Evenhandedness in Arbitration: The Case of Major League Baseball

The focus of this study is how labor and management judge the degree of evenhandedness of arbitrators in major league baseball final-offer arbitration. The empirical work suggests that if a naive "win-loss" tallies approach is used, arbitrators in baseball may be deemed fair. However, if a richer model is employed whereby players and owners judge arbitration outcomes relative to some notion of the player's worth, a significant portion of arbitrators may be judged biased in their decisions.

Estimating an hedonic translog cost function for the home health care industry

Medicare home health care plays an important role in providing cost effective care for the chronically ill and elderly. Long seen as a cost effective substitute for nursing home care, home care has become even more important with expenditures increasing by 31.4% from 1990 to 1996. The purpose of this paper is to provide a short run cost analysis of a sample of home health care providers to gain insight into the efficient provision of home health care services. This paper is a significant improvement over previous studies in that it uses a nationwide database to more accurately represent the multiproduct nature of the industry and uses an hedonic translog cost estimation with desirable economic properties.

Factors influencing the adoption of state lotteries

This paper explores the factors influencing the adoption of state lotteries in the United States. The conceptual framework utilizes a common utility framework in which a representative legislator maximizes utility derived from the current and expected fiscal position of a state, subject to a political constraint. The empirical results support the theoretical hypotheses, including the finding that changes in the fiscal health of the state, the predicted profit potential of a lottery, and the political climate of the state all affect the likelihood that a lottery is adopted. By introducing a sound conceptual framework, using better data than used in previous studies, utilizing an appropriate estimation technique, and obtaining strong results, this study advances our knowledge of why states adopt lotteries.

Supplement or Supplant? Estimating the Impact of State Lottery Earmarks on Higher Education Funding

In the wake of declining state support for higher education, many state leaders have adopted lottery earmark policies, which designate lottery revenue to higher education budgets as an alternative funding mechanism. However, despite the ubiquity of lottery earmarks for higher education, it remains unclear whether this new source of revenue serves to supplement or supplant state funding for higher education. In this paper, we use a differencein-differences design for the years 1990–2009 to estimate the impact on state appropriations and state financial aid levels of designating lottery earmark funding to higher education. Main findings indicate that lottery earmark policies are associated with a 5 percent increase in higher education appropriations, and a 135 percent increase in merit-based financial aid. However, lottery earmarks are also associated with a decrease in need-based financial aid of approximately 12 percent. These findings have serious distributional implications that should be considered when state lawmakers adopt lottery earmark policies for higher education