Since at least the Ford Administration, deregulation has been a politically popular slogan. Over the past ten years there has been a growing recognition that dismantling the economic regulation of various sectorsairlines, trucking, communications, and the like-requires simultaneous or prior dismantling of the barriers to entry and competition. This recognition was translated into action during the Ford and Carter Administrations when the chairmen of the CAB, the ICC, and the FCC were trying to convince a majority of their fellow commissioners or board members (and the relevant members of Congress) to adopt promarket, deregulatory positions. During those periods, each agency made significant progress in opening up entry to new firms and new service offerings, and in reducing the degree of detailed intervention in the daily affairs of the regulated companies. Since the advent of the Reagan Administration, however, the momentum pushing open entry and promoting competition in communications has definitely been blunted, if not entirely broken. As a result, it may not be politically feasible to let the market, rather than the government, serve as the arbitor of the public interest in communications. Because of some basic differences between the industries, opening entry to communications markets requires different policy actions from those required to allow entry into most transportation sectors. Communications is characterized by two features not present in airlines and trucking: the use of the frequency spectrum and the market power of certain firms caused by the presence of a very significant proportion of sunk vs. variable costs. The use of the spectrum realistically means that government will determine basic entry possibilities into the foreseeable future by the way that it allocates spectrum, a process similar to making land zoning decisions. Having a high proportion of sunk vs. variable costs means that antitrust-type issues will remain important. While this latter condition is seen primarily as applying to common carrier communications at this time, the rapid growth and spread of cable television systems will make this condition applicable to broadcasting markets in the future. Given these features, further movement towards a truly promarket, deregulatory policy in communications requires that spectrum allocation decisions be made with the explicit goals of encouraging entry, increasing competition, and decreasing the market power of currently dominant firms. In particular, spectrum needs to be allocated in a way that assures that spectrum is always available to permit new service offerings in competition with those being offered over wire systems. In this respect, the Fowler FCC has deviated from its most recent predecessors. The Fowler Commission seems to be concerned more with removing some, but by no means all, restrictions on existing firms than with encouraging competition and new entry into the industry. It has not been willing to expand the ability of new firms to offer existing services, where competition could come about most rapidly. Rather, to the extent that it has considered allowing entry at all, it has focused its attention on creating new services that are either secondary to existing services, are structured so they can only supplement and not compete with existing services, or are able to compete only far in the future. Recent FCC activities illustrate these deficlencies.

Aged people face the problem of allocating over the rest of their lifetimes the wealth that they have accumulated during their working years. This problem is fairly complex, because they are uncertain about the dates of their death and because they may wish to use their wealth to finance general consumption, or hold it to meet emergencies, leave estates, or maintain power or status. Whether skilled at dynamic programming or not, aged people effectively do make these decisions. What are the results? Some studies of the entire lifetime pattern of saving and wealth tend to support the simple life cycle model, in which the aged use up their wealth to help finance consumption. Harold Lydall, for example, found saving rates to increase and then decrease with age in the whole population and to be negative for the group aged 65 and over. Guarded support for the theory was found by Franco Modigliani and Albert Ando in Britain and by Dorothy Projector in the United States. More recently, A.F. Shorrocks examined the lifetime pattern of wealth holding in estate-tax data for a single cohort and found the hump pattern that is characteristic of life cycle saving. Other evidence on wealth holding runs contrary to this, however. In a study of estate-tax returns in Washington, D.C., James D. Smith found that wealth increased with age among the aged, after controlling for other demographic variables. Examining national estate-tax data, John Brittain found wealth to increase with age in the United States and A. B. Atkinson and A. J. Harrison reported the same pattern in England and Wales. In a sample of (TIAA) annuity recipients analyzed by James Mulanaphy, over half reported that their total savings had increased during retirement and another quarter reported that their savings had remained about the same. In this paper, I examine wealth holding patterns among aged married couples, using survey data representing the entire aged population of the United States in 1968. The statistical analysis serves as a test of the hypothesis that emerges from life cycle theory and provides some further exploration into the economic behavior of the aged. I find that the aged tend to increase their wealth over time.

asks it in a new context. The old question is a paraphrase of the title of Herbert Spencer's famous essay What Knowledge is of Most Worth? The new context is to pose the question for undergraduate students majoring in economics. My intent is to engage you in reflecting about what kinds of knowledge and skills our economics majors should master-what proficiencies they should be able to demonstrate-by the time they graduate from college. My focus is on not the select few who plan to enter graduate economics programs, but rather the vast majority who go out into the world and will become the next generation of leaders. I propose a list of knowledge and skills, perhaps a better word is proficiencies, that we might reasonably expect our majors to demonstrate upon graduation. This is by no means a final or definitive list; rather it is offered to stimulate discussion about the meaning of the economics major and how to give it more meaning.

Both the distribution of income and the role of ethnicity in economic behavior can be illuminated by an analysis of ethnic differences in married women's labor supply. Differences in wives' labor supply are the main source, beside differences in rates of female headship and wages, of the disparities in family income among racial and ethnic groups in the United States (see my 1984 article). Moreover, differences among ethnic subcultures may affect the labor supply of wives more than they influence many other types of economic behavior. Ethnic groups are distinguished by, among other things, views about male and female roles in the family and about wives and mothers working outside the home, as well as by the value placed on children, family size, household composition, and the education of women. These differences may give rise to systematic differences in utility functions that lead to systematic differences in behavior by women in different ethnic or nativity groups who face the same constraints or opportunity set. Such cultural differences in utility functions no doubt are historically shaped by economic as well as other circumstances, and they evolve, but more slowly than the economic conditions. Ethnic differences in attitudes are, therefore, presumably more pronounced in the first generation of immigrants than in their American-born descendants. These cultural attitudes may have both direct and indirect effects on wives' labor supply. They directly affect the allocation of time between home and market work by women with the same education, number of children, etc. They also affect decisions about education, fertility, and other choices which in turn influence the market work opportunities and value of home time, and so indirectly affect labor force participation. Virtually all of the numerous studies of black-white differences in female labor supply have found that black wives have higher labor force participation rates (LFPR) than whites, even after adjusting for differences in measured variables such as age, children, education, location, other family income, and wages. (For a summary of the results, see Mark Killingsworth, 1983, pp. 122, 195, 202, 404; and Phyllis Wallace, 1982, ch. 2.) Several explanations have been suggested-such as blacks' greater marital instability, their extended-family households, black husbands' lower wages and less stable employment-but none has proved satisfactory. It seems that black wives' higher labor force participation is in large part a cultural difference, rooted in the historical experience of blacks in America, and not explainable by current conditions alone. No one has yet attempted to measure and account for the differences in wives' labor supply among the other ethnic and nativity groups, as this paper will do. These differences are large, with the variation in annual LFPRs among ethnic and nativity groups being greater than the variation in annual hours worked for those in the labor force, as shown in Table 1. The ranking of groups in terms of annual hours worked by those in the labor force differs from the ranking in terms of LFPRs. This suggests that different parameters govern the participation and hours worked decisions, perhaps because the groups face different fixed costs of working. These two aspects of labor supply therefore need to be analyzed separately. In this paper I focus on the differences in labor force participation rates. *Department of Economics, Hunter College, and Graduate School of the City University of New York, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021. I thank Cecilia Conrad for helpful discussions. A PSC-CUNY Research Award helped support this research.