Healthy People in a Healthy Economy: A Blueprint for Action in Massachusetts

Examines the recession's effects on health and the cost of chronic disease. Suggests proven strategies for schools, municipalities, state government, payers, employers, the food industry, physicians, philanthropies, and media to promote healthy behaviors

On Implied Wishes for Olympic Victory in Pindar

published or submitted for publicatio

The Paradox of "Natural" Heterosexuality with "Unnatural" Women

This essay examines the debates between advocates of heterosexual and pederastic love in Plutarch's Amatorius, Achilles Tatius 2.33-38, and the Lucianic Erotes. The heterosexual side condemns pederasts for "unnatural" practices, drawing on Platonic and Stoic precedents. I shall demonstrate that the opposition between "natural" heterosexuality and "unnatural" homosexuality predated even Plato, with its roots in the physis vs. nomos opposition of the Sophists. For their part, the pederasts portray the heterosexual obsession with "nature" as bestial, and present their own preference as a mark of advanced cultural evolution, drawing upon a strain of Greek anthropological theory.Classic

Elemental Psychology And The Date Of Semonides-Of-Amorgos

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Horace and Catullus: the Case of the Suppressed Precursor in 'Odes' 1.22 and 1.32

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How Wide is the Scope of Hold-Up-Based Theories? Contractual Form and Market Thickness in Trucking

How far do the contractual implications of hold-up-based theories (Klein, Crawford, and Alchian (1978), Williamson (1979, 1985)) extend? I investigate this in the context of trucking. Quasi-rents in trucking are generally smaller than in the contexts studied in the previous empirical literature. They vary with hauls' distance and the thickness of local markets. I find that doubling the thickness of the market increases the likelihood that simple spot arrangements govern transactions by about 30% for long hauls. I find weaker evidence of relationships between local market thickness and contractual form for short hauls -- hauls for which quasi-rents are particularly small. Contracts' role as protectors of quasi-rents becomes less important as quasi-rents decrease, but exists over a surprisingly large range.

Cold dilute neutron matter on the lattice II: Results in the unitary limit

This is the second of two papers which investigate cold dilute neutron matter on the lattice using pionless effective field theory. In the unitary limit, where the effective range is zero and scattering length is infinite, simple scaling relations relate thermodynamic functions at different temperatures. When the second virial coefficient is properly tuned, we find that the lattice results obey these scaling relations. We compute the energy per particle, pressure, spin susceptibility, dineutron correlation function, and an upper bound for the superfluid critical temperature.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure

Specialization, Firms, and Markets: The Division of Labor Within and Between Law Firms

What is the role of firms and markets in mediating the division of labor? This paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine law firms' boundaries. We find that firms' field scope narrows as market size increases and individuals specialize, indicating that firms' boundaries reflect organizational trade-offs. Moreover, we find that whether the division of labor is mediated by firms differs systematically according to whether lawyers in a particular field are mainly involved in structuring transactions or in dispute resolution. Our evidence is consistent with hypotheses in which firms' boundaries reflect variation in the value of knowledge-sharing or in the costs of monitoring, but not in risk-sharing. Our findings show how the incentive trade-offs associated with exploiting increasing returns from specialization lead the structure of the industry to be fragmented, but highly-skewed.

Hierarchies, Specialization, and the Utilization of Knowledge: Theory and Evidence from the Legal Services Industry

What role do hierarchies play with respect to the organization of production and what determines their structure? We develop an equilibrium model of hierarchical organization, then provide empirical evidence using confidential data on thousands of law offices from the 1992 Census of Services. The driving force in the model is increasing returns in the utilization of acquired knowledge. We show how the equilibrium assignment of individuals to hierarchical positions varies with the degree to which their human capital is field-specialized, then show how this equilibrium changes with the extent of the market. We find empirical evidence consistent with a central proposition of the model: the share of lawyers that work in hierarchies and the ratio of associates to partners increases as market size increases and lawyers field-specialize. Other results provide evidence against alternative interpretations that emphasize unobserved differences in the distribution of demand or 'firm size effects,' and lend additional support to the view that a role hierarchies play in legal services is to help exploit increasing returns associated with the utilization of human capital.

The Return to Knowledge Hierarchies

Hierarchies allow individuals to leverage their knowledge through others' time. This mechanism increases productivity and amplifies the impact of skill heterogeneity on earnings inequality. To quantify this effect, we analyze the earnings and organization of U.S. lawyers and use the equilibrium model of knowledge hierarchies in Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2006) to assess how much lawyers' productivity and the distribution of earnings across lawyers reflects lawyers' ability to organize problem-solving hierarchically. We analyze earnings, organizational, and assignment patterns and show that they are generally consistent with the main predictions of the model. We then use these data to estimate the model. Our estimates imply that hierarchical production leads to at least a 30% increase in production in this industry, relative to a situation where lawyers within the same office do not "vertically specialize." We further find that it amplifies earnings inequality, increasing the ratio between the 95th and 50th percentiles from 3.7 to 4.8. We conclude that the impact of hierarchy on productivity and earnings distributions in this industry is substantial but not dramatic, reflecting the fact that the problems lawyers face are diverse and that the solutions tend to be customized.