info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Numerous studies find that criminal court judges issue racially disparate sentences, but whether these patterns reflect tastes for discrimination remains unclear. An alternative explanation is statistical discrimination, which implies that judges rely on race to predict a felon’s latent criminality in the absence of perfect information. This paper uses an empirical approach that distinguishes between taste-based and statistical discrimination. The intuition is that if the rank order of judicial incarceration rates depends on race, then this is symptomatic of taste-based discrimination. The rank-order test results imply that we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no taste-based discrimination.

IN the continuing debate about the role of money, credit, and monetary policy in our society, one of the major issues centers around the specific incidence of "tight money" on individual business firms. On the one hand, leading proponents of monetary controls as a regulatory device have emphasized the general, impersonal nature of such controls. They have argued that the impact of monetary policy is determined by the reaction of individual borrowers to changed market conditions.

Recently, in this REVIEW (J. K. Galbraith, "Market Structure and Stabilization Policy,this REVIEW, XXXIX (May 1957) I24-33) Professor Galbraith has asserted that in the case of monetary policy the "inflation can be controlled by denying credit to what are, in a general way, the least powerful firms" (page 132). Elsewhere, these least powerful firms are identified as the smaller firms (pages 131, 132, 133), and evidence concerning the distribution of bank loans by size is presented, to indicate that "while the case cannot be proven, there is a strong probability that in the last couple of years the effect of monetary policy has been to ration credit from all sources away from smaller firms in the competitive sector and to larger firms in the oligopolistic sector" (page 133).

T HE model presented in this paper is a system of recursive linear regression equations, the parameters of which are esti-mated from monthly series of data covering the

Recent theoretical models underscore the potential asymmetric response of various behaviors, ranging from criminal activity to smoking. In this paper, we use state-level panel and individual-level panel data to document the previously unnoticed asymmetric response of crime to changes in the unemployment rate. The results have policy implications, and they have potentially widespread ramifications because similar asymmetries may also be prevalent in other domains, ranging from the relationship between income and health to peer quality and student outcomes.

We estimate substitution possibilities among a set of age-race-sex groups in the labor force. The estimates are based on cross-section data from SMSAs in 1969, and they allow us to consider how substitutable adult women are for young women or young men. The estimates are used, along with assumptions about the extent of wage rigidity and elasticities of labor supply, to simulate the direct and indirect effects of the growth of the female labor force on job opportunities for youth, assuming rigid wages for young workers, and on the wage rates of adult males, assuming these wages are flexible.

William A. Niskanen, Steve H. Hanke, Land Prices Substantially Underestimate the Value of Environmental Quality: A Rejoinder, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Feb., 1980), p. 156

Peer Reviewed

The analysis of economic phenomena at the wholistic (aggregative) level 11l8intains a long tradition that assumes the neoclassical production function Q-f(K,L) (i.e., output as a function of capital and labor) satisfies the condition of constant returns to scale.The assumed absence of any (dis-)economies of scale renders the production function useless, when the scale effect is as pronounced as is typically found at the less aggregative levels of individual firm or industry analvsis.. .The purpose of this paper is to deduce new classes of production functions that are not limited to the constant returns to scale characteristic.Hore specifically, the scale effect is described by an arbitrary function of one of the factors of production, capital in this paper.This class of production functions exhibi-ts scale sensitivity with respect to capital (SSWK).The paper shows how different fmidlies of production functions can be derived from two basic .. building blocks," a :wage share function and a scale functitm.The Cobb-])ouglas, CES and VES production fmu:tions are special cases.~e Cobb-Douglas and CES functions can be expanded to incorporate non-constant returns to scale.A smnple of firms from Taiwan is used to test among various derived functional specifications.An interesting diversity of preferred specifications was found among three industries.