egalitarian than the slave South or urban areas of its time, it does not follow that this region represented a classic egalitarian society. Although wealth was greater in the older, more settled areas of the country, the median wealthholding, particularly in the nonslave states, was remarkably uniform across states, suggesting that migration took place from households lying toward the middle of the eastern states' wealth distributions, which together with the flow of immigrants would explain both the similarities between East and West and the differences in wealth patterns and in the social and demographic characteristics of the wealthholders. The patterns of age and wealth accumulation were consistent with the Life Cycle hypothesis, while the social characteristics of the wealthholders are consistent with a hypothesis of racial and sexual discrimination. To be wealthy in this egalitarian society of historical tradition was to be a middle-aged, native-born, white, literate, male farmer.

D O the poor substitute among commodities more flexibly than the rich when relative prices change, even when compensated for the income effects of the price changes? Is it necessary to add a third dimension to the Slutsky substitution matrix to identify household income? In short, do the terms of the Slutsky elasticity matrix curve smoothly from poor households to rich households in such a way that equation (1) is meaningful?

Yutaka Horiba, Rickey C. Kirkpatrick, Factor Endowments, Factor Proportions, and the Allocative Efficiency of U.S. Interregional Trade, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 63, No. 2 (May, 1981), pp. 178-187

James G. Beierlein, James W. Dunn, James C. McConnon, Jr., The Demand for Electricity and Natural Gas in the Northeastern United States, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Aug., 1981), pp. 403-408

ECONOMISTS and statisticians who construct estimates of total factor productivity or who estimate production functions or systems of consumer demand functions are often forced to aggregate subsets of their data. In order to perform this aggregation, an index number formula is generally used. A price index P(pO, pl, x?, xI) is defined to be a function P of the prices of the N commodities to be aggregated in periods 0 and 1,p?-(pll, . . . , PNO) and pl (pl,.'.. PN'), respectively, and of the corresponding quantities utilized during periods 0 and 1, x? (xi?, . . .,XNO) andX1 _ (xi', . . .,XN1), respectively. A quantity index Q(p0, pl, x?, xl) is defined to be another function Q of the price and quantity vectors for the two periods. Generally, we assume that P and Q satisfy Fisher's (1922) weak factor reversal test:

IN 1966, the Coleman Report provided compelling evidence of the importance of the home environment in determining children's cognitive skill levels. This evidence, coupled with doubts about the effectiveness of school-based compensatory education programs, has led policymakers to consider programs that aim at improving school achievement by providing additional resources to the families of low achieving children. Efforts to design such programs have been hindered, however, by a lack of knowledge concerning the key resources in the home that influence children's achievement. This paper reports the results of research that attempts to reduce this knowledge gap by examining the roles played by particular resources in the home in influencing children's achievement. This study extends previous work on home investments in children in two significant ways. First, the analysis focuses on black children living in low income, urban families. Most previous research has studied children in middle class families. Second, the stability of the results is examined by estimating the same model for two samples of children. Previous studies have reported results for a single sample. Differences in results across studies have raised questions concerning the stability of relationships between particular home resources and children's achievement. In this study, the stability issue is addressed directly. The central finding of our research is that the skills of the mother, measured by the extent of her formal schooling, are a critical resource in determining children's achievement. Our results demonstrate that these skills affect children through the mechanism of child care, and not simply through genetically transmitted endowments. Another key result is that goods inputs in the home do not appear to have consistent effects on children's learning. Thus, our findings support the results of other recent research that has emphasized the importance of human resources (such as mothers and teachers) rather than material inputs in determining children's achievement. These and other findings are discussed in detail later in the paper. The next section of the paper lists the hypotheses examined in this study. Section III describes the analytical framework within which these hypotheses were tested. Section IV describes the data. Section V describes the problem of interpreting correlations between attributes of the home environment and children's achievement. Section VI presents the results, and section VII discusses their implications.