DO SURVEYS OVERSTATE PUBLIC CONCERNS?

Because the item, "How concerned are you about...?" asks respondentsto indicate their level of concern about an issue, some respondentsmay sense it assumes they are concerned or should be concernedabout the issue. Using a filter question to first determineif people are concerned about the issue before asking for theirdegree of concern may help solve this problem. To test thishypothesis, a split-ballot experiment was embedded in a nationalrandom digit dialing telephone survey on food-related issues.For the four items included in the experiment, the group receivingthe filter versions of the questions gave roughly double thepercentages of "not concerned" responses as the group receivingstandard items, and the filter group also gave fewer responsesat the upper end of the response scale.     

Governing the transnational organic cotton network from Benin

In this article, we attempt to conceptualize the historical development and the governance structure of the transnational organic cotton network from Benin. We aim to discover how the organic cotton production‐consumption network is governed locally and internationally. Existing bodies of literature on international agricultural production networks, in particular the Global Value Chains (GVC) perspective, focus on economic dimensions, but find it difficult to incorporate the sustainability dimension. We favour widening the concept of GVCs beyond economics by acknowledging and including environmental rationalities and the representatives of their interests, not as external elements, but rather as co‐governing or co‐structuring factors (or actors) of sustainable value chains. Our findings reveal that beyond the traditional producer versus buyer dualism, intermediate stakeholders, namely transnational and local environmental NGO networks, are instrumental in the construction, maintenance and transformation of the organic cotton network. It is also apparent that farmers' leaders play an important role in mediating and (re)building trust among organic farmers, though they exert insufficient vertical power in the organic cotton network to control it.     

THE MARKET FOR MOTION PICTURES: RANK, REVENUE, AND SURVIVAL

Every motion picture is an innovation that competes for theater screens and audiences during its brief life against a changing array of imperfect substitutes. We analyze a large sample of motion pictures as an evolving rank tournament of survival and death. The results indicate that the failure rate of motion pictures is time-dependent and survival time is strongly related to the number of initial bookings. Weekly box office revenue is highly convex in rank, which is consistent with Rosen's superstar phenomenon. Our results have implications for motion picture licensing arrangements, which have been severely restricted by U.S. court decisions.     

TAX-RATE UNCERTAINTY, FACTOR SUPPLIES, AND WELFARE

Uncertainty about prospective changes in tax rates may increase factor supplies, and hence the tax base, permitting a reduction in tax rates that could result in a net increase in welfare. Under empirically relevant assumptions about attitudes towards risk we find that when an individual exclusively saves or works, the tax base rises in response to greater tax-rate uncertainty, so that welfare could indeed increase. However, when an individual both saves and works, the supply of the randomly taxed factor declines with increased uncertainty, implying that tax revenue and welfare decrease when the nonrandom tax rate is sufficiently low.     

PROFIT AND EXPENDITURE FUNCTIONS IN BASIC PUBLIC FINANCE: AN EXPOSITORY NOTE

This paper demonstrates how profit and expenditure functions may be used to prove fundamental results about deadweight losses suffered by consumers, producers, and resource owners. Losses arising from excise taxes and subsidies are examined and, in the case of a tax, the individual level analysis is extended to the market level in a partial equilibrium setting. In addition, profit and expenditure functions are applied to quantity constraints, two-part tariffs, all-or-nothing choices, and reservation prices. Although no new results are derived, the paper provides motivation for the study of indirect objective functions and duality.     

INTERNATIONAL PRICE BEHAVIOR AND THE DEMAND FOR MONEY

Oil prices, commodity prices and American monetary policy, the last operating through a variety of channels, have all figured prominently in explanations of the international inflation process in the late 1960s and early 70s. OUT major purpose in this paper is to test these various hypotheses. We do so in the context of a reduced-form rational-expectations price equation which we estimate for the United States and seven other industrial countries using quarterly data for the period 1955 through 1976.
The principal conclusion that emerges from this exercise is that movements in domestic money in these countries served as the key link in the inflation process. The factors that produced these monetary changes, however, differed among countries. Price shocks of various sorts were clearly of secondary importance.
The other important set of conclusions concerns the demand for money. In place of a traditional stock adjustment model, we used GLS with a second-order correction for autocorrelation. We believe this produced more plausible estimates of the parameters of the long-run demand function and of the adjustment process itself.