COMPARISONS of the extent of poverty at different times are greatly affected by whether the dividing line between the poor and the rest of the population changes as average income grows over time, and if so to what degree.1 The absolute income standard and the relative income standard are polar hypotheses about the income elasticity of the poverty line. Under an absolute standard of poverty, the poverty line is constant (in deflated dollars). In terms of what people thought of as poverty a century ago, the absolute standard implies that today almost no one is poor in the United States. Under a relative standard of poverty, the poverty line changes in the same proportion as average income if the relative income distribution is constant. The relative standard implies that if the shape of the income distribution is the same today as a century ago, the poverty problem is now no less.2 Probably more likely than either of these extremes is that people's judgment about the dividing line between poverty and a more adequate standard of living is determined by a mixture of concerns over both absoluteand relative conditions.3 If so, growth in average income increases the poverty line, but by less than in the same proportion. This proposition -that the income elasticity of the poverty line is between zero and one-is the hypothesis tested in this paper. I Time Series Analysis of Gallup Poll Results

PpT HE loss of aggregate income due to the 1970 recession in the United States is widely recognized and much decried. How the loss has been distributed in society is not so well known and not extensively researched. This paper is concerned with measuring and describing the incidence of the recession on families, by income level. Historical trends in the size distribution of income have been' analyzed by Budd (1970) and Lampman (1971), and its cyclical variability has been studied by Schultz (1969), Metcalf (1972), Thurow (1970), and Mirer (1972). Most of their results suggest that macro-economic downturns increase income inequality or otherwise bear heavily on the poor and near-poor. This analysis examines micro data from a panel survey to measure the pattern of incidence of the loss of aggregate income in 1970, and finds it to be different from the effects found for past recessions. Toward the end of the 1960's, the economy was experiencing high employment along with increasing inflation. Restrictive monetary and fiscal policies along with changes in the structure of government expenditure brought about a worsening of economic conditions. In February 1969 the civilian unemployment rate stood at 3.3 per cent; it rose above 3.5 per cent in September and above 4.0 per cent in February 1970. By December 1970 the unemployment rate was 6.1 per cent. In 1970 real output declined 0.4 per cent from the 1969 level. In describing the distributional effects of these changes in macro-economic conditions, it is essential to compare what actually occurred to what would have occurred under some specified set of alternative conditions. The analytical framework of this study is a comparative statics model in which families' incomes in 1970 are compared to what their incomes would have been then if the aggregate conditions of 19671969 had continued. This approach is particularly relevant for policy purposes because it allows one to judge the distributional costs of the restrictive anti-inflationary policies of recent years.

H EALTH professionals have complained of a of Registered Nurses for the past twenty-five years. High vacancy rates have been reported for nursing positions throughout the entire post-World War II period. From 1951 to 1966 an average of 14 per cent of budgeted hospital nursing positions were unfilled.1 Donald Yett and other economists have noted that this state of chronically high vacancy rates might result from an oligopsonistic market structure. This explanation of the shortage of nurses is developed fully below. First, a model of hospital input utilization is presented, viewing hospitals as maximizers of a welfare function representing the goals of hospital management. With the aid of this model it is demonstrated that under a wide range of behavioral assumptions monopsony hospital employers will report vacancies in equilibrium. Second, the monopsony question is put to an empirical tes-t in a multiple regression setting. A significant negative relationship is demonstrated between the wages of nurses and concentration in the hospital sector. This result indicates that where monopsony power is present in the market for nurses, that power will be exploited. The conclusion follows that the high vacancy rates for nursing positions result in part from an oligopsonistic market structure.

Focuses on additive and homogeneous production possibility frontiers that have played an important role in formulating statistical tests of the theory of production. Characterization of the class of production possibility frontiers that are homogenous and additive; Representation of the production possibility frontier; Statistical tests of the theory of production. (Из Ebsco)