Statistical consulting

The paper and the special issue focus on the activity of statistical consulting and its varieties. This includes academic consulting, consulting to and in industry as well as statistics in public media.     

A simulation study of a discrete-time multiserver retrial queue with finite population

In this paper, we deal with a discrete-time multiserver retrial queue with finite population. Firstly, we study the Markov chain at the epochs immediately after slot boundaries making emphasis on the computation of its steady-state distribution. Then, the main performance measures are investigated. Besides, we simulate the waiting time of a customer in the retrial group under three different queueing policies. Some numerical examples are given to illustrate the analysis.     

Communication of risk: health hazards from mobile phones

Summary. Possible health hazards from mobile phones arise from the use of the phones themselves and via the base stations that relay signals. Except for an increase in traffic accidents induced by the use of mobile phones in cars the evidence for a health hazard is at most indirect, but it cannot be entirely dismissed; the phones have not been widely used for sufficiently long for direct epidemiological studies to have high sensitivity for detecting any induced incidence of cancer, for example. The background and evidence are briefly reviewed and the steps taken in the UK to make information widely available described.     

On the Third Law of Demand

The Alchian and Allen theorem predicts that it will be harder to find "good" apples in the State of Washington, a prime apple-growing region, than in, say, New York City, where the addition of shipping charges makes "bad" apples comparatively more expensive. We recast the theorem as a testable proposition by explicitly taking the supply side into account and identifying plausible scenarios in which a fixed cost either has no effect on the relative prices of high and low quality grades of the same good in distant markets or, indeed, causes more of the bad apples to be shipped out.     

Trait Expressiveness and Marital Satisfaction: The Role of Idealization Processes

This study examined the processes that underlie the association between trait expressiveness and marital satisfaction. A total of 168 newlywed couples participated in a four‐wave, 13‐year longitudinal study of marriage. Cross‐sectional and longitudinal path analyses suggested that expressiveness promotes satisfaction by leading spouses to engage in affectionate behavior and by leading them to idealize their partner. Expressive people formed idealized images of their partner because they brought out the best in their partner's behavior and because they interpreted their partner's behavior in a favorable light. The study extends previous research by showing that the benefits of trait expressiveness extend into the second decade of marriage and by providing a plausible explanation of the connections between trait expressiveness and marital satisfaction.     

Reconsidering the Evolution of Nonlinguistic Communication: The Case of Laughter

Nonlinguistic communication is typically proposed to convey representational messages, implying that particular signals are associated with specific signaler emotions, intentions, or external referents. However, common signals produced by both nonhuman primates and humans may not exhibit such specificity, with human laughter for example showing significant diversity in both acoustic form and production context. We therefore outline an alternative to the representational approach, arguing that laughter and other nonlinguistic vocalizations are used to influence the affective states of listeners, thereby also affecting their behavior. In the case of laughter, we propose a primary function of accentuating or inducing positive affect in the perceiver in order to promote a more favorable stance toward the laugher. Two simple strategies are identified, namely producing laughter with acoustic features that have an immediate impact on listener arousal, and pairing these sounds with positive affect in the listener to create learned affective responses. Both depend on factors like the listener's current emotional state and past interactions with the vocalizer, with laughers predicted to adjust their sounds accordingly. This approach is used to explain findings from two experimental studies that examined the use of laughter in same-sex and different-sex dyads composed of either friends or strangers, and may be applicable to other forms of nonlinguistic communication.     

Urban Power Structures and Publicly Financed Stadiums

Urban elites are increasingly addressing local social problems though policies that turn their cities into tourist destinations. Often at the heart of these policies are new publicly financed sports stadiums. Ironically, this strategy is flourishing despite near-unanimous academic criticism, and increasing public skepticism, about this approach. Our research addresses this contradiction by exploring how and why powerful decisionmakers continue supporting publicly financed stadiums. We rely on local growth coalition theory to explore this topic because it offers analytical advantages, including looking beyond local sports teams as the focal point of these initiatives, addressing the variation in the outcomes of these initiatives, and acknowledging that policymakers are predisposed toward supporting these initiatives but that this predisposition does not always result in success.     

Adult Drug Treatment Courts: A Review

Drug treatment courts (DTCs), an alternative to traditional criminal courts, provide an innovative way to legally process some drug offenders. The origin and recent growth of the drug court system in the USA can be explained as an unintended consequence of a failing 'war on drugs'. In this article, we discuss the spread of adult DTCs throughout the USA, the main components of drug courts, controversies surrounding DTCs, and some criticisms of drug courts. We summarize the recent evaluations of adult DTCs, and highlight various DTC factors that have been found to reduce individual drug use and criminal activity. We also offer suggestions for future research on DTCs and conclude with policy recommendations.     

Joint tests of non-nested models and general error specifications

This paper is concerned with joint tests of non-nested models and simultaneous departures from homoskedasticity, serial independence and normality of the disturbance terms. Locally equivalent alternative models are used to construct joint tests since they provide a convenient way to incorporate more than one type of departure from the classical conditions. The joint tests represent a simple asymptotic solution to the “pre-testing” problem in the context of non-nested linear regression models. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed tests have good finite sample properties.     

CORPORATE TAX INCIDENCE AND INEFFICIENCY WHEN CORPORATE AND NONCORPORATE GOODS ARE CLOSE SUBSTITUTES

An important deficiency in Harberger's [1962] model of corporate income taxation is its inability to consider both corporate and noncorporate production of the same good. Within-industry substitution has potentially major implications for both the excess burden and incidence of the corporate tax.
We analyze this within-industry substitution using a model in which each industry/sector contains corporate and noncorporate firms (with identical production functions) which produce goods that are close substitutes. The scope for considerable within-industry substitution of noncorporate for corporate capital leads to a very much larger excess burden than that in the Harberger model.