STRUCTURAL UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED STATES: THE EFFECTS OF INTERINDUSTRY and INTERREGIONAL DISPERSION

The effects of sectoral shifts, measured by dispersion in the growth rates of employment or earning across industries or regions, on unemployment are tested in a specification controlling for the effects of other labor-market variables and shifts in the demographic composition of the labor force. Interindustry and geographical shifts in labor demand have significant unemployment effects, with adult males the group most strongly affected. The estimated equations imply that most of the fluctuation in unemployment over the period 1956-87 was been due to microeconomic causes rather than aggregate demand.     

Unions,PAC contributions,and the NAFTA vote

Political action committees (PACs), especially those controlled by organized labor and business, have been shown to affect Congressional voting. We explore how PACs influenced the House of Representatives’ vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The NAFTA vote is analyzed because organized labor strongly opposed the treaty while business generally supported it and because of the straight-forward voting generated by its fast-track status. Probit analysis of a unique, unpublished data set containing information about PAC and non-PAC contributions to the 1992 House election campaigns demonstrates that Representatives who depended largely on labor PACs tended to oppose NAFTA, while Representatives who derived a large proportion of their campaign contributions from business PACs tended to favor its passage.     

Beheimatungsprozesse begleiten — ein Werkstattbericht

Supporting processes of belonging in supervision and coachingThe contemporary employee has to cope with frequent changes. Not only does he lose his familiar environment, he also has to find ways to familiarize himself with new places and to develop a fresh sense of belonging. This process can be understood and facilitated by interpreting the German concept of “Heimat“ as something we have to create ourselves. First experiences demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in coaching processes.     

Expected sample moments of concomitants of selected order statistics

In this paper, the task of determining expected values of sample moments, where the sample members have been selected based on noisy information, is considered. This task is a recurring problem in the theory of evolution strategies. Exact expressions for expected values of sums of products of concomitants of selected order statistics are derived. Then, using Edgeworth and Cornish-Fisher approximations, explicit results that depend on coefficients that can be determined numerically are obtained. While the results are exact only for normal populations, it is shown experimentally that including skewness and kurtosis in the calculations can yield greatly improved results for other distributions.     

A simple,automatic and adaptive bivariate density estimator based on conditional densities

The standard approach to non-parametric bivariate density estimation is to use a kernel density estimator. Practical performance of this estimator is hindered by the fact that the estimator is not adaptive (in the sense that the level of smoothing is not sensitive to local properties of the density). In this paper a simple, automatic and adaptive bivariate density estimator is proposed based on the estimation of marginal and conditional densities. Asymptotic properties of the estimator are examined, and guidance to practical application of the method is given. Application to two examples illustrates the usefulness of the estimator as an exploratory tool, particularly in situations where the local behaviour of the density varies widely. The proposed estimator is also appropriate for use as a pilot estimate for an adaptive kernel estimate, since it is relatively inexpensive to calculate.     

Going to Pieces: Paul Monette and the Fragments of the Tribe

Author of the highly acclaimed Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) and winner of the 1992 National Book Award for his autobiography Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Paul Monette died of complications from AIDS in Los Angeles on February 12, 1995. His most recent work, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (1994), is his third volume in a trilogy of autobiographical writing on growing up gay, coming-out, and living with AIDS. A graduate of Phillips Academy and Yale University, Monette received a number of awards for his writing and his work as an outspoken voice in the battle against AIDS, including the National Book Award, three Lambda Literary awards, the PEN Center West Freedom to Write Award, and three honorary doctorate degrees, from Wesleyan University, the City University of New York, and the State University of New York at Oswego. A memorial service was held for Monette on Sunday, February 19, 1995, at the Directors Guild of America on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Paul Monette was 49.     

Relations in frozen places: Observations on winter public order

The effects of prolonged winter weather on public order have been overlooked in sociological research literature. A naturalistic observational study conducted over a two year period using team field research methods documents several phenomena characteristic of winter public order. First, there were exaggerated body glosses or officious displays, second, decreased numbers of people, third, displays of a festive attitude, and fourth, an attitude of adventure and exploration. These observations allow a generalization that winter public behavior differs from that described by Goffman in that conditions provide greater freedom to the individual in the uses to which urban territory can be put. This democratization of urban space is explained in terms of Homan's model of group processes which suggests that public norms will be suspended with decreased activity and interaction.

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Sensitivity of the Optimum to Perturbations of the Profit or Weight of an Item in the Binary Knapsack Problem

In the binary single constraint Knapsack Problem, denoted KP, we are given a knapsack of fixed capacity c and a set of n items. Each item j, j = 1,...,n, has an associated size or weight w_j and a profit p_j. The goal is to determine whether or not item j, j = 1,...,n, should be included in the knapsack. The objective is to maximize the total profit without exceeding the capacity c of the knapsack. In this paper, we study the sensitivity of the optimum of the KP to perturbations of either the profit or the weight of an item. We give approximate and exact interval limits for both cases (profit and weight) and propose several polynomial time algorithms able to reach these interval limits. The performance of the proposed algorithms are evaluated on a large number of problem instances.     

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