Regulating Campus Hate Speech: Is It Constitutional? (FOCUS)

Every year between 800,000 and one million American college students are victims of ethnoviolence. These incidents take the form of racist slurs and posters, racial harassment, and alleged racial intimidation; anti-Semitic remarks, graffiti, and posters; and harassment and threatening statements toward lesbians and gays. However, free speech issues have often overwhelmed the problem of ethnoviolence on our college and university campuses. In formulating policy, university administrators and legal counsel are now considering free speech issues as much, if not more, than the race conflict issue itself. The problem is that focusing exclusively on First Amendment concerns reflects not minority concerns, but the prejudicial priorities of some members of the dominant social order. Our universities as well as our culture must confront the dilemma presented by the extent to which free speech or racial conflict should be given priority

Hunt V. Kenai Peninsula Borough: The Search For Clarity In Legislative Prayer Speaker Selection

In 2016, three residents of the Kenai Peninsula Borough were prevented from delivering an invocation at a Borough Assembly meeting because they were neither borough chaplains nor members of a qualifying religious association. These three residents sued the borough, claiming that the Borough Assembly’s speaker selection policy violated the Alaska Constitution’s Establishment Clause. The superior court ruled for the plaintiffs, holding that the selection policy constituted a step towards the establishment of a state religion. Applying Supreme Court precedent, the superior court reached the correct result. However, the limited amount of federal precedent on the principles guiding speaker selection policies has led to significant variance of application in different jurisdictions. Important questions remain regarding the scope of legislative prayer doctrine in Alaska, which still need to be addressed

Growth: With or Without Scale Effects?

December 15, 1998 -- Version 1.0 The property that ideas are nonrivalrous leads to a tight link between idea-based growth models and increasing returns to scale. In particular, changes in the size of an economy's population generally affect either the long-run growth rate or the long-run level of income in such models. This paper provides a partial review of the expanding literature on idea-based models and scale effects. It presents simple versions of various recent idea-based growth models and analyzes their implications for the relationship between scale and growth. Prepared for the AEA Meetings, January 3, 1999. Forthcoming in the AER Papers and Proceedings, May 1999.

Why Have Health Expenditures as a Share fo GDP Risen So Much?

Aggregate health expenditures as a share of GDP have risen in the United States from about 5 percent in 1960 to nearly 14 percent in recent years. Why? This paper explores a simple explanation based on technological progress. Medical advances allow diseases to be cured today, at a cost, that could not be cured at any price in the past. When this technological progress is combined with a Medicare- like transfer program to pay the health expenses of the elderly, the model is able to reproduce the basic facts of recent U.S. experience, including the large increase in the health expenditure share, a rise in life expectancy, and an increase in the size of health-related transfer payments as a share of GDP.

Beyond GDP? Welfare Across Countries and Time

We propose a simple summary statistic for a nation’s flow of welfare, measured as a consumption equivalent, and compute its level and growth rate for a broad set of countries. This welfare metric combines data on consumption, leisure, inequality, and mortality. Although it is highly correlated with per capita GDP, deviations are often economically significant: Western Europe looks considerably closer to U.S. living standards, emerging Asia has not caught up as much, and many African and Latin American countries are farther behind due to lower levels of life expectancy and higher levels of inequality. In recent decades, rising life expectancy boosts annual growth in welfare by more than a full percentage point throughout much of the world. The notable exception is sub- Saharan Africa, where life expectancy actually declines.Welfare, life expectancy, living standards

The Steady-State Growth Theorem: A Comment on Uzawa (1961)

This brief note revisits the proof of the Steady-State Growth Theorem, first provided by Uzawa (1961). We provide a clear statement of the theorem and a new version of Uzawa's proof that makes the intuition underlying the result more apparent.

Why Do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output per Worker than Others?

Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis, our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries. At a deeper level, we document that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output per worker are driven by differences in institutions and government policies, which we call social infrastructure. We treat social infrastructure as endogenous, determined historically by location and other factors captured in part by language.

Short Sale Constraints and Stock Returns

Stocks can be overpriced when short sale constraints bind. We study the costs of short selling equities, 1926-1933, using the publicly observable market for borrowing stock. Some stocks are sometimes expensive to short, and it appears that stocks enter the borrowing market when shorting demand is high. We find that stocks that are expensive to short or which enter the borrowing market have high valuations and low subsequent returns, consistent with the overpricing hypothesis. Size-adjusted returns are one to two percent lower per month for new entrants, and despite high costs it is profitable to short them.

Plant succession on gopher mounds in Western Cascade meadows: consequences for species diversity and heterogeneity

Pocket gophers have the potential to alter the dynamics of grasslands by creating mounds that bury existing vegetation and locally reset succession. Gopher mounds may provide safe sites for less competitive species, potentially increasing both species diversity and vegetation heterogeneity (spatial variation in species composition). We compared species composition, diversity and heterogeneity among gopher mounds of different ages in three montane meadows in the Cascade Range of Oregon. Cover of graminoids and forbs increased with mound age, as did species richness. Contrary to many studies, we found no evidence that mounds provided safe sites for early successional species, despite their abundance in the soil seed bank, or that diversity peaked on intermediate-aged mounds. However, cover of forbs relative to that of graminoids was greater on mounds than in the adjacent meadow. Variation in species composition was also greater within and among mounds than in adjacent patches of undisturbed vegetation, suggesting that these small-scale disturbances increase heterogeneity within meadows