Atmospheric Scaling of Cosmogenic Nuclide Production: Climate Effect

Absorption of cosmic rays by atmospheric mass varies temporally due to a redistribution of atmospheric pressure by ice sheets during glaciations, the compression and expansion of the atmosphere due to cooling and warming, and changes in katabatic winds near large ice masses. These atmospheric processes can result in changes in production rates of cosmogenic nuclides which, when integrated over long exposure durations may result in 0% to \u3e5% adjustments in site production rates depending on location. Combining a CCM3 model with imbedded ice sheets for 20 ka, we show that production rates changes (relative to today) are greatest at high elevations (6–7% at 5 km altitude) due to atmospheric compression from decreased temperature. Production rates at specific times for sites near ice sheet margins can be reduced more than 10% due to a combination of katabatic winds draining off the ice sheet margins and atmospheric cooling. Nunatak settings may be significantly affected by the climate effect due to persistent glacial atmospheric conditions. Atmospheric variability may explain some of the disparities among cosmogenic nuclide production rate calibrations

Kennan: The Elusive Effects of Minimum Wages The Elusive Effects of Minimum

Walker, and seminar participants at McMaster University for helpful comments, and to the National Science Foundation for financial support. THE U.S. MINIMUM WAGE is now $4.25 per hour, and Congress is talking about increasing it. If the minimum were to be increased to$25 per hour many workers would lose their jobs. Cause and effect would be obvious, even to the most jaundiced eye. If the minimum is raised instead to just $5.15 per hour (as the President has proposed) the effect will not be obvious, and much research effort will be devoted to uncovering it. If only Congress could be persuaded to randomize the timing of the increase (perhaps by giving each employer or each local labor market a lottery number with lump sum compensation), we might learn something about the employment effects of minimum wages (although there would still be the problem of predicting the market effect of a general change from the effects of local changes). Alas, legislators tend to view their job as being complicated enough already, and past minimum wage legislation has not made any attempt to facilitate policy evaluation. Davi

Can pay regulation kill? Panel Data evidence on the effect of labor markets on hospital performance.

In many sectors, pay is regulated to be equal across heterogeneous geographical labor markets. When the competitive outside wage is higher than the regulated wage, there are likely to be falls in quality. We exploit panel data from the population of English hospitals in which regulated pay for nurses is essentially flat across the country. Higher outside wages significantly worsen hospital quality as measured by hospital deaths for emergency heart attacks. A 10 percent increase in the outside wage is associated with a 7 percent increase in death This is a heavily revised version o

Commercial Imperialism? Political Influence and Trade During the Cold War: Dataset.” American Economic Review.

History provides us with many examples of the use of political power to promote trade and other national interests, the starkest being the unequal treaties imposed by Western powers on China and Japan during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Findlay and O'Rourke 2007). However, the general question of whether power is an important determinant of international trade, particularly in the more recent past, is difficult to examine empirically because shifts in power relations between governments are often the result of decisions that are made behind the veil of government secrecy. In this paper, we surmount this problem by relying on the use of recently declassified CIA documents to generate a country-and year-specific measure of the influence of the US government over foreign countries. We identify instances where US covert services engaged in interventions that installed and/or supported political leaders in [email protected]). We thank four anonymous referees for comments and suggestions that significantly improved the paper. We also thank J