couples living in Georgia and North Carolina who were identified through churches, senior centers, and congregate housing units and through personal contacts. For the total sample, health status was the strongest predictor of life satisfaction followed by certain family strengths factors and job prestige, respectively. Males and females differed concerning which variables contributed most to explaining variance in life satisfaction. Variance in life satisfaction of males was best explained by job prestige, family strengths, and financial help given. Variance in life satisfaction of women was best explained by their perception of their health, family strengths, and job prestige.     

Analysis of breeding bird communities along an urban-rural gradient in Berlin,Germany, by Hasse Diagram Technique

Breeding bird communities in Berlin were investigated at five study sites, which represent an structural urban-rural gradient, from densely built-up areas with sealed ground to green areas such as large parks. In this paper, we tested the Hasse Diagram Technique (HDT), an approach belonging to partial order theory, for its appropriateness to extract information about changes in species composition from our data set. As expected, the overall number of bird species was positively correlated with the urban-rural gradient, increasing from 12 found in the city center to 28 in an urban park. By HDT analysis, four different sub-groups of birds could be identified, contributing differentially to the increase in species number: (1) ubiquists, i.e., species found at each study site, (2) a sub-group, the species’ number of which was positively correlated with the urban-rural gradient, increasing with increasingly green areas, (3) a sub-group, the species’ number of which was negatively correlated with the urban-rural gradient, decreasing with a declining density of buildings, and (4) species, the distribution of which did not show any correlation with the urban-rural gradient. The results show that HDT is a suitable tool for formalized analysis of the pattern of species’ communities along an environmental gradient.