Technology differs from other features of culture in that the Boasian stance of cultural relativism seems less binding: one can argue that the technology of one society is superior or inferior to the technology of another. This comparison is possible because technological change—as described...

Cross-cultural researchers often combine several component variables into a composite index or “scale.” The value of a scale for a particular observation is sensitive not only to the values of its component variables, but also to the values of the weights used to combine the components. This...

Mayan towns in the Guatemalan highlands hold markets on specific days of the week. A market is attended by local townspeople, by peasants residing in the town’s hinterland, and by vendors bringing wares from other towns. A market functions to bring in goods from other ecological zones, to...

Accountability reforms have led to a bewildering array of public school performance measures. Policy makers, parents, and the public would often like to use this information to rank schools by differing degrees of effectiveness. Combining measures from different performance dimensions into a...

Policy makers need accurate measures of school district-level costs for a variety of reasons, including salary equity efforts and state-level funding of local schools. Since salaries constitute most of the operating costs for local education providers, teacher salary data provide a ready...

Recent experimental games conducted by ethnographers (Henrich et al. 2004) have shown that groups with higher levels of market integration exhibit higher levels of prosocial behavior. In order to see whether these results are confirmed in a broader ethnographic sample, this paper draws from the...

Inter-county flows of commuters have long been used by the Bureau of the Census to identify MSAs and by the BEA to identify its Economic Areas. This paper looks at U.S. interregional flows of commuters, population, and goods in an effort to identify broader patterns of relationships among U.S....

Positive autocorrelation implies that proximate observations take on similar values. “Proximate” can be defined in many different dimensions. In a cross-section of U.S. regions, it can be defined using physical distance, cultural similarity, ecological similarity, or using frequency and...

Some land uses are considered incompatible. When a parcel is bordered by parcels with incompatible land uses, external costs will impact the property owner. Collective action by property owners then results in land use regulations designed to restrict neighboring parcels from incompatible uses....

Consumers of higher education face a bewildering array of product and price combinations. We compare U. S. institutions with a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) multi-factor frontier using 2000-2001 data for 1,188 four-year institutions of higher education. The input is net price or tuition, fees,...