High School Inputs and Labor Market Outcomes for Male Workers in Their Mid-Thirties: New Data and New Estimates from Wisconsin

This study presents new evidence on the relationship between high school inputs measured at the time male respondents attended high school and the earnings of these same individuals when they were in their mid-thirties. To accomplish this task, we matched newly coded data on the characteristics of Wisconsin high schools in 1954–57 to the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey. Our estimates show a significant relationship between the characteristics of teachers and the earnings of their students 17 years after graduation. Specifically, a 1 percent increase in the average teacher salary in a district increases the earnings of students by 0.33 percent. The magnitude of this effect is larger than estimates reported in previous research and many times larger than the impact of increasing parents’ income by a comparable amount.

CRED: A New Model of Climate and Development

This paper describes a new model, Climate and Regional Economics of Development (CRED), which is designed to analyze the economics of climate and development choices. Its principal innovations are the treatment of global equity, calculation of the optimum interregional flows of resources, and use of McKinsey marginal abatement cost curves to project the cost of mitigation. The model shows more equitable scenarios have better climate outcomes; the challenge of climate policy is to persuade high-income countries to accept the need for both international equity and climate protection.climate economics, development, global equity, abatement costs, integrated assessment models

IR spectral characteristics of cirrus clouds

The recent focus of parameterization of the radiative properties of clouds has been to include the microphysical properties of the cloud. A variety of parameterization have been developed for both the shortwave and the longwave. In parameterizing the longwave properties of clouds, it is useful to consider the two stream solution of the radiative transfer equation appropriate for a thermal source. These radiative transfer equations are considered

The role of answer fluency and perceptual fluency in the monitoring and control of reasoning: Reply to Alter, Oppenheimer, and Epley

In this reply, we provide an analysis of Alter et al. (2013) response to our earlier paper (Thompson et al., 2013). In that paper, we reported difficulty in replicating Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, and Eyre’s (2007) main finding, namely that a sense of disfluency produced by making stimuli difficult to perceive, increased accuracy on a variety of reasoning tasks. Alter, Oppenheimer, and Epley (2013) argue that we misunderstood the meaning of accuracy on these tasks, a claim that we reject. We argue and provide evidence that the tasks were not too difficult for our populations (such that no amount of “metacognitive unease” would promote correct responding) and point out that in many cases performance on our tasks was well above chance or on a par with Alter et al.’s (2007) participants. Finally, we reiterate our claim that the distinction between answer fluency (the ease with which an answer comes to mind) and perceptual fluency (the ease with which a problem can be read) is genuine, and argue that Thompson et al. (2013) provided evidence that these are distinct factors that have different downstream effects on cognitive processe

Analysis of cirrus optical properties with data from NASA ER2 High-resolution Interferometer Sounder (HIS)

The 8 to 13 micron spectral region is an important atmospheric window for radiometric studies of the Earth's surface and clouds. Most of the Earth-atmosphere longwave radiative loss to space occurs in this spectral region. Selective gaseous absorption in this window occurs in the 9.6 micron ozone band with the remaining absorption dominated by the water vapor continuum. Cirrus clouds have a large impact on the transmittance of this atmospheric window region; it is therefore important to understand the interaction of cirrus cloud with the radiation field for climate studies and in the interpretation of satellite radiometric measurements. The focus was to employ observations of the High-resolution Interferometer Sounder (HIS) made during First ISCCP Regional Experiment (FIRE) to improve the understanding of the radiative properties of cirrus clouds within this window region. Studies were undertaken to investigate the coupling between the microphysical properties of cirrus clouds and their spectral variation within this window region. Extensions of the HIS studies to satellite measurements, with regards to remote sensing and interpretation, were also investigated

Remote sounding through semi-transparent cirrus cloud

A large portion of the earth is covered by thin semi-transparent cirrus cloud. The cirrus results from the natural injection of moisture into the upper troposphere by deep convection (i.e., anvils) and from man-made moisture injected into the upper troposphere by jet aircraft. Although most cirrus clouds are semi-transparent to infrared wavelengths, their heights, thicknesses, and spectral absorption properties must be known in order to retrieve atmospheric temperature and moisture profiles from the data. An algorithm is developed for accounting for the radiative properties of semi-transparent cloud in the retrieval of vertical temperature and moisture profiles. The algorithm is to be applied to the NASA ER2 HIS data collected during the FIRE cirrus field program

Determination and impact of surface radiative processes for TOGA COARE

Experiments using atmospheric general circulation models have shown that the atmospheric circulation is very sensitive to small changes in sea surface temperature in the tropical western Pacific Ocean warm pool region. The mutual sensitivity of the ocean and the atmosphere in the warm pool region places stringent requirements on models of the coupled ocean atmosphere system. At present, the situation is such that diagnostic studies using available data sets have been unable to balance the surface energy budget in the warm pool region to better than 50 to 80 W/sq m. The Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere (TOGA) Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Response Experiment (COARE) is an observation and modelling program that aims specifically at the elucidation of the physical process which determine the mean and transient state of the warm pool region and the manner in which the warm pool interacts with the global ocean and atmosphere. This project focuses on one very important aspect of the ocean atmosphere interface component of TOGA COARE, namely the temporal and spatial variability of surface radiative fluxes in the warm pool region