Mapping State Unemployment

In this data snapshot, authors Michael Ettlinger and Jordan Hensley report the relative level of initial unemployment claims for the week ending March 28 as a share of the labor force, and the “insured unemployment” as a share of the February labor force for the week ending March 21. Hawaii, Michigan, and Pennsylvania top the list of initial unemployment claims

A Critique on the Current Standards for Evaluating Costs For Invasive Species in Economic Literature

The paper surveys the current invasive species literature in order to form the basis of a evaluation, and then presents the evaluation

Employment Income Drops in More Low-Income Than High-Income Households in All States

Low-wage workers are being hit much harder in the COVID-19 economic crisis than higher wage workers. This is evident in the much greater job loss in lower wage industries than higher wage industries

Unanimity on the Rehnquist Court

The unanimous decision making process is an intriguing phenomenon. However, the process of justices with different backgrounds, attitudes, and perceptions uniting on a decision raises many difficult questions for judicial scholars. Despite these challenges, the limited amount of knowledge in the area of unanimous decision making is troubling because such decisions constitute a sizable portion of judicial decisions. For example, nearly one-half of the Court\u27s decisions were unanimous during the 1996-1997 term. Given the Court\u27s penchant for unanimity, it is obvious that research into this area can contribute substantially toward explaining the behavior of the Justices on the Court. Thus, the central question of this article is: What characterizes the unanimous decision making process of the United States Supreme Court? By examining all formally decided cases from the first five terms of the Rehnquist Court (1986-1990), this study aims to provide new insights regarding the determinants of unanimity

Multiplicative and Additive Processes in the Subjective Evaluation of Travel Expense

Subjects were asked to make absolute judgments and relative ratings of travel expense for a series of hypothetical trips described by varying levels of distance to be travelled, gasoline price, and expected gas mileage. In Experiment 1, intuitive estimates of cost in dollars followed a multiplicative model analogous to the rational model but allowing individual differences in evaluating and weighting stimulus factors. In Experiment 2, subjective ratings of relative expense followed an additive model. An additive model implies that an extreme value of one factor will be balanced by more neutral values of other factors, whereas a multiplicative model implies that a single extreme value will have an exaggerated effect. Two interpretations of these disparate findings were considered: either the underlying information integration process differed as a function of how the information was to be used, or response differences were due to transformations of the internal responses to the overt response scale. Experiment 3, in which subjects were required to make both kinds of evaluations, ruled out the response transformation interpretation

Government Spending Across the World: How the United States Compares

In this brief, authors Michael Ettlinger, Jordan Hensley, and Julia Vieira analyze how much the governments of different countries spend, and on what, to illuminate the range of fiscal policy options available and provide a basis for determining which approaches work best. They report that the United States ranks twenty-fourth in government spending as a share of GDP out of twenty-nine countries for which recent comparable data are available. The key determinant of where countries rank in overall government spending is the amount spent on social protection. The United States ranks last in spending on social protection as a share of GDP and twenty-second in per capita spending. The United States ranks at or near the top in military, health care, education, and law enforcement spending. Measuring government spending by different methods and including tax expenditures does not appear to significantly alter the conclusion that the United States is a low-tax, low-spending country relative to the other countries examined, particularly when compared to its fellow higher-income countries

A formal specification and analysis of the resource reservation protocol

This thesis explores the practicality of using the Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) model to prove quality of service guarantees over networks. An overview of the requirements to provide quality of service is provided. Using Finite State Machine analysis, the RSVP protocol is formally specified and found to be suitable for reserving resources along a proposed path. However, the distributed nature of the RSVP model and its reliance on quality of service aware routing protocols is problematic. Several examples where RSVP provides less than optimal and/or incorrect results are studied. The framework for alternate model of proving quality of service is proved. This model uses a centralized server for flow path computation. The server-based approach provides more accurate results than the RSVP model and is capable of network optimization; yet it places fewer strains on network resources and appears easier to implement.http://archive.org/details/aformalspecifica1094513682U.S. Marine Corps (U.S.M.C.) author.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited