This paper examines the measurement of poverty in the United States from 1972 through 2004. We investigate how poverty rates and poverty gaps have changed over time, explore how these trends differ across demographic groups, and contrast these trends for several different income and consumption...

The theory of policy implementation yields conflicting predictions. Depending on the case and the perspective of the observer, policy control over the bureaucracy ranges from loose or non-existent to oppressive and pernicious right down to the street level. This paper presents a theoretical...

We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Mother-Child Files to estimate the effect of age at enrollment in first grade on eight to eleven year old children's cognitive test scores and behavior problems. We find that children who enroll in first grade at a young age score higher...

A "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" (Guardian, 9 September) is the latest reminder of the persistence of controversy over who wrote Shakespeare. But the skeptics' case depends on a logical slip. The starting point is always some close variant of the claim that while Shakspere (a common spelling...

"The Locality of Waste Sites in the City of Chicago: A Demographic, Social, and Economic Analysis" is a study designed to explore the factors that explain the location of a wide class of environmental wastes in a large American city. This report expands on the 1994 study "Environmental Racism in...

This study has offered a critical review of the literature on business fixed investment spending, and has assessed the current state of knowledge and future research agenda. To place some structure on this vast literature, the survey has been organized according to two principles. The first...

The paper gives an account of several well-known cognitive illusions in terms of contextual defaults which guide intuition where familiar cues are ambiguous. When the default is inappropriate, as it sometimes must be, the result is a cognitive illusion. In contrast to Kahneman & Tversky...

Though Canada, Mexico, and the United States have distinctly different administrative histories, the language of "performance," "customers," "accountability," "privatization," and "decentralization" is heard throughout North America, and all three countries are engaged in public management...

Several recent studies have documented a significant positive effect of minority racial concentration on overall mortality rates. These findings pertain to ecological studies of states, cities, counties and census tracts in the U.S. In this paper, we examine whether this effect persists after...

Recent research on aggregate fluctuations, coupled with ongoing work in industrial organization, has renewed interest in the existence, magnitude, and cyclical pattern of market power and the extent of increasing returns to scale across industries. By exploiting restrictions from dynamic theory...