Did children’s education matter? : family migration as a mechanism of human capital investment : evidence from nineteenth century Bohemia

This paper analyzes the rural-urban migration of families in the Bohemian region of Pilsen in 1900. Using a new 1300-family dataset from the 1900 population census I examine the role of children‘s education in rural-urban migration. I find that families migrated to the city such that the educational attainment of their children would be maximized and that there is a positive correlation between family migration and children being apprentices in urban areas. The results suggest that rural-urban migration was powered not only by the exploitation of rural-urban wage gaps but also by aspirations to engage in human capital investment

In Defense of Wishful Thinking: James, Quine, Emotions, and the Web of Belief

What is W. V. O. Quine’s relationship to classical pragmatism? Although he resists the comparison to William James in particular, commentators have seen an affinity between his “web of belief” model of theory confirmation and James’s claim that our beliefs form a “stock” that faces new experience as a corporate body. I argue that the similarity is only superficial. James thinks our web of beliefs should be responsive not just to perceptual but also to emotional experiences in some cases; Quine denies this. I motivate James’s controversial view by appealing to an episode in the history of medicine when a researcher self-experimented by swallowing a vial of bacteria that at the time had not been studied in much detail. The researcher’s commitment to his own as-yet untested hypothesis was based in part on emotional considerations. Finally, I argue that Quine’s insistence that emotions can never be relevant to adjusting our web of belief reflects a tacit holdover of one of logical positivism’s crucially anti-pragmatist commitments—that philosophy of science should focus exclusively on the context of justification, not the context of discovery. James’s emphasis on discovery as a (perhaps the) crucial locus for epistemological inquiry is characteristic of pragmatism in general. Since Quinean epistemology is always an epistemology of justification, he is not happily viewed as a member of the pragmatist tradition

Geography and Intra-National Home Bias: U.S. Domestic Trade in 1949 and 2007

This article examines home bias in U.S. domestic trade in 1949 and 2007. We use a unique data set of 1949 carload waybill statistics produced by the Interstate Commerce Commission, and 2007 Commodity Flow Survey data. The results show that home bias was considerably smaller in 1949 than in 2007 and that home bias in 1949 was even negative for several commodities. We argue that the difference between the geographical distribution of the manufacturing activities in 1949 and that of 2007 is an important factor explaining the differences in the magnitudes of home-bias estimates in those years

Eigensystem multiscale analysis for the Anderson model via the Wegner estimate

We present a new approach to the eigensystem multiscale analysis (EMSA) for random Schr\"odinger operators that relies on the Wegner estimate. The EMSA treats all energies of the finite volume operator in an energy interval at the same time, simultaneously establishing localization of all eigenfunctions with eigenvalues in the energy interval with high probability. It implies all the usual manifestations of localization (pure point spectrum with exponentially decaying eigenfunctions, dynamical localization). The new method removes the restrictive level spacing hypothesis used in the previous versions of the EMSA. The method is presented in the context of the Anderson model, allowing for single site probability distributions that are H\"older continuous of order $\alpha \in (0,1]$.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1611.02650, arXiv:1509.0852

Efficiency, Distortions and Factor Utilization during the Interwar Period

In this paper, we analyze the International Great Depression in the US and Western Europe using the business cycle accounting method a la Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (CKM 2007). We extend the business cycle accounting model by incorporating endogenous factor utilization which turns out to be an important transmission mechanism of the disturbances in the economy. Our main findings are that in the US labor wedges account for roughly half of the drop in output while efficiency and investment wedges each account for a quarter of it during the 1929-1933 period while in Western Europe labor wedges account for more than one-third of the output drop and efficiency, government and investment wedges are responsible for the remaining during the 1929-1932 period. Our findings are consistent with several strands of existing descriptive and empirical literature on the International Great Depression

Do Off-Label Drug Practices Argue Against FDA Efficacy Requirements? Testing an Argument by Structured Conversations with Experts

The Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act of 1938 with amendments in 1962 is inconsistent regarding FDA certification of a drug’s efficacy. The act requires efficacy certification for the drug’s initial (“on-label”) uses, but does not require certification before physicians may prescribe for subsequent (“off-label”) uses. Are there good reasons for this inconsistency? Using a sequential online survey we carried on a “virtual conversation” with some 500 physicians. The survey asked whether efficacy requirements should be imposed on off-label uses, and almost all physicians said no. It asked whether the efficacy requirements for initial uses should be dropped, and most said no. We then gently challenged respondents asking them whether opposing efficacy requirements in one case but not the other involved an inconsistency. In response to this challenge we received hundreds of written commentaries. This investigation taps the specialized knowledge of hundreds of physicians and organizes their insights into challenges to the consistency argument. Thus, it employs a method of structured conversations with experts to test the merit of an argument. Is the consistency argument a case of “foolish consistency,” or does it hold up even under scrutiny?Food and Drug Administration; drug approval; efficacy requirements; off-label uses; on-label uses; certification; liberalization

Gibrat's law and the British industrial revolution

This paper examines Gibrat’s law in England and Wales between 1801 and 1911 using a unique data set covering the entire settlement size distribution. We find that Gibrat’s law broadly holds even in the face of population doubling every fifty years, an industrial and transport revolution, and the absence of zoning laws to constrain growth. The result is strongest for the later period, and in counties most affected by the industrial revolution. The exception were villages in areas bypassed by the industrial revolution. We argue that agglomeration externalities balanced urban disamenities such as commuting costs and poor living conditions to ensure steady growth of many places, rather than exceptional growth of few

Efficiency, distortions and factor utilization during the interwar period

In this paper, we analyze the International Great Depression in the US and Western Europe using the business cycle accounting method a la Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (CKM 2007). We extend the business cycle accounting model by incorporating endogenous factor utilization which turns out to be an important transmission mechanism of the disturbances in the economy. Our main Öndings are that in the U.S. labor wedges account for roughly half of the drop in output while efficiency and investment wedges each account for a quarter of it during the 1929-1933 period while in Western Europe labor wedges account for more than one-third of the output drop and e¢ ciency, government and investment wedges are responsible for the remaining during the 1929-1932 period. Our Öndings are consistent with several strands of existing descriptive and empirical literature on the International Great Depressio

Simulating and detecting artificial magnetic fields in trapped atoms

A Bose-Einstein condensate exhibiting a nontrivial phase induces an artificial magnetic field in immersed impurity atoms trapped in a stationary, ring-shaped optical lattice. We present an effective Hamiltonian for the impurities for two condensate setups: the condensate in a rotating ring and in an excited rotational state in a stationary ring. We use Bogoliubov theory to derive analytical formulas for the induced artificial magnetic field and the hopping amplitude in the limit of low condensate temperature where the impurity dynamics is coherent. As methods for observing the artificial magnetic field we discuss time of flight imaging and mass current measurements. Moreover, we compare the analytical results of the effective model to numerical results of a corresponding two-species Bose-Hubbard model. We also study numerically the clustering properties of the impurities and the quantum chaotic behavior of the two-species Bose-Hubbard model.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures. Published versio