Border region makes progress in the 1990s

North American Free Trade Agreement ; Employment - Texas ; Income

The Legal Environment and the Choice of Default Resolution Alternatives: An Empirical Analysis

In addition to standard foreclosure, three other methods of resolution for mortgage defaults are available: bankruptcy protection, surrender of deed to the lender, and pre-foreclosure sale. This paper develops a model that specifies the choice of resolution method as a function of the state-specific legal environment and local area economic conditions. A large national data set is used to estimate a multinomial logit choice model for the 1987 to 1991 period. The results indicate that the choice of default resolution alternative is sensitive to the legal environment. The results imply that selected legal reforms will tend to improve the efficiency of the default resolution process.

On-Call Time Under the Fair Labor Standards Act

Economic pressures, changing family structures, and technology have increasingly blurred the line between work time and personal time. The rise of independent contracting, the growing number of families in which both parents work, and the. expanding reach of computer networks, fax machines, pagers, and mobile telephones, to provide a few examples, have blurred the once-familiar distinction between work time and leisure time. This distinction is particularly unclear for on-call employees. An on-call employee is one who may be physically away from the workplace but who remains connected to it by telephone, beeper, computer, or radio, and who must respond to the employer if called. While on call, an employee generally does not face the constraints he may face while on a regular shift at his employer\u27s premises. He may be able to go shopping or watch television during his on-call hours, for example. At the same time, even though he may have a greater measure of freedom than he does while working a normal shift, he is never truly free from work. The employer may interrupt the employee\u27s personal activities without warning, and the threat of interruption may prevent him from engaging in certain activities altogether, either because he would not be able to return to work quickly enough, or because some activities - such as attending movies or sporting events - require a solid block of time and thus would be impractical. Moreover, nonpayment for on-call time can be inequitable: employers obtain value from the on-call services, enabling them to reduce staff or limit compensable hours worked without compensating the employees who have forgone personal activities

Cooperative Gating and Spatial Organization of Membrane Proteins through Elastic Interactions

Biological membranes are elastic media in which the presence of a transmembrane protein leads to local bilayer deformation. The energetics of deformation allow two membrane proteins in close proximity to influence each other's equilibrium conformation via their local deformations, and spatially organize the proteins based on their geometry. We use the mechanosensitive channel of large conductance (MscL) as a case study to examine the implications of bilayer-mediated elastic interactions on protein conformational statistics and clustering. The deformations around MscL cost energy on the order of 10 kT and extend ~3nm from the protein edge, as such elastic forces induce cooperative gating and we propose experiments to measure these effects. Additionally, since elastic interactions are coupled to protein conformation, we find that conformational changes can severely alter the average separation between two proteins. This has important implications for how conformational changes organize membrane proteins into functional groups within membranes.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 63 references, submitted to PLoS Computational Biolog

The Renormalization Group Limit Cycle for the 1/r^2 Potential

Previous work has shown that if an attractive 1/r^2 potential is regularized at short distances by a spherical square-well potential, renormalization allows multiple solutions for the depth of the square well. The depth can be chosen to be a continuous function of the short-distance cutoff R, but it can also be a log-periodic function of R with finite discontinuities, corresponding to a renormalization group (RG) limit cycle. We consider the regularization with a delta-shell potential. In this case, the coupling constant is uniquely determined to be a log-periodic function of R with infinite discontinuities, and an RG limit cycle is unavoidable. In general, a regularization with an RG limit cycle is selected as the correct renormalization of the 1/r^2 potential by the conditions that the cutoff radius R can be made arbitrarily small and that physical observables are reproduced accurately at all energies much less than hbar^2/mR^2.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

A Bayesian Analysis of Trend Determination in Economic Time Series

In this paper we provide a comprehensive Bayesian posterior analysis of trend determination in general autoregressive models. Multiple lag autoregressive models with fitted drifts and time trends as well as models that allow for certain types of structural change in the deterministic components are considered. We utilize a modified information matrix-based prior that accommodates stochastic nonstationarity, takes into account the interactions between long-run and short-run dynamics and controls the degree of stochastic nonstationarity permitted. We derive analytic posterior densities for all of the trend determining parameters via the Laplace approximation to multivariate integrals. We also address the sampling properties of our posteriors under alternative data generating processes by simulation methods. We apply our Bayesian techniques to the Nelson-Plosser macroeconomic data and various stock price and dividend data