Distributional effects and individual differences in L2 morphology learning

Second language (L2) learning outcomes may depend on the structure of the input and learners’ cognitive abilities. This study tested whether less predictable input might facilitate learning and generalization of L2 morphology while evaluating contributions of statistical learning ability, nonverbal intelligence, phonological short-term memory, and verbal working memory. Over three sessions, 54 adults were exposed to a Russian case-marking paradigm with a balanced or skewed item distribution in the input. Whereas statistical learning ability and nonverbal intelligence predicted learning of trained items, only nonverbal intelligence also predicted generalization of case-marking inflections to new vocabulary. Neither measure of temporary storage capacity predicted learning. Balanced, less predictable input was associated with higher accuracy in generalization but only in the initial test session. These results suggest that individual differences in pattern extraction play a more sustained role in L2 acquisition than instructional manipulations that vary the predictability of lexical items in the input

The Impact of Transit Oriented Development on the Travel Behaviors of Workers in Denver, Colorado

To combat unsustainable transportation systems characterized by reliance on petroleum, polluting emissions, traffic congestion and suburban sprawl, planners encourage mixed use, densely populated areas that provide individuals with opportunities to live, work, eat and shop without necessarily having to drive private automobiles to accommodate their needs. Despite these attempts, the frequency and duration of automobile trips has consistently increased in the United States throughout past decades. While many studies have focused on how residential proximity to transit influences travel behavior, the effect of workplace location has largely been ignored. This paper asks, does working near a TOD influence the travel behaviors of workers differently than workers living near a TOD? We examine the non-work travel behaviors of workers based upon their commuting mode and proximity to TODs. The data came from a 2009 travel behavior survey by the Denver Regional Council of Governments, which contains 8,000 households, 16,000 individuals, and nearly 80,000 trips. We measure sustainable travel behaviors as reduced mileage, reduced number of trips, and increased use of non-automobile transportation. The results of this study indicate that closer proximity of both households and workplaces to TODs decrease levels of car commuting and that non-car commuting leads to more sustainable personal travel behaviors characterized by more trips made with alternative modes

The New Industrial Organization and Small Business

The small business sector is an important part of the American economic landscape, in both absolute and relative terms. Despite its absolute growth, however, the sector accounts for a diminishing share of private sector activity. But its importance, and changes in importance, vary across industrial sectors of the economy. Drawing on the theoretical and empirical insights developed in recent books by John Sutton, we suggest that the presence or absence of endogenous strategic behaviors of the larger firms with respect to advertising, promotion, research and development, and other sunk cost expenditures may well play an important role in explaining the differing levels of small business importance, both cross-sectionally and over time. We conclude the paper with suggestions for research directions that could shed further light on these ideas

Strategic Withholding through Production Failures

Anecdotal evidence indicates that electricity producers use production failures to disguise strategic reductions of capacity in order to influence prices, but systematic evidence is lacking. We use a quasi-experimental set up and data from the Swedish energy market to examine such behavior. In a market without strategic withholding, the decision of reporting a failure should be independent of the market price. We show that marginal producers in fact base their decision to report a failure in part on prices, which indicates that failures are a result of economic incentives as well as of technical problems

Firm-size distribution and price-cost margins in Dutch manufacturing

Industrial economists surmise a relation between the size distribution of firms and performance. Usually, attention is focused on the high end of the size distribution. The widely used 4-firm seller concentration, C4, ignores what happens at the low end of the size distribution. An investigation is presented of the extent to which the level and the growth of small business presence influence price-cost margins in Dutch manufacturing. A large data set of 66 industries for a 13-year period is used. This allows the investigation of both small business influences within a framework in which that of many other market structure variables is also studied. Evidence is shown that price-cost margins are influenced by large firm dominance, growth in small business presence, capital intensity, business cycle, international trade, and buyer concentration

Productivity in Electricity Retail after Market Liberalisation: Analysing the Effects of Ownership and Firm's Governance Structure

This paper, which is one of the first to estimate productivity in retail electricity for a European country after liberalisation, analyses the effect of ownership and governance structure by using a unique dataset of German electricity retailers from 2003 to 2012. An innovative service production function for the retail sector is derived with labour and external services as the main inputs. A structural model is used with a proxy function for productivity to overcome the endogeneity of input choice. Ownership is controlled for in the law of motion for productivity. The results of the dataset used to validate the model show that firm-level productivity did not increase after 2008 and that ownership had no effect on productivity. The results provide useful insights into the link between ownership and productivity in modern public enterprises after liberalisation

Modelling generalized firms' restructuring using inverse DEA

The key consideration for firms’ restructuring is improving their operational efficiencies. Market conditions often offer opportunities or generate threats that can be handled by restructuring scenarios through consolidation, to create synergy, or through split, to create reverse synergy. A generalized restructuring refers to a move in a business market where a homogeneous set of firms, a set of pre-restructuring decision making units (DMUs), proceed with a restructuring to produce a new set of post-restructuring entities in the same market to realize efficiency targets. This paper aims to develop a novel inverse Data Envelopment Analysis based methodology, called GInvDEA (Generalized Inverse DEA), for modeling the generalized restructuring. Moreover, the paper suggests a linear programming model that allows determining the lowest performance levels, measured by efficiency that can be achieved through a given generalized restructuring. An application in banking operations illustrates the theory developed in the paper