EFFICIENCY ANALYSIS OF HOSPITALS IN THE GREAT PLAINS: AN URBAN-RURAL COMPARISON

This study examined the efficiency of a sample of hospitals in the Great Plains using a nonparametric approach. Technical efficiency was less than either allocative or scale efficiency. Urban hospitals are relatively more efficient than rural hospitals with respect to all efficiency measures. Private hospitals are more efficient than others.Health Economics and Policy,

Reexamining the Impact of Employee Relocation Assistance on Housing Prices

In this paper, we reexamine the issue of whether corporate relocation assistance programs for transferred employees significantly affect sale prices of single-family homes. We estimate a hedonic price equation that includes physical housing characteristics, location factors, occupancy status, and type of seller for a sample of 2,441 transactions. Seller types include (a) transferred employees who were given direct relocation assistance, (b) transferred employees who were not given direct relocation assistance, and (c) sellers who were not facing an employment transfer. After controlling for vacancy and tenant occupancy, we find that houses sold by transferred employees who receive direct relocation assistance exhibit no significant price differential, but that houses sold by transferred employees who do not receive direct relocation assistance sell at a discount of approximately 3%.

Legal Phenomena, Knowledge, and Theory: A Cautionary Tale of Hedgehogs and Foxes

This article analyzes the susceptibility of areas of legal regulation to being organized or explained by top-down deductive theories of general applicability. It hypothesizes that at least three variables determine in part the likely relevance of general theories to sets of legal phenomena, ambiguity (gaps in the law), unpredictability (computational intractability), and the comparative need for specialized and common sense reasoning. We hypothesize that as ambiguity, unpredictability, and the utility of common sense reasoning go up, the amenability of a set of legal phenomena to general theoretical approaches decreases. We thus predict that the meaning of negligence will be resistant to theoretical approaches, both economic and corrective justice, and that the nature of antitrust law will embrace the microeconomic approach. We test these predictions in various ways and find support for both of them

The Self-Incrimination Clause Explained and Its Future Predicted

Like many areas of the law, the Fifth Amendment has defied theoretical explanation by scholars. We examine whether the fifth amendment cases can be explained with a relatively simple theory, and find that they can. The key to that theory is the recognition that, although never acknowledged by the Court, its cases make plain that testimony is the substantive content of cognition - the propositions with truth-value that people hold or generate (as distinct from the ability to hold or generate propositions with truth-value). This observation leads to a comprehensive positive theory of the Fifth Amendment right: the government may not compel disclosure of the incriminating substantive results of cognition that themselves (the substantive results) are the product of state action. As we demonstrate in this article, this theory explains all of the cases, a feat not accomplished under any other scholarly or judicial theory; it even explains the most obvious datum that might be advanced against it - the sixth birthday question in Muniz. There remain two sources of ambiguity in Fifth Amendment adjudications. First, compulsion and incrimination are both continuous variables - questions of degree. The Court has recognized this and set about defining the amount of compulsion and incrimination necessary to a Fifth Amendment violation. The result is a common law of both topics rather than a precise metric of either. These two variables are independent and do not interact, which reduces the complexity of decision making. Compulsion, in other words, is in no way determined by the extent to which the results are incriminating. Compulsion is determined on its own, as is the sufficiency of incrimination. The second source of ambiguity arises from the Court not explicitly equating testimony with cognition, though that is precisely what has controlled its decisions. Given that the Court\u27s opinions have not focused on substantive cognition as the third element of a Fifth Amendment violation, it is not surprising that the Court has not clarified whether cognition, too, is a continuous or discontinuous variable. This is where the future lies. The Court will have to clarify two matters: first, whether the extent of cognition matters, and second, the derivative consequences of cognition. In addition, the Court will have to determine whether these two issues are, like compulsion and incrimination, independent. Does the extensiveness of the compelled cognition determine how far its causal effect will be traced? We then note that this theory does not look like a standard academic theory with its attendant emphasis on normative analysis. We examine whether the normal meaning of normative justification is a very useful one in any field of law with the range of the fifth amendment, point out that it is quite similar to the fourth amendment in this regard, and that scholarly efforts to discover its true justification may be doomed to failure. This does not mean that fields of law are unjustified, but perhaps that the justification must come in other terms. The terms plainly applicable to these two areas are the traditional ones of the rule of law. The Court has strived to make sense of ambiguous directives through creating and sustaining relatively clear legal categories and by responding to new situations through analogies to prior cases. We think it plausible that, however dull this may appear to the legal theorist, the legal system may be better off as a result. The article thus adds to the growing literature concerning the nature of legal theorizing by demonstrating yet another area where legal theorizing in its modern conventional sense (involving the search for the moral or philosophical theory that justifies an area of law) has been completely ineffectual, whereas explanations that are informed by the presently neglected values of legality (clarity, precision, consistency, fidelity to authority) have considerable promise

An Optimal Control Framework to Address the Relationship between Water Resource Management and Water-Borne Health Impacts: Focus on the Texas Lower Rio Grande Valley

The objective of this study is develop a theoretical model that can evaluate two types of public health expenditures on water-borne health risks: water-related municipal services, an ex ante preventative measure against water-borne contamination, and medical treatment, an ex post treatment of the water-borne pollutant’s harmful effects on human health. The modeled community can allocate resources in either centralized-municipal water-services, point-of-use water-services, or medical intervention, with expenditures subject to a budget constraint. The movement of a water-borne illness through the community is modeled with a susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) disease framework. An optimization framework is developed, including a statement of the problem’s Hamiltonian and first-order-conditions. The first-order-conditions are discussed. Future work includes obtaining a numerical solution to the optimization problem.water, public health, rural development, dynamic optimization, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Economic and psychological approaches to risk-bearing : theory and experimental evidence / BEBR No. 603

Title page includes summary.Includes bibliographical references (p. 44-45)

Effect of Agricultural Activity on River Water Quality: A Case Study for the Lower Colorado River Basin

This case study investigates the effect of a change in cropping pattern involving expanded acres of crops for biofuel feedstock, on the discharge of nutrients to rivers. Annual data from 1968-2008 on stream flow, cropped acres, and precipitation for Wharton County, Texas are used. A positive impact of increased corn acreage over this period on river discharge is identified.Biofuels, Stream Flow, Discharge, Production Economics, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Crystal Nucleation of Colloidal Suspensions under Shear

We use Brownian Dynamics simulations in combination with the umbrella sampling technique to study the effect of shear flow on homogeneous crystal nucleation. We find that a homogeneous shear rate leads to a significant suppression of the crystal nucleation rate and to an increase of the size of the critical nucleus. A simple, phenomenological extension of classical nucleation theory accounts for these observations. The orientation of the crystal nucleus is tilted with respect to the shear direction.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Submitted to Phys. Rev. Let