Retail's Choice: How Raising Wages and Improving Schedules for Women in the Retail Industry Would Benefit America

Today women make up nearly half of America's workforce, and there is little question that their success in the economy is critical to the nation's prosperity. Yet every day across America, millions of women go to work in low paying jobs that fail to move their families out of poverty. One such low-paid position is the most common occupation in America today: retail salesperson. The typical woman working as a salesperson earns just $10.58 an hour: a wage that keeps a family of three near poverty, even if the employee is able to secure enough hours for full-time work. American women disproportionately hold the retail industry's lowest-paid positions. Jobs that could be a source of stability to families and growth for the national economy too often involve not only low pay but erratic schedules, a lack of sufficient work hours, and the scarcity of basic benefits like paid sick days -- making hourly retail jobs precarious positions holding back not just women but their families and our nation as a whole

Two-Mirror Apodization for High-Contrast Imaging

Direct detection of extrasolar planets will require imaging systems capable of unprecedented contrast. Apodized pupils provide an attractive way to achieve such contrast but they are difficult, perhaps impossible, to manufacture to the required tolerance and they absorb about 90% of the light in order to create the apodization, which of course lengthens the exposure times needed for planet detection. A recently proposed alternative is to use two mirrors to accomplish the apodization. With such a system, no light is lost. In this paper, we provide a careful mathematical analysis, using one dimensional mirrors, of the on-axis and off-axis performance of such a two-mirror apodization system. There appear to be advantages and disadvantages to this approach. In addition to not losing any light, we show that the nonuniformity of the apodization implies an extra magnification of off-axis sources and thereby makes it possible to build a real system with about half the aperture that one would otherwise require or, equivalently, resolve planets at about half the angular separation as one can achieve with standard apodization. More specifically, ignoring pointing error and stellar disk size, a planet at $1.7 \lambda/D$ ought to be at the edge of detectability. However, we show that the non-zero size of a stellar disk pushes the threshold for high-contrast so that a planet must be at least $2.5 \lambda/D$ from its star to be detectable. The off-axis analysis of two-dimensional mirrors is left for future study.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures. For author's webpage version see http://www.orfe.princeton.edu/~rvdb/tex/piaa/ms.pdf This version has improved figures and addresses comments of a refere

Flight selection at United Airlines

Airline pilot selection proceedures are discussed including psychogical and personality tests, psychomotor performance requirements, and flight skills evaluation. Necessary attitude and personality traits are described and an outline of computer selection, testing, and training techniques is given

The Provision of Local Public Services in a Risky Environment: An Application to Crime

We state efficiency conditions for the provision of congestable local public goods that diminish individual-specific proprietary risks. The optimum level of such a public service is determined by equating the sum of the reductions of the expected property losses due to a better service level with the marginal costs of the service. The optimum size of the providing local authority in terms of population is obtained where the increase in proprietary risks due to congestion meets the decrease in contributions for the original citizens. As an empirical example, we employ Germany?s crime statistic in order to assess the efficiency of the provision of police services at the state level. --Local Public Goods,Congestion,Risk,Crime,Police

Federalism, Freedom of Movement, and Fiscal Equalization

In this paper, we take up the question why a group of sovereign countries is willing to form a federation even if residents of the high-income region suspect potential immigrants to be net beneficiaries of the tax and transfer system. We argue that income uncertainty alone cannot satisfactorily explain the formation of federations, since in many existing and developing federations income differences are both large and persistent. In the model presented here remaining separated involves costs for the high-income region, which can be regarded as a proxy for the efficiency loss caused if mobile factors cannot reallocate. A fiscal equalization scheme that shares the resources saved by limiting costly migration between the regions can make both regions better off. --Federalism,Migration,Fiscal Equalization

Quality Investment and Price Formation in the Performing Arts Sector: A Spatial Analysis

In this paper, we present a spatial model of the public provision of the performing arts. Agents behave boundedly rational. Art directors set performance quality according to their aspiration levels. While taking into account the spatial distribution of the population, administrative directors in calculating ticket prices ignore that they compete with neighboring performing arts organization (PAOs) for audience. The model is tested empirically using a spatial autoregressive (SAR) model with a complete data set of German PAOs and cities. Our data support the model and help to explain the size and distribution of losses in the public performing arts sector. --Performing Arts,Local Public Goods,Quality,Spatial Competition,Bounded Rationality

Underwriting Bad Jobs: How Our Tax Dollars are Funding Low-Wage Work and Fueling Inequality

The idea that employees working on behalf of America should benefit from strong workplace protections has a long history in American law. The Davis-Bacon Act, passed in 1931, mandates that federally contracted construction workers be paid at least the prevailing wage within a particular area for their work. In 1936, the Walsh-Healey Act extended similar protections to workers manufacturing goods to be used by federal agencies, including the military. The 1965 Service Contract Act further mandates that employees of federal contractors or subcontractors who provide services to federal agencies should also be covered by prevailing wage standards. According to an analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, "the thrust of the statutes was to establish the federal government as a model employer to be emulated by the private sector. More directly, they were intended to provide economic protections to the targeted groups of workers." While these statutes continue to offer important labor protections, they are not enough to ensure decent standards for all private sector workers supported by public dollars. First of all, they largely apply only to employees of federal contractors and subcontractors, leaving out employees whose work is supported through other public funding streams, such as small business loans or Medicare spending. Second, because prevailing wages reIect local industry standards, they cannot guarantee adequate wages and benefits in low-wage industries or regions of the country. In fact, as Appendix II describes in more detail, the Davis-Bacon Act, Walsh-Healey Act, and Service Contract Act have not succeeded in consistently raising wages above $12 an hour. Finally, prevailing wage laws do not address companies' records of compliance with workplace laws and protections. Private employees working on behalf of America need additional protection