A RECREATION OPTIMIZATION MODEL BASED ON THE TRAVEL COST METHOD

A recreation allocation model is developed which efficiently selects recreation areas and degree of development from an array of proposed and existing sites. The model does this by maximizing the difference between gross recreation benefits and travel, investment, management, and site-opportunity costs. The model presented uses the Travel Cost Method for estimating recreation benefits within an operations research framework. The model is applied to selection of potential wilderness areas in Colorado. This example is then extended to show the model's capability in budget analysis and in planning to meet recreation targets.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

W(h)ither the Fed’s balance sheet?

Federal Reserve policymakers have expressed their support for ultimately shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet and returning the composition of its portfolio to only Treasury securities. Policymakers also favor returning to a fed-funds-rate-targeting procedure or something quite similar. While Fed holdings of some asset classes have been diminishing naturally, the orderly reduction of others could involve special tools that the Fed has been putting in place for a while. An ongoing issue will be to determine an optimal sequence of appropriate actions.Monetary policy - United States ; Federal Reserve System ; Financial crises

Are searching and non-searching unemployment distinct states when unemployment is high? The case of South Africa

Broadly and narrowly measured unemployment rates differ very markedly in certain countries, and the measure chosen to be the ‘official’ unemployment rate affects perceptions about the extent of the problem. The appropriate measure of the unemployment rate depends on whether jobless persons who say they want work but who are not actively searching should be regarded as part of the labour force. This paper examines whether the non-searching-unemployed state is distinct from the searching-unemployed state in a developing country - South Africa - where the broad unemployment rate and the gap between the broad and narrow rates are both very high. It asks whether lack of job-search among jobless persons claiming to want work is an outcome of tastes or of constraints. It finds evidence in support of adopting the broad definition.

A quantum key distribution protocol for rapid denial of service detection

We introduce a quantum key distribution protocol designed to expose fake users that connect to Alice or Bob for the purpose of monopolising the link and denying service. It inherently resists attempts to exhaust Alice and Bob's initial shared secret, and is 100% efficient, regardless of the number of qubits exchanged above the finite key limit. Additionally, secure key can be generated from two-photon pulses, without having to make any extra modifications. This is made possible by relaxing the security of BB84 to that of the quantum-safe block cipher used for day-to-day encryption, meaning the overall security remains unaffected for useful real-world cryptosystems such as AES-GCM being keyed with quantum devices.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures. v2: Shifted focus of paper towards DoS and added protocol 4. v1: Accepted to QCrypt 201

The Measurement of Racial Discrimination in Pay between Job Categories: Theory and Test

The traditional model of taste discrimination in labor markets presumes perfect substitution, making it unsuitable for the measurement of discrimination across job assignments. We extend the model to explain cross-assignment discrimination and test it on data from Major League Baseball. A competitive firm with a Generalized Leontief production function fills each job assignment with whites and nonwhites in an environment of customer prejudice. According to the model, cross-assignment discrimination depends upon racial productivity differences, the productivity x prejudice interaction, technology, relative labor supply and racial integration. We find strong evidence of ceteris paribus racial salary differences between hitters and pitchers.wages, discrimination, imperfect substitutability, integration

Unemployment in South Africa: The nature of the beast

Unemployment in South Africa is so widespread that it demands an explanation. This paper examines two questions about South African unemployment. Firstly, why do the unemployed not enter the informal sector, as is common in other developing countries? Secondly, why do the unemployed not enter wage employment more readily? The findings provide little support for the idea that unemployed people choose to be unemployed: the unemployed are substantially worse off, and less satisfied with their quality of life, than they would be if informally employed. Various impediments to entry into the informal sector increase open unemployment. The test of the hypothesis that the unemployed have unrealistically high wage aspirations suggests that the commonly reported high reservation wages (relative to predicted wages) are not to be interpreted as reflecting unwillingness to work.

Unemployment and wages in South Africa: A spatial approach

A large amount of recent evidence finds a negative relationship between local unemployment and wages in OECD countries, a relationship christened a ‘wage curve’. This contradicts the conventional model of the labour market in which high unemployment regions have higher wages to compensate for search and other costs. This paper discovers a wage curve in South Africa, a country with several times the typical unemployment rate of OECD countries. The wage curve elasticity in South Africa is similar to that in OECD countries (-0.1) but persists over a much larger range of unemployment rates, implying that unemployment can have a large impact on wages in South Africa. However, this wage flexibility does not extend to union wages which are well insulated from local unemployment conditions. The results here also shed light on the segmentation of the labour market based on labour immobility and on the debate about the appropriate definition of unemployment in South Africa.wages, unemployment, wage curve, South Africa