Abstract This article presents information on capital gains and losses in accounting. Capital gain has been defined as "profit upon realization of assets otherwise than in the ordinary course of business, this profit being the excess of the proceeds of realization over the cost of the property realized." Accounting makes a careful distinction between realized and unrealized capital increments, the latter generally being designated "appreciation." No matter how capital gain is defined the most significant feature of the transaction is that it does not occur in the ordinary course of business. Another peculiarity of capital gain from the accounting point of view is that it is not recognized until actually realized. The conditions and circumstances which bring about capital losses (realized or unrealized) are various. A change in price levels may be a cause. Obsolescence is frequently associated with capital losses. In the case of security investments, factors related solely to market conditions may be primarily influential. To say that capital losses are always non-recurring and outside the regular fulfillment of the particular function of a business enterprise is hardly accurate because obsolescence and many of the other risks which might result in loss of capital are always present and cannot be disassociated from the purposes of an enterprise.

Rational Choice--the published record of a conference on economics and psychology--frames the issues as a contest between economic theory and the falsifying evidence from psychology. According to a third perspective, that of experimental economics, most standard theory provides a correct first approximation in predicting motivated behavior in laboratory experimental markets, but the theory is incomplete, particularly in articulating convergence processes in time and in ignoring decision cost. This view has roots in the work of Herbert Simon and Sidney Siegel, but it is not plainly represented in contemporary research in economic pyschology.

A discrete version of the author's incentive-compatible Auction Mechanism for public goods is applied to the problem of social choice (voting) among distinct mutually exclusive alternatives. This Auction Election is a bidding mechanism characterized by (1) unanimity, (2) provision for the voluntary compensation of voters harmed by a winning proposition, and (3) incentives for "reasonable" bidding by excluding members of a collective from maximal increase in benefit if they fail to agree on the proposition with largest surplus. Four of five experiments with six voters, bidding privacy, monetary rewards, and cyclical majority rule structure choose the best of three propositions.

The employment to population rate of high school–aged youth has fallen by about 20 percentage points since the late 1980s. One potential explanation is increased competition from substitutable labor, such as immigrants. I demonstrate that the increase in the population of less educated immigrants has had a considerably more negative effect on employment outcomes for native youth than for native adults. At least two factors are at work: there is greater overlap between the jobs that youth and less educated adult immigrants traditionally do, and youth labor supply appears more responsive to immigration-induced wage changes.