A much smaller fraction of professional men live in two-career families than do professional women. The restriction that couples accept jobs in the same geographic location thus weighs more heavily against professional women than against professional men. A probabilistic model of the placement process is developed that predicts the geographic distribution of female professionals that would be observed in the absence of employer discrimination. This distribution is much more than proportionally concentrated in large urban markets. It is concluded that the proportional guidelines employed in the Affirmative Action program discriminate against employers located in small labor markets.

A much smaller fraction of professional men live in two-career families than do professional women. The restriction that couples accept jobs in the same geographic location thus weighs more heavily against professional women than against professional men. A probabilistic model of the placement process is developed that predicts the geographic distribution of female professionals that would be observed in the absence of employer discrimination. This distribution is much more than proportionally concentrated in large urban markets. It is concluded that the proportional guidelines employed in the Affirmative Action program discriminate against employers located in small labor markets.

Is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) among families or individuals more or less equal in relative terms than another? Despite the seeming straightforwardness of this question, there has been and continues to be considerable debate over how to go about finding the answer. There are two points of contention. One is the issue of cardinality vs. ordinality. Practitioners of the cardinal approach compare distributions by means of summary measures such as a Gini coefficient, variance of logarithms, and the like. For purposes of ranking the relative inequality of two distributions, the cardinality of the usual measures is not only a source of controversy, but it is also redundant. Accordingly, some researchers prefer an ordinal approach, adopting Lorenz domination as their criterion. The difficulty with the Lorenz criterion is its incompleteness, affording rankings of only some pairs of distributions but not others. Current practice in choosing between a cardinal or an ordinal approach is now roughly as follows: Check for Lorenz domination in the hope of making an unambiguous comparison; if Lorenz domination fails, calculate one or more cardinal measures. This raises the second contentious issue: which of the many cardinal measures in existence should one adopt? The properties of existing measures have been discussed extensively in several recent papers. Typically, these studies have started with the measures and then examined their properties. In this paper, we reverse the direction of inquiry. Our approach is to start by specifying as axioms a relatively small number of properties which we believe a ?good? index of inequality should have and then examining whether the Lorenz criterion and the various cardinal measures now in use satisfy those properties. The key issue is the reasonableness of the postulated properties. Work to date has shown the barrenness of the Pareto criterion. Only recently have researchers begun to develop an alternative axiomatic structure. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to such a development.

PERSONAL saving rates, i.e., the ratios of personal saving to personal disposable income, in many industrialized countries have risen dramatically in recent years. A number of attempts to explain the phenomenon of rising saving rates coinciding with price inflation have drawn upon the work of George Katona (1975), who has stressed the feeling of uncertainty and pessimism about the future caused by inflation that, in turn, encourages saving. In this paper a general model of aggregate household saving behavior is formulated. Data on Canada, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States are used to estimate the personal saving function in each of the countries and the results are used to test various hypotheses about personal saving behavior. This paper has two major objectives: to test for a direct influence of inflation on personal saving after taking into account the influence of other relevant factors, including any indirect channels by which inflation may exert an influence (e.g., the level of real liquid assets); and to determine what factors in each country are important for explaining saving behavior.

Falk and Heintz have proposed a scalogram technique to rank industries according to risk as reflected by financial ratios. The present paper examines some problems which need to be resolved before this technique can be used. First, the F & H selection of ratios is somewhat subjective and is not supported by tests for validity and reliability. And because of the confounding effects of changing economic conditions, the difficulty in obtaining a unique observable concept for industry risk, and because of measurement problems, it may be infeasible to assure an adequate degree of validity and reliability for this ranking technique. Also, some of the ratios selected by F & H may have high inter-correlation with other F ratios, thus implicitly adding greater weights to some of the ratios. Moreover, the F & H technique may be biased because of the selection of a different number of significant digits for two of the ratios. F & H have not offered any supporting reason for either of these sources of bias.

The article comments on the paper "The Contingency Theory of Managerial Accounting," by David C. Hayes. The intent and implications of Hayes's research were to provide a sufficiently rich description of organizational subunit performance so as to permit a delineation of the factors which cause certain costs to occur. Once the causal factors of cost have been determined, controllability can be more clearly defined and responsibility for the causal factors can be assigned to individuals within the organization who have control over them. The major contingencies associated with departmental effectiveness in Hayes's assessment model are: organizational subunit interdependence, subunit environmental relationships, and factors internal to the subunit of interest. In describing these model dimensions, Hayes states that the nature of departmental interdependence varies with organizational complexity and may be classified as either stable pooled, sequential, or reciprocal. Unfortunately, the nature of the contingency dimensions is ignored by Hayes in stating his propositions and in conducting and analyzing his empirical research.