The effect of incentive regulation on productive efficiency in telecommunications

Incentive regulation is now an important regulatory tool in the telecommunications industry in the United States. The issue explored here is whether incentive regulation has resulted in an increase in productive efficiency. After providing an overview of the nature of incentive regulation, one methodology for measuring the effects of incentive regulation on productive efficiency is reviewed. This methodology is data envelopment analysis (DEA) and allows for the measurement of both scale efficiency and technical efficiency of individual local exchange carriers (LECs). The results indicate that most LECs were technically efficient over the 1988–1998 period. Four LECs, however, consistently demonstrate scale inefficiency. In the aggregate, however, based on the DEA results there was no identifiable improvement in aggregate LECs' technical efficiency between 1988 and 1998. Subsequently, an alternative methodology, a stochastic frontier production function approach, is considered. The results from this methodology confirm that there was no change in technical efficiency over the period of study, something that incentive regulation was specifically designed to enhance.     

The Symmetry Rule: A Seven‐Year Study of Symptoms and Explanatory Labels Among Gulf War Veterans

Noticing medical symptoms can cause one to search for explanatory labels such as “ate bad food” or even “exposed to anthrax,” and perhaps these labels may cause new symptom reports. The present study examined whether there is empirical support for this symptom‐label “symmetry rule.” We interviewed veterans (N= 362) from the Gulf War Registry in 1995 and 2002 about their medical symptoms and about their exposure to war‐related hazards and stressors. Health symptom reports were strongly correlated between the two time periods and showed relatively stable mean levels, whereas recall of war‐related exposures was notably unstable. Veterans starting with fewer medical symptoms recalled fewer war‐related exposures seven years later. Initial recollection of chemical and biological warfare exposure (but not other exposures) longitudinally predicted novel medical symptoms. The findings generally support the symmetry rule hypotheses, although the evidence for the label to symptom link was less strong. The findings account for some variability in symptoms and exposure recall over time, but they do not, on their own, account for the Gulf War veterans' elevated number of unexplained medical symptoms.     

Forgone labor participation and earning due to childbearing among Norwegian women

Individual-level retrospective data from the Family and Occupation Survey of 1988 are used to assess the time diverted from gainful employment because of the presence of children in two Norwegian birth cohorts. We find that a two-child mother born in 1950, whose births occurred in her early twenties, lost 6.6 women-years up to age 37, compared to a childless woman. By matching information on registered income with the survey data, we estimate that her lost income amounts to $151,000 at 1990 prices. After taxation the loss is $98,000. Women with fewer than 12 years of schooling seem to forgo more labor market activity by reason of childbearing than do their better-educated counterparts. The pattern is less clear with respect to the loss of income.     

COSTLY INTERMEDIATION AND CONSUMPTION SMOOTHING

This paper studies quantitatively how intermediation costs affect household consumption loans and welfare. Agents face uninsurable idiosyncratic shocks to labor productivity in a production economy with costly financial intermediation and a borrowing limit. Reducing intermediation costs has two effects: (1) For a given decrease in the interest rate on borrowing, agents' ability to smooth consumption over time improves. (2) The demand for loans increases, which increases the interest rate. The net welfare gain of reducing intermediation costs from 3.927% (U.S. level) to 1% is about 1.14% of equivalent consumption in the baseline economy for an endogenous interest rate and 1.90% for an exogenous interest rate. The gains are distributed unevenly: households at the bottom wealth decile improve welfare by 3.96% and 5.86% of equivalent consumption, while those at the top decile have welfare gains of 0.35% and 0.2%, respectively. Sufficiently high intermediation costs eliminate borrowing and hence the welfare gain of reducing costs is not substantial. The welfare analysis includes transitional dynamics between steady states. (JEL D91, E60, G38)     

Student supervision

In October 1967 Sydney was the venue for the Annual Conference of The Australian Group for the Scientific Study of Mental Deficiency, the theme being “Preparing the Mentally Retarded for Adult Life”. A small group of students under the supervision of Mary McLelland¹ of Sydney University undertook a pilot study of the problems of the adolescent retarded, and the results of this were reported by her at a session of the conference. The subject was chosen because of direct and indirect pleas for help from parents of adolescent retarded people, mainly through the organization known as Aid Retarded Persons. Discussions and talks had taken place over a couple of years, and it is of this pre-conference thinking I am now writing. Parts of the material were given in talks to the parents and to a special group of the A.M.A.     

The Power of Imagination in Transnational Mobilities

At the roots of many travels to distant destinations, whether in the context of tourism or migration, are historically laden and socioculturally constructed imaginaries. People worldwide rely on such imaginaries, from the most spectacular fantasies to the most mundane reveries, to shape identities of themselves and others. These unspoken representational assemblages are powerful because they enact and construct peoples and places, implying multiple, often conflicting, representations of Otherness, and questioning several core values multicultural societies hold, by blurring as well as enforcing traditional territorial, social, and cultural boundaries. What are the contours of power, agency, and subjectivity in imaginaries of transnational mobility and the intersecting social categories those visions both reify and dissolve? Ethnographic studies of human (im)mobility provide an innovative means to grasp the complexity of the global circulation of people and the world-making images and ideas surrounding these movements. As a polymorphic concept, mobility invites us to renew our theorizing, especially regarding conventional themes such as culture, identity, and transnational relationships. This article critically analyzes some preliminary findings of an ongoing multisited research project that traces how prevalent imaginaries of transnational tourism to and migration from the “global South” are (dis)connected. I suggest anthropology has unique contributions to make to the current debate in the social sciences by ethnographically detailing how mobility is a contested ideological construct involving so much more than mere movement.