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.

The current merger movement has been characterized by the willingness of the management of some acquiring companies to pay substantial merger premiums. A merger premium exists when the common stockholders of an acquired company receive cash and/or securities possessing a value greater than the company's premerger market value. The rationalization or justification of these “premiums” is based on a merger synergy concept. Contemporary merger literature recognizes two broad forms of merger synergy — the potential for greater operating efficiencies [14] and/or potential financial benefits — with the latter containing instantaneous [12] and real elements [1, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13].

where y(t) represents the vector of endogenous variables, x(t) the vector of exogenous variables, u(t) the vector of stochastic disturbances, and t the tth period of observation. The matrices A, (T = 0, 1, . . . , m) of the structural coefficients are square matrices of order G. It is assumed that the conditions justifying the theorems in [3, Ch. 10] are satisfied, and that there are no nonlinear restrictions on the elements of A.. The stability of the system is determined by reference to the dominant root of the polynomial equation (2) det E Atmt) =0. t=O

[The limited information maximum likelihood and two-stage least squares estimates have the same asymptotic normal distribution; the ordinary least squares estimate has another asymptotic normal distribution. This paper considers more accurate approximations to the distributions of the so-called "k-class" estimates. An asymptotic expansion of the distribution of such an estimate is given in terms of an Edgeworth or Gram-Charlier series (of which the leading term is the normal distribution). The development also permits expression of the exact distribution in several forms. The distributions of the two-stage least squares and ordinary least squares estimates are transformed to doubly-noncentral F distributions. Numerical comparisons are made between the approximate distributions and exact distributions calculated by the second author.]

Abstract Reviews the book "CPA Review Manual," 4th ed., by Herbert E. Miller and George C. Mead.

Abstract Reviews the book "The Income Tax and Business Decisions," by William L. Raby.

Abstract The article examines probability revision behavior based on data generated by single and joint information systems. The bases for measurement comparison have numbered a few less than the number of measurements themselves. Some authors consider the behavior of income in response to changes in accounting methods. Other authors appeal to underlying economic variables and suggest that some measurements more realistically reflect the economic phenomena than other measurements. The author remarks that, although this research project is germane to several accounting issues, its merit does not lie in the fact that it resolves these accounting issues, but rather that it presents a systematic set of theoretical statements for interpreting the issues and predicting behavior. Messages from an information system discriminate among the underlying set of objects on which the system operates. The ring of an alarm clock discriminates among times of day, a stop sign discriminates among possible operations of an automobile and a book cover discriminates among possible contents of the volume.