Digital Commons Network^™

The Politics Of Appointing Catholics To The Federal Courts, Sheldon Goldman

Sheldon Goldman

No abstract provided.

Cheerleading And The Gendered Politics Of Sport, Laura Grindstaff, Emily West

Emily E. West

Cheerleading occupies a contested space in American culture and a key point of controversy is whether it ought to be considered a sport. Drawing on interviews with college cheerleaders on coed squads as well as five years of fieldwork in various cheerleading sites, this paper examines the debate over cheerleading and sport in terms of its gender politics. The bid for sport status on the part of cheerleaders revolves around the desire for respect more than official recognition by athletic organizations; cheerleaders recognize the prestige associated with sport, a function of its historic association with hegemonic masculinity, and they claim …

Mediating Citizenship Through The Lens Of Consumerism: Frames In The American Medicare Reform Debates Of 2003-2004, Emily West

Emily E. West

Access to health care is an issue that challenges the imagined boundary between being a ‘consumer’ and being a ‘citizen’. This is especially true in the United States where market-based solutions to providing health care have historically been favored over care organized through government. In the recent debate over how to organize prescription drug coverage for seniors in the United States, stakeholders quoted in the press were more likely to position health care as a consumer issue rather than as an issue of basic rights that accompany citizenship. As scholars such as Lizabeth Cohen (2003) have illustrated, being a ‘consumer’ …

Dangerous Demographies And The Scientific Manufacture Of Fear, Elizabeth L. Krause

Elizabeth L. Krause

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/dangerous-demographies

Pursuing Manufacturing-Based Export-Led Growth: Are Developing Countries Increasingly Crowding Each Other Out?, Arslan Razmi

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This study empirically investigates the presence of crowding out effects emerging from intra- developing country competition in export markets for manufactured goods. Export equations are estimated for a panel consisting of twenty major developing country exporters of manufactures, after developing weighted price and quantity indexes based on their exports to thirteen major industrialized countries. The results indicate that in spite of an increase in the elasticity of industrialized country expenditures on imported products, crowding out effects became much more significant in the 1990s. The estimated crowding out effects vary across time periods, SITC categories, and levels of technological sophistication of …

Social Segregation And The Dynamics Of Group Inequality, Samuel Bowles, Rajiv Sethi

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We explore the dynamics of group inequality when segregation of social networks places the initially less affluent group at a disadvantage in acquiring human capital. Extending Loury (1977), we demonstrate that (i) group differences in economic success can persist across generations in the absence of either discrimination or group differences in ability, provided that social segregation is sufficiently great, (ii) there is threshold level of integration above which group inequality cannot be sustained, (iii) this threshold varies systematically but non-monotonically with the population share of the disadvantaged group, (iv) crossing the threshold induces convergence to a common high level of …

Aspects Of Informalization And Income Distribution In Developing Countries: A Modified Specific Factors Approach, Arslan Razmi

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper explores aspects of increased informalization in developing countries with the help of a modified specific factors model with a fixed nominal wage in the formal sector, which is assumed to have a “lighthouse” effect on the informal sector wage. Both sectors produce a tradable good each, with informal sector production being embedded in international production networks. Comparative dynamic exercises that attempt to simulate recent economic developments in many developing countries yield plausible results, and suggest various channels for increased informalization. Contrary to standard sticky wage models, wage suppression in the formal sector leads to informalization. Changes in factor …

Border Wars: Tax Revenues, Annexation, And Urban Growth In Phoenix, Carol E. Heim

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Phoenix and neighboring municipalities, like many in the South and West, pursued a growth strategy based on annexation in the decades after World War II. This paper explores the link between annexation and competition for tax revenues. After discussing arguments for annexation, it traces the history of annexation in the Phoenix metropolitan area. A long-running series of "border wars" entailed litigation, pre-emptive annexations, and considerable intergovernmental conflict. The paper argues that tax revenues have been a key motivation for annexation, particularly since the 1970s. It then considers several related policy issues and argues that while opportunities for annexation are becoming …

Morphology: Optimality Theory, John J. Mccarthy

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

Prosodic Morphology, John J. Mccarthy

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

Stocking Rates For Operators Of Small Horse Farms, Madeleine Charney, Sue Ellen Johnson

University Libraries Publication Series

As Project Assistant, I collaborated with Dr. Sue Ellen Johnson on this brochure. The project was a planning grant for USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Conservation Planning Initiative, to support sustainable grazing practices in the Chicopee River Basin, Massachusetts’ largest watershed.

Variables In Natural Language, Meredith Landman

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

A central goal of generative linguistics is to determine what constitutes a possible grammar of a natural language. This thesis works toward that goal in positing a constraint on the possible semantic types of variables in natural language. Specifically, I argue here that the logical forms (LFs) of natural languages do not contain higher-type variables, i.e., variables of a type higher than that of an individual, type e (see Chierchia (1984) and Baker (2003) for similar proposals). I refer to this constraint as the No Higher-Type Variables constraint (NHTV).

Assuming that the domain of individuals, D, includes at least objects, …

An Asymmetric Dynamic Struggle Between Pirates And Producers, Alex Coram

Economics Department Working Paper Series

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of struggles over resources by studying a game between a producer that can guard and buy fortifications and a pirate. It is assumed that the returns from defence and raiding depends on the ratio of the resources spent on each activity and that all produced goods can be stolen. It attempts to characterise the trajectory of the resources and the defence and raiding activities of the pirate and producer. I show, among other things, that the pirate’s strategy is to farm the producer and that the …

Japanese Growth And Stagnation: A Keynesian Perspective, Takeshi Nakatani, Peter Skott

Economics Department Working Paper Series

This paper uses a modified Harrodian model to understand both the long period of rapid Japanese growth and the recent period of stagnation. The model has multiple steady-growth solutions when the labour supply is highly elastic, and government intervention, we argue, took the Japanese economy onto a high-growth trajectory. Labour constraints began to appear around 1970, and a combination of high saving rates and slow population growth account for the stagnation of the 1990s. This combination produces a structural liquidity trap and threatens the sustainability of attempts to ensure near full employment through …fiscal policy or by running a persistent …

Relative Advantage, Queue Jumping, And Welfare Maximizing Weath Distribution, Alex Coram, Lyle Noakes

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Suppose individuals get utilities from the total amount of wealth they hold and from their wealth relative to those immediately below them. This paper studies the distribution of wealth that maximizes an additive welfare function made up of these utilities. It interprets wealth distribution in a control theory framework to show that the welfare maximizing distribution may have unexpected properties. In some circumstances it requires that inequality be maximized at the poorest and richest ends of the distribution. In other circumstances it requires that all wealth be given to a single individual.

Whose Money? Whose Time? A Nonparametric Approach To Modeling Time Spent On Housework, Sanjiv Gupta, Michael Ash

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We argue that earlier quantitative research on the relationship between heterosexual partners’ earnings and time spent on housework has two basic flaws. First, it has focused on the effects of women’s shares of couples’ total earnings on their housework, and has not considered the simpler possibility of an association between women’s absolute earnings and housework. Consequently it has relied on unsupported theoretical restrictions in the modeling. We adopt a flexible, nonparametric approach that does not impose the polynomial specifications on the data that characterize the two dominant models of the relationship between earnings and housework, the “economic exchange” and “gender …

Cultural Socialization In Families With Internationally Adopted Children, Richard M. Lee, Harold D. Grotevant, Wendy L. Hellerstedt, Megan R. Gunnar, Minnesota International Adoption Project Team

Rudd Publications

Cultural socialization attitudes, beliefs, and parenting behaviors were examined in families with internationally adopted children. The authors hypothesized that parents with lower color-blind racial attitudes would be more likely to engage in enculturation and racialization parenting behaviors because they hold stronger beliefs in the value and importance of cultural socialization. Using data from the Minnesota International Adoption Project, the results support this mediation model of cultural socialization. Individual variations in cultural socialization also are discussed in terms of child development and shifting adoption attitudes and practices.

Mandated Wage Floors And The Wage Structure: New Estimates Of The Ripple Effects Of Minimum Wage Laws, Jeanette Wicks-Lim

PERI Working Papers

Minimum wage laws have become a key political issue, following on the heels of over 130 successful living wage campaigns around the country. In the debates surrounding these mandated wage floors, one recurring issue has been whether the legislation has wider-ranging impacts on wages than the legally-required raises alone. Advocates on both sides of the debate dispute the potential magnitude of 'ripple effects'- the nonmandated raises given by employers to maintain a similar wage hierarchy before and after a change in the wage floor. These ripple effects have the potential to greatly expand the overall impact of mandated wage floors. …

The Fallacy Of The Revised Bretton Woods Hypothesis: Why Today’S System Is Unsustainable And Suggestions For A Replacement, Thomas I. Palley

PERI Working Papers

Dooley et al. (2003) have argued that today’s international financial system has structural similarities with the earlier Bretton Woods (1946 – 71) arrangements and is stable. This paper argues that the comparison is misplaced and ignores fundamental microeconomic differences, and that today’s system is also vulnerable to a crash. Eichengreen (2004) and Goldstein and Lardy (2005) have also argued that the system is unsustainable. However, their focus is the sustainability of financing to cover the U.S. trade deficit, whereas the current paper focuses on inadequacies on the system’s demand side. The paper concludes with suggestions for a global system of …