Invisible Races

When a people in Zimbabwe have more of the "Jewish Priestly gene" than many Jewish Priests, what does genetics tell us? Perhaps that there is more than one historical pathway to authenticity

Enoch's Imaginary Ancestor

This paper examines a foundational tradition of Second Temple scholarship: that the figure of Enoch was inspired by the mythical Babylonian diviner-king Enmeduranki because both revealers were the seventh of ten figures before the flood. It finds that no preserved pre-Chris- tian texts present Enmeduranki this way, and no evidence that anybody in the ancient world believed in this connection. Astonishingly, this theory – dating from 1903, it is literally the first Babylonian-Second Temple connection ever made – has survived repeated disconfirma- tion and been repeated uncritically for 115 years. Why did nobody critically reexamine the data for over a century? Scholarship on this topic has key features that modern scholars themselves associate with folklore: the handing down of a chain of unchallenged authoritative traditions to create a compelling narrative of the past. It is part of a larger way that the story of Judaism has been told as one of nativization. These studies in continuity provide internalist narratives that present what could be seen as sharp Jewish departures from prior Hebrew traditions as instead part of an inclusive patrimony, a reworking of a shared past. In this view, patterns shared with other cultures recede into matters of “influence” and “background” to Judaism, a creative reuse of an older and sometimes otiose culture to fertilize a new and changing one. In response, the paper concludes by looking to a better documented medium connecting Judean and Babylonian cultures, and a theoretical model that goes beyond borrowing and influence. Rather than an obscure borrowed “tradition,” the heavenly sage was a shared piece of Aramaic- based high culture common to Judean and Mesopotamian scholars. The figure exemplified a type of scribal thought in which the mastery of language meant mastery of a linguistically structured universe

The Biblical Priestly Tradition as Material Religion: A Comparative Ancient Mediterranean Approach

This chapter lays out how the Priestly corpus represents a distinctive form of material religion within the ancient Near East. Both its ideology and practice, on the one hand, and its physical shape as a composition, on the other, are distinctive and have had distinctive impacts on the history of religion. While the acts that the Priestly corpus prescribes, including the sanctification of ritual sites, offerings of animal and vegetable sacrifice, and the purification of bodies and objects are common across the ancient Mediterranean, its attitude toward language and action is not. In contrast to its best- documented neighbors from Syria and Mesopotamia, it represents a largely different attitude toward the possibilities of human ritual activity and its relationship to the divine. Indeed, P is itself a distinctive embodiment of language about action

What if There Aren't Any Empirical Models for Pentateuchal Criticism?

Maybe there aren't any

Monitoring, Motivation and Management: The Determinants of Opportunistic Behavior in a Field Experiment

Economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation. Employees are 'rational cheaters,' who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the perceived marginal benefit exceeds the marginal cost. Managers respond to this decision calculus by implementing monitoring and incentive pay practices that lessen the attraction of shirking. This 'rational cheater model' is not the only model of opportunistic behavior, and indeed is viewed skeptically by human resource practitioners and by many non-economists who study employment relationships. We investigate the 'rational cheater model' using data from a double-blind field experiment that allows us to observe the effect of experimentally-induced variations in monitoring on employee opportunism. The experiment is unique in that it occurs in the context of an ongoing employment relationship, i.e., with the firm's employees producing output as usual under the supervision of their front-line managers. The results indicate that a significant fraction of employees behave roughly in ccordance with the 'rational cheater model.' We also find, however, that a substantial proportion of employees do not respond to manipulations in the monitoring rate. This heterogeneity is related to employee assessments about their general treatment by the emp loyer.

Inequality and Human Capital in Appalachia: 1960-2000

This paper examines changes in the earnings distribution of men age 25-64 between 1960 and 2000 in Appalachia and in the remainder of the U.S. Because Appalachia is more rural than the remainder of the U.S. we also examine changes in the earnings distribution in rural vs. urban areas. Our central finding is that there have been large differences in the evolution of the earnings distribution in rural vs. urban areas and this is the principal reason that Appalachia’s earnings distribution differs to some degree from the remainder of the U.S. We find that the bottom of the earnings distribution increased in rural counties between 1960 and 1980 while there was a small decrease in the bottom of the earnings distribution in urban areas. Between 1980 and 2000, urban areas exhibited far more bifurcation of earnings than rural areas. The level and the return to education may play an important role in understanding these patterns. At the bottom of the distribution there was a large increase in education in rural areas relative to urban areas between 1980 and 2000. The relative rise at the top of the earnings distribution in cities is likely caused by men in the upper part of the earnings distribution being much more likely to have a college degree combined with a rapid rise in the return to college education

8 - Precision Top Quark Mass Extraction at the Large Hadron Collider

The Standard Model (SM) is the established theory of particle physics down to distance scales as small as a thousandth of a femtometer. The frontier of particle physics is the search for new physics beyond the SM through searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), complimented by high precision measurements of key SM parameters. One such parameter is the mass of the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle, about 170 times more massive than the hydrogen atom. The uncertainty in its value affects precision fits, limiting the ability to test the SM and constrain new physics. At the LHC, the most precise experimental top mass measurements are based on the method of kinematic reconstruction, which yields enhanced sensitivity to the top quark mass. We perform Monte Carlo simulations of a related observable, the ``boosted top jet mass spectrum”, based on a newly developed theoretical framework. We study the sensitivity of this observable to the top quark mass and compare the simulation results to theoretical predictions. We have generated over 18 million simulation events, analyzed them through independently written C++ algorithms, and compared to theoretical predictions. This entire process was automated through a sequence of shell scripts. Good agreement was found with the theoretical predictions. Current work is focused on a detailed statistical analysis of these results for a high precision extraction of the top quark mass

Teenage Childbearing and Its Life Cycle Consequences: Exploiting a Natural Experiment

In this paper, we exploit a 'natural experiment' associated with human reproduction to identify the effect of teen childbearing on subsequent educational attainment, family structure, labor market outcomes and financial self-sufficiency. In particular, we exploit the fact that a substantial fraction of women who become pregnant experience a miscarriage (spontaneous abortion) and thus do not have a birth. If miscarriages were purely random and if miscarriages were the only way, other than by live births, that a pregnancy ended, then women, who had a miscarriage as a teen, would constitute an ideal control group with which to contrast teenage mothers. Exploiting this natural experiment, we devise an Instrumental Variables (IV) estimators for the consequences of teen mothers not delaying their childbearing, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 (NLSY79). Our major finding is that many of the negative consequences of not delaying childbearing until adulthood are much smaller than has been estimated in previous studies. While we do find adverse consequences of teenage childbearing immediately following a teen mother's first birth, these negative consequences appear short- lived. By the time a teen mother reachers her late twenties, she appears to have only slightly more children, is only slightly more likely to be single mother, and has no lower levels of educational attainment than if she had delayed her childbearing to adulthood. In fact, by this age teen mothers appear to be better off in some aspects of their lives. Teenage childbearing appears to raise levels of labor supply, accumulated work experience and labor market earnings and appears to reduce the chances of living in poverty and participating in the associated social welfare programs. These estimated effects imply that the cost of teenage childbearing to U.S. taxpayers is negligible. In particular, our estimates imply that the widely held view that teenage childbearing imposes a substantial cost on government is an artifact of the failure to appropriately account for pre- existing socioeconomic differences between teen mothers and other women when estimating the causal effects of early childbearing. While teen mothers are very likely to live in poverty and experience other forms of adversity, our results imply that little of this would be changed just by getting teen mothers to delay their childbearing into adulthood.

Are children 'normal'?

In his classic work on the economics of fertility, Becker (1960) suggests that children are likely “normal.” We examine this contention. Our first step is documenting an empirical regularity about the cross section of white married couples in the U.S.: when we restrict comparisons to households living in broadly similar locations (e.g., in expensive urban areas, or in rural areas), completed fertility is positively correlated with the husband’s income. Two alternative models rationalize the data—one in which children are “normal” and a second in which the observed pattern emerges solely as a consequence of rational sorting by households. In an effort to sort out causal effects, we undertake a rather specialized empirical exercise to analyze the localized impact on fertility of the mid-1970s increase in world energy prices—an exogenous shock that substantially increased men’s incomes in the Appalachian coal-mining region. We find that children are indeed “normal.”Demography

The role of location in evaluating racial wage disparity

A standard object of empirical analysis in labor economics is a modified Mincer wage function in which an individual's log wage is specified to be a function of education, experience, and an indicator variable identifying race. Researchers hope that estimates from this exercise can be informative about the impact of minority status on labor market success. Here we set out a theoretical justification for this regression in a context in which individuals live and work in different locations. Our model leads to the traditional approach, but with the important caveat that the regression should include location-specific fixed effects. Given this insight, we reevaluate evidence about the black-white wage disparity in the United States.Income distribution ; Wages ; Discrimination in employment