Teenage Unemployment: What is the Problem?

This nontechnical paper was prepared as a background study for the NBER Conference on Youth Joblessness and Employment. Our analysis of data collected in the March 1976 and October 1976 Current Population Surveys leads us to the following conclusions: Unemployment is not a serious problem for the vast majority of teenage boys. Less than 5 percent of teenage boys are out of school, unemployed and looking for full-time work. Many out of school teenagers are neither working nor looking for work and most of these report no desire to work. Virtually all teenagers who are out of work live at hone. Among those who do seek work, unemployment spells tend to be quite short; over half end within one month when these boys find work or stop looking for work. Nevertheless, much of the total amount of unemployment is the result of quite long spells among a small portion of those who experience unemployment during the year. Although nonwhites have considerably higher unemployment rates than whites, the overwhelming majority of the teenage unemployed are white. Approximately half of the difference between the unemployment rates of whites and blacks can be accounted for by demographic and economic differences. There is a small group of teenagers with relatively little schooling for whom unemployment does seen to be a serious and persistent problem. This group suffers most of the teenage unemployment. Although their unemployment rate improves markedly as they move into their twenties, it remains very high relative to the unemp1oynent rate of better educated and more able young men.

The Second Night\u27s Stop : Effects of U.S. Highway 301, Tourism, and Interstate 95 upon Statesboro, Georgia, 1950-1975

The history of the automobile is a vital part of the history of the twentieth century United States The automobile began to significantly reshape America following the second World War. The construction of the enormous National Interstate and Defense Highway System assured the dominance of personally-owned automobile as the mode of transportation in the United States. Improved highways made far-flung suburban communities possible and the 41,000 miles of Interstate highway traversing our nation and entering our metropolitan areas assured crowded city streets and time-consuming traffic jams. What however, has the Interstate system done to the rural areas of our nation? This examination of Statesboro, Georgia gives some insight The invasion of Interstate 95 down the eastern coastal area of Georgia radically altered the existing traffic and tourism patterns that had slowly developed since the 1920s and rose to its highest levels in the 1950s and 1960s. Statesboro—as its Police shoulder badges attested—was known as the Tourist City and relied upon Northeastemers visiting Florida for a significant portion of its yearly income. The main travel artery that carried this traffic before the Interstate system was U. S Highway 301, which ran through the heart of downtown Statesboro. The Interstate system could have a profound effect upon rural communities, depending upon where the highway was routed. In Statesboro\u27s case. Interstate 95 was constructed fifty miles away, effectively cutting the community off from the traffic that would use the newer road The loss of tourist traffic, due to I-95\u27s construction was an additional hardship upon Statesboro. Statesboro\u27s tourism memory and the reaction to the Interstate are the heart of this work, as well as a look at where Statesboro is today and efforts to revitalize some tourist traffic on the old regional highway. Along the way, the changing world of highway travel will also be examined, paying special attention to the homogenization of the roadside experience, from chain restaurants, to impersonal motels, to the death of small towns

Asymptotic Properties of Approximate Bayesian Computation

Approximate Bayesian computation allows for statistical analysis in models with intractable likelihoods. In this paper we consider the asymptotic behaviour of the posterior distribution obtained by this method. We give general results on the rate at which the posterior distribution concentrates on sets containing the true parameter, its limiting shape, and the asymptotic distribution of the posterior mean. These results hold under given rates for the tolerance used within the method, mild regularity conditions on the summary statistics, and a condition linked to identification of the true parameters. Implications for practitioners are discussed.Comment: This 31 pages paper is a revised version of the paper, including supplementary materia

The quality of monetary policy and inflation performance: globalization and its aftermath

With a few unfortunate exceptions the last three decades have seen reductions in inflation around the world to the point that many would argue that further improvements in price stability would offer only limited welfare gains. This experience is the result of many factors, some of which are country-specific. In this paper we seek to isolate one of the factors, namely, the improvement in the quality of monetary policy. There are two novel aspects to the study. Firstly, we essentially estimate a gravity-like model. Secondly, we propose generally a more exhaustive analysis of the potential role of a large number of institutional factors than has been done before. Briefly, we find that institutional factors play a role in explaining inflation relative to the US experience, which is used as the benchmark. Nevertheless, any reduction in inflation stemming from greater central bank autonomy is a feature of the 1980s and early 1990s. Thereafter, central banks in the OECD look very much alike.globalization; inflation differentials; monetary policy strategy; institutional change

The WIRED Survey. IV. New Dust Disks from the McCook & Sion White Dwarf Catalog

We have compiled photometric data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer All Sky Survey and other archival sources for the more than 2200 objects in the original McCook & Sion Catalog of Spectroscopically Identified White Dwarfs. We applied color-selection criteria to identify 28 targets whose infrared spectral energy distributions depart from the expectation for the white dwarf photosphere alone. Seven of these are previously known white dwarfs with circumstellar dust disks, five are known central stars of planetary nebulae, and six were excluded for being known binaries or having possible contamination of their infrared photometry. We fit white dwarf models to the spectral energy distributions of the remaining ten targets, and find seven new candidates with infrared excess suggesting the presence of a circumstellar dust disk. We compare the model dust disk properties for these new candidates with a comprehensive compilation of previously published parameters for known white dwarfs with dust disks. It is possible that the current census of white dwarfs with dust disks that produce an excess detectable at K-band and shorter wavelengths is close to complete for the entire sample of known WDs to the detection limits of existing near-IR all-sky surveys. The white dwarf dust disk candidates now being found using longer wavelength infrared data are drawn from a previously underrepresented region of parameter space, in which the dust disks are overall cooler, narrower in radial extent, and/or contain fewer emitting grains.Comment: accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal; 34 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables; added missing reference in Section 2 (p. 7