mandatory retirement for tenured faculty (uncapping) which was enacted in the 1986 amendments to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) will take effect. This grace period between enactment and effective dates was a response to the concerns that have been regularly expressed by educational administrators such as Rosovsky. In the congressional debate concerning the impact of uncapping on the retirement behavior of tenured faculty and the implications of any behavioral changes for the vitality of higher education, it was concluded that this delay would allow time for study, adjustment, and the opportunity to request a permanent exemption, if necessary.

To arrive at a tenable interpretation of black history, it is important to resolve the conflict between my measure-retrospective years of schooling completed-and Robert Margo's measure-prospective accumulation across ages of cohort-specific attendance rates. My series reconciled the apparent inconsistency between the stagnant pre-1940 black-white income ratios and what scholars had previously thought was a steady narrowing of racial education differences. Margo's series not only would restore that incon

Twenty years have passed since President Kennedy declared that action was needed to assure that pay rates be comparable with private enterprise rates for the same level of work. Because there are no profit considerations in government and powerful political influences affect all decisions, special guidelines are needed for wage determination. During the subsequent years, the doctrine became the guiding principle in federal pay policy for both bluecollar and white-collar workers. Over time, however, the implementation of full comparability adjustments have more often been downgraded to satisfy other national policy goals. A major reform bill is now under consideration in Congress. Therefore, it is appropriate at this time to examine where we are in terms of achieving and maintaining and consider the prospects for reform.

We propose a summary statistic for the economic well-being of people in a country. Our measure incorporates consumption, leisure, mortality, and inequality, first for a narrow set of countries using detailed micro data, and then more broadly using multi-country datasets. While welfare is highly correlated with GDP per capita, deviations are often large. Western Europe looks considerably closer to the United States, emerging Asia has not caught up as much, and many developing countries are further behind. Each component we introduce plays a significant role in accounting for these differences, with mortality being most important.

Hayami and Willis Peterson present a practical application of Alfred Marshall's social welfare concepts.1 Their approach, in the tradition of public goods analysis, seeks to measure the social returns to improvements in information about U.S. farm commodities. Their strong theoretical argument is jeopardized by their empirical evidence leading to exaggerated and unrealistic conclusions. We have two basic criticisms of their analysis: 1) they use highly inelastic demand elasticities for grains which exclude export and animal feed uses; and 2) their conclusions are dominated by the marginal social returns for onlv two of the seventeen commodities studied. Their distribution of returns raises specific questions about sampling techniques for the two commodities which may be more important than the broader issue of social returns to public information services.

More than in any particular method of inquiry, I think the hallmark of science is to be found in a constructively skeptical attitude toward knowledge.' The more fundamental are the concepts and assumptions of a science, the easier it is to take them for granted and to abandon this skepticism. In this spirit, Ronald Heiner (1985) is correct in emphasizing that the obtained from the study of the performance of experimental markets is only as secure as the classical preference model used to induce prespecified value structures on the agents in such markets. If the purpose of an experiment is to test a theory (for example, and demand), and the theory is not falsified by the test, this in no way supports any premise of the theory which was also a premise of the experimental design. When we falsify a theory, the implication is that one or more of its assumptions about the behavior of economic agents (maximization of expected utility, commonly shared (homogeneous) expectations, risk aversion, zero subjective costs of transacting, etc.) is in question, and the immediate task is to modify the suspected behavioral assumptions of the original theory. Other assumptions-such as that agents have well-defined preferences, or know the probability distribution from which other agent values were drawn-are not brought into question by the experiment because the experimental design reproduced (or should have) the environment posited by the theory being tested. When testing formal market theories in this way, we should always be aware of the fact that we are studying behavior within the context of our representations of the economic environment. If any of these representations is wrong, then our studies have only increased our self-knowledge, not our knowledge of things (natural economic processes). If we are to increase our knowledge of things, then our ultimate aim should aspire to more than discovering that the behavioral *Department of Economics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. 1 The principal contribution of Popper's falsificationist methodology is, I believe, the influential attempt to develop a formal logic of skeptical inquiry. That the attempt has failed, in the sense that it has produced no defensible codified set of procedures that yield a science of scientific method (happily it would appear that all such attempts will fail), should not detract from the disciplinary value of the falsificationist perspective in approaching scientific questions. Its value to the experimentalist is to force him to ask How can I design an experiment with the property that the set of potentially observable outcomes can be partitioned into those that are consistent with one (or a given) theory and those that are consistent with other theory(ies) (or inconsistent with the given theory)? That experimental life is such that his effort is about as likely to fail as to succeed by no means detracts from the value of the exercise. Its value to the theorist (if he will just forgo the career-advancing primeval incentive to publish yet another technically tractable extension of the existing theory literature) is to force him to ask How can I model this question so as to suggest (as Martin Shubik would say) a do-able experiment, and so as to yield observable implications that do not exhaust the set of possible outcomes? That this effort will often fail does not detract from the value of the exercise. Having said this I would not want to leave the impression that experiments that are fishing expeditions in the laboratory to see what will happen are of no value; seeing what happens can be essential in defining an analyticalempirical research program. Similarly, when a theorist builds (as Buz Brock would say) castles in the air, this is not necessarily useless, for it may lead to more operational forms of theory. We should impute some nonzero probability to the proposition that Feyerabend's anything goes posture is right. But at this stage I think it has become pretty obvious where our professional weaknesses are concentrated. Economists, while spouting the rhetoric (Donald McClosky, 1983) of the falsificationist, are in fact verificationist to the core. We all do it. We take a proposition, conjecture, or theory, then search for supportive historical or empirical examples. As everyone ought to know, seek and ye are likely to find, whether one is a Keynesian or a supply sider. What is not sufficiently appreciated is that this verificationist grubbing is a prescientific exercise in which one asks whether there is any supporting evidence, and how difficult it is to find; if there is none or if it is pretty hard to uncover, it suggests abandonment in the prescientific womb.

The old age provisions of the Medicaid program were designed to insure retirees against medical expenses. We estimate a structural model of savings and medical spending and use it to compute the distribution of lifetime Medicaid transfers and Medicaid valuations across currently single retirees. Compensating variation calculations indicate that current retirees value Medicaid insurance at more than its actuarial cost, but that most would value an expansion of the current Medicaid program at less than its cost. These findings suggest that for current single retirees, the Medicaid program may be of the approximately right size.

Women are underrepresented in science and engineering, with the underrepresentation increasing in career stage. We analyze gender differences at critical junctures in the STEM pathway--graduate training and the early career--using UMETRICS administrative data matched to the 2010 Census and W-2s. We find strong gender separation in teams, although the effects of this are ambiguous. While no clear disadvantages exist in training environments, women earn 10% less than men once we include a wide range of controls, most notably field of study. This gap disappears once we control for women's marital status and presence of children.

This paper reports the results of an evaluation of partial-equilibrium welfare measures of the effects of large multisector shocks to an economic system. A nine a developed economy was used in the analysis. The findings indicate that the errors in single-sector, partial-equilibrium welfare measures depend on the consistency in the signs and approximate magnitude of indirect price effects. Disparities in either the direction or size of price changes in the indirectly affected markets can lead to large errors in the partial-equilibrium welfare measures.

Skeptical that research to date does not warrant confidence in the relationship between natural resources and the maintenance of material well-being, the authors consider the conventional explanations for how resource stringencies have been avoided and what has been learned during the past decade. They then point out what has been missed by formal economic modeling and why it may be important in understanding the implications of resource scarcity. 19 references.