Social Security Wealth: The Impact of Alternative Inflation Adjustments

The distribution of wealth is one of the most important and least studied features of our economic life. A lack of good data on household wealth is the primary reason for the inadequate attention to this subject. Moreover, the evidence that is available from household surveys and estate records excludes the most important asset of the vast majority of households: the value of future social security benefits. The purpose of the current paper is to present evidence on the distribution of social security wealth and to use these estimates to analyze the impact of alternative methods of adjusting future benefits for changes in the price level.

Social Security and Household Wealth Accumulation: New Microeconomic Evidence

The social security program will pay benefits of more than $100 billion in 1978. Public transfers on this scale are large enough to have profound effects on the behavior of the U.S. economy. The most important effect, although not the only one, is likely to be the impact of social security on private saving and aggregate capital accumulation. The present paper contributes to the analysis of this issue by providing new evidence on the extent to which the accumulation of wealth by individual households responds to differences in social security benefits.

Country-level Business Performance and Policy Asymmetries in Great Britain

The HM Treasury identifies key ‘drivers’ of business performance and productivity differentials, which include skills, investment and competition. This paper presents an empirical investigation into the effects of these drivers on business-level productivity per employee across England, Scotland and Wales in order to identify whether spatial differences in the influence of these drivers exist. We adopt the Cobb-Douglas production function approach and our results suggest that, after taking account of sector specific effects, productivity differentials do exist between businesses across Great Britain and that policy instruments do potentially enhance productivity. The results indicate that these key drivers are equally applicable across countries of Great Britain. However, there is evidence to suggest that scale effects for labour and capital do differ across England, Wales and Scotland and that policy makers should be aware of these asymmetries.Productivity per employee; HM Treasury’s key drivers; scale effects

Locomotion in Response to Shifting Climate Zones: Not So Fast

Although a species’ locomotor capacity is suggestive of its ability to escape global climate change, such a suggestion is not necessarily straightforward. Species vary substantially in locomotor capacity, both ontogenetically and within/among populations, and much of this variation has a genetic basis. Accordingly, locomotor capacity can and does evolve rapidly, as selection experiments demonstrate. Importantly, even though this evolution of locomotor capacity may be rapid enough to escape changing climate, genetic correlations among traits (often due to pleiotropy) are such that successful or rapid dispersers are often limited in colonization or reproductive ability, which may be viewed as a trade-off. The nuanced assessment of this variation and evolution is reviewed for well-studied models: salmon, flying versus flightless insects, rodents undergoing experimental evolution, and metapopulations of butterflies. This work reveals how integration of physiology with population biology and functional genomics can be especially informative

Optimal guidance law development for an advanced launch system

The proposed investigation on a Matched Asymptotic Expansion (MAE) method was carried out. It was concluded that the method of MAE is not applicable to launch vehicle ascent trajectory optimization due to a lack of a suitable stretched variable. More work was done on the earlier regular perturbation approach using a piecewise analytic zeroth order solution to generate a more accurate approximation. In the meantime, a singular perturbation approach using manifold theory is also under current investigation. Work on a general computational environment based on the use of MACSYMA and the weak Hamiltonian finite element method continued during this period. This methodology is capable of the solution of a large class of optimal control problems

Chapter 8 Applying an integrated approach to workplace mental health in SMEs

Small-medium enterprises (SMEs) are a vital employment sector in most developed economies but these work settings have not featured widely in occupational health research and practice. Given the high prevalence of mental health disorders and their related economic consequences, mental health focussed interventions that are gaining traction in larger organizations also need to be on the agenda for SMEs. The potential for interventions in this sector is examined by reviewing a best practice framework, the integrated approach to workplace mental health and associated guidelines to assist organizations with implementation, in relation to the SME context and characteristics. Several promising opportunities and potential challenges are identified and researchers and practitioners are encouraged to focus greater attention on this sector, particularly around the issues identified

Complex Decapod Burrows and Ecological Relationships in Modern and Pleistocene Intertidal Carbonate Environments, San Salvador Island, Bahamas

Burrowing by thalassinidean shrimp in modern tropical, shallow-subtidal to intertidal carbonate environments is widespread and a powerful agent of bioturbation, particularly within sandy substrates. Deep and intense burrowing by callianassids commonly occurs along the intertidal margins of hypersaline lagoons throughout the Bahamas, such as Pigeon Creek on San Salvador Island, where the sediments of extensive sand flats are thoroughly bioturbated by Glypturusacanthochirus. In addition to dominating the deep-tier infauna, G. acanthochirus is a true ecosystem engineer, and its prodigious burrowing activity results in a highly mounded topography. On sand flats, individual sediment cones commonly coalesce with time to form large composite mounds with surfaces stabilized by the development of microbial mats. This unique, biogenetically produced topography sets the stage for colonization by shallow-tier burrowers, particularly the upogebiid shrimp Upogebia vasquezi and several species of fiddler crabs. Burrow systems of U. vasquezi are distinctive and complex. They typically consist of a pair of U-shaped burrows in close proximity or criss-crossing, with knobs or short tunnels at their bases. The entire U-burrow pair is lined by a thick, externally pelleted wall. Inside burrow diameters range from 0.2 to 1 cm, and burrow depths are 10^15 cm, in contrast to the much deeper callianassid burrows. These complex upogebiid burrows also occur as trace fossils in late Pleistocene lagoon-margin facies of the Grotto Beach Formation on San Salvador. Initially reported as fragmentary burrow fills, whole burrow systems virtually identical to the modern upogebiid burrows recently have been found at several localities. These fossil burrows are most abundant in beds lying immediately below a terra rossa paleosol that marks the late Pleistocene^Holocene stratigraphic boundary, and the beds likely were deposited with sea-level stillstand and regression associated with the onset of Wisconsinan glaciation. With their high potential for preservation, these complex upogebiid trace fossils may prove useful as both paleoenvironmental and sea-level position indicators in the study of Quaternary carbonate sequences throughout the Bahamas and other geologically similar regions

Ultrasonic array imaging through reverberating layers for industrial process analysis

In this paper, ultrasonic phased arrays are investigated as an imaging tool for industrial process analysis. Noninvasive process measurement, via transmission of information through a vessel wall, typically requires a window to create an optical path between the sensor and the process. Ultrasonic array imaging provides a means to overcome this barrier as it is specifically used to image into optically opaque structures. However, the large acoustic impedance mismatch between the steel process vessel and water load results in reverberations clouding the image scene containing reflections from within the process fluid. A methodology to identify and remove this reverberation interference from the image scene is proposed using subspace analysis coupled with phase coherence imaging. A 32 element, 5 MHz finite element array model mounted to the outside of a steel vessel wall is used to demonstrate the application of this methodology to a typical industrial process environment. The final image is free of reverberation artifacts, providing a means to accurately extract quantitative information about the process from these images