A model incorporating SSI participation, information and perceptions of program eligibility is developed and estimated using data from the 1980 PSID. The model assumes the participation decision process begins in an uninformed regime and switches to an informed regime if the perceived benefits are sufficiently high. In this informed regime individuals participate if perceived benefits exceed perceived costs. We find that the acquisition of information is responsive to actual program generosity just as is participation itself. Faulty information, which may be the proximate cause of low participation rates, is apparently, in part, a consequence of low perceived net benefits.

In this paper the author examines the demand for a hypothetical input, electric over-the-road vehicles, in the commercial sector using data from a survey experiment. This experiment is designed to allow the estimation of theoretically plausible, derived demand functions from either the Translog or the CES production functions. A heteroscedasticity-corrected, two-limit Tobit model is developed and estimated. The results provide evidence of considerable adaptability to new technologies and price structures on the part of firms. They evidently would be willing to cope with the limited traveling range of electric vehicles if these vehicles were able to provide a less costly means of doing business.

A bstract-A statistical model of household automotive transportation demand is developed which nests the Koyck distributed lag model and four alternatives as special cases. These various specifications are tested with data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. For households who changed residence during the observation period 1973-1978, the Koyck model is rejected in favor of a model which allows price and income effects to vary freely for two years prior to settling into a geometric declining pattern. The maximum single year income impact, for these households, is in the year following the income change. Prices appear to have an initial negative impact on miles driven followed by a strong positive impact in the third year. This latter effect may be related to the acquisition of a more fuel efficient vehicle stock.

This paper summarizes results from a validation study in which administrative records from a large manufacturing company are used to validate survey responses of a sample of workers from that company. Relatively little evidence of bias is found in reports of prior-year earnings and unemployment, the more salient fringe benefits, and union status. Quite diverse amounts of error variance are found in the survey reports, ranging from very small for reports of job tenure, annual earnings, and annual unemployment to very large for work hours and especially for a measure of hourly earnings constructed by dividing annual earnings by annual work hours. Furthermore, it is found that the conventional assumptions regarding measurement error in earnings models are not justified. In particular, there appears to be an important correlation between the measurement error in the reports of earnings and the level of job tenure, producing a bias in the estimated payoff to job tenure of roughly 30%. This result suggests a need for a greater understanding of the correlates of survey response errors.

Daniel H. Hill, Deborah A. Ott, Lester D. Taylor, James M. Walker, Incentive Payments in Time-of-Day Electricity Pricing Experiments: The Arizona Experience, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Feb., 1983), pp. 59-65