Regulating Misinformation

The government has responded to misleading advertising by banning it, engaging in counter-advertising and taxing the product. In this paper, we consider the social welfare effects of those different responses to misinformation. While misinformation lowers consumer surplus, its effect on social welfare is ambiguous. Misleading advertising leads to overconsumption but that may be offsetting the under-consumption associated with monopoly prices. If all advertising is misinformation then a tax or quantity restriction on advertising maximizes social welfare. Other policy interventions are inferior and cannot improve on a pure advertising tax. If it is impossible to tax misleading information without also taxing utility increasing advertising, then combining taxes or bans on advertising with other policies can increase welfare.

Recent changes in state civil services may cause politicians to favor spending more at the state level and less through local governments

In the modern U.S., most state civil service bureaucracies are organized to be professional and independent of political influence. But have these civil service reforms, such as merit based apolitical recruitment, affected the behavior of elected politicians? In a study of states that have adopted these merit systems throughout the 20th century, Gergely Ujhelyi finds that these changes have led to the decentralization of state government spending towards local governments. He argues that as politicians lost their ability to influence policy implementation, they began to redistribute public funding towards friendly local governments. With the current trend towards a less politically insulated and more flexible civil service, state politicians may now have an incentive to centralize spending at the state level once again

Iskola 2.0. Digitális generáció az oktatásban

A 8–14 évesek harmada nem érti, hogyan lehetett korábban mobiltelefon nélkül élni. A egyik legnagyobb közösségi oldal (MySpace) 110 millió felhasználójával földünk 11. legnépesebb országa lehetne. Minden nyolcadik amerikai házasság netes találkozás eredménye

A köztisztviselői törvények hatása a kormányzati kiadásokra

Fontos-e, hogy a bürokrácia független legyen a politikától? Milyen hatással járnak azok a törvények, amelyek a politikusok és a bürokrácia kapcsolatát szorosabbá teszik vagy lazítják? Ezek alapvető kérdések a modern államok szervezésével kapcsolatban, mégis viszonylag keveset tudunk róluk. Ebben a cikkben a témakör egy szeletével foglalkozom: a köztisztviselői törvények hatásaival. Összefoglalok néhány közelmúltbeli elméleti és empirikus eredményt, és rövid áttekintést nyújtok az idevágó közgazdasági és politikatudományi irodalomról.* Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) kód: D72, D73, E62, H11, H7

WATER DEMAND OF CONCRETE MIXTURES

After summarizing the former methods for evaluating water demand of concrete mixtures [1-17], the author gives some information about his investigations of the last twenty years carried out in Hungarian Institute for Building Sciences, sponsored partly by Ministry for Building (1975-1985), partly by National Organization of Technical Development in Hungary, OMFB, (1989-1992), partly by National Foundation for Scientific Research in Hungary, OTKA (1992-1994). The detailed results came - as by-products - from these investigations, which had the aim to determine possibilities and criteria of making durable concretes. According to the results, the water demand of concretes may be separated into three stages: (a) mixture of water and aggregate with cement content from zero to a relatively small quantity (depending on the aggregate grading up to 150-250 kg/m 3 ), where the necessary water quantity (in kg/m 3 ) for a given workability is constant and depends only on the aggregate grading (from aggregate+water up to lean concrete mixtures), (b) mixture of cement, water and aggregate with cement content from 150-250 kg/m 3 up to 600-700 kg/m 3 , where the necessary water quantity depends on the aggregate grading but increases slowly with increasing cement content (ordinary con- crete mixtures), (c) mixtures from very rich concretes (cement content of about 600-700 kg/m 3) up to cement pastes, where the necessary water content for a given workability depends mainly on cement content (pastes or paste-like mixtures). The paper deals with the calculation method of necessary water quantity depending on cement content and fineness (specific surface), on aggregate grading (type and fineness) and on necessary workability

Static Type Checking of Model Transformation Programs

Model transformation is seen as a promising approach to automate software development and verification, thus improving quality and reducing production costs significantly. However, errors of transformation programs can propagate into the generated artifacts complicating the detection of errors. The current paper proposes a static type checking approach for early detection of typing errors of partially typed transformation programs. The approach describes type safety as constraint satisfaction problems, and uses a dedicated back-annotation mechanism for error feedback

Business students' attitudes toward corporate social responsibility

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