Using a Canadian-American Natural Experiment to Study Relative Efficiencies of Social Welfare Payment Systems

We study whether social welfare recipients may end up paying more for their grocery if social welfare payments are more concentrated over time. We first present a theoretical model showing that lower incomes in general and a lower lower bound of the income distribution lead to less mobility for poorer consumers. This causes local stores to have more market power and increase their prices when the incomes of poorer people go down and/or when the number of poorer people goes up. Secondly, we verify these theoretical findings by using a natural experiment to study links between food prices and the more restrictive timing of social welfare payments in Montreal, Canada compared to the timing in Bangor, Maine. We find some statistically significant evidence of : i) a negative effect on prices in the week of social welfare check issue ; ii) increasing prices over a month. We also find that some socio-economic factors such as a higher percentage of single-parent families in one area may increase prices charged by grocery stores in that area.Welfare Payments, Grocery Prices, Poverty

Scholarship Reconsidered: Role Definition and Its Impact on the Faculty

This article addresses issues concerning the role of faculty members in U.S. universities and colleges. With external pressures coming from state legislators and accrediting bodies, all of which are aimed at the role of the individual faculty member, many both on the inside and the outside of the university are expressing opinions about the work life of the faculty member. In fact, one might even be so bold as to suggest that everything we have traditionally accepted about scholarship is now up for grabs. This unstable environment has heaped added pressure upon the individual faculty member, who may well be perceiving that the rules are changing just as s/he has learned them. The faculty member is in a complex situation. National decisions are taking place which could change the job description of the professoriate

Housing Prices and Inter-urban Migration

Understanding the causes and consequences of human migration has long been of interest to urban and regional economists. Empirical studies build on the theoretical results of Roback (1982) and Mueser and Graves (1995) by estimating the effects of wages, housing prices, and amenities on inter-area migration. Findings with respect to amenities are clear (e.g., Rappaport 2007), and household-level studies consistently find that relative wages or incomes increase the probability that a household will select a given location (e.g., Berger and Blomquist 1992). In contrast, the results for housing prices are inconclusive. Studies that include area-level measures (e.g., median housing price for a metropolitan area) find a mix of negative, positive, and insignificant effects on inter-area migration decisions (e.g., Hunt and Mueller 2004). Many migration studies exclude housing price measures. This paper investigates the role of housing prices in influencing inter-urban household migration decisions. An important contribution of the study is the development of a new method for representing housing prices in migration analyses. Following the approach commonly used to model wages in studies of household migration, we identify the form of the utility function for which individual-specific housing prices can be predicted for unselected areas as a function of individual characteristics. Our theoretical results guide the development of an empirical measure of housing costs that accounts for the decision to own or rent and the cost of holding housing capital. We test our housing cost measure using the 2000 PUMS to identify point-to-point migration decisions for a large sample of college-educated males residing in 291 U.S. metropolitan areas. We estimate conditional logit models of metropolitan area choice, controlling for wages, a large range of amenities, and expected housing costs. Our key finding is that our proposed housing cost measure yields the expected results (higher housing prices reduce the probability that an area is selected), which is robust to alternative specifications and samples. We re-estimate our model using three alternative metropolitan area measures of housing costs: median house price, average apartment rent, and average urban land rent. We find that these measures consistently yield counterintuitive results.

Marching to the Beat of the EU\u27s Drum: Refining the Collective Management of Music Rights in the United States to Facilitate the Growth of Interactive Streaming

In the digital era, interactive streaming is now the preferred method for music consumers to access their favorite albums and songs. The traditional copyright system used to administer music rights and royalties has not evolved accordingly, which not only impedes progress by music platform innovators, but also frustrates artist, labels, and composers who are unable to reap the benefits of their music rights. This Note examines the complex process interactive streaming services undergo to obtain the rights necessary to stream music through their platforms, which involves a discussion of collective rights organizations. This Note then argues that the European Directive on collective rights management offers mechanisms that the United States Copyright Office should adopt to improve collective music rights management in the United States. Finally, this Note argues that creating a global authoritative rights database (GARD) that ties use to ownership is necessary to move the music rights administration process into the digital age

PUBLIC CONSERVATION LAND AND EMPLOYMENT GROWTH IN THE NORTHERN FOREST REGION

As with many environmental issues, debates about increasing public conservation lands in the Northern Forest region frequently center on a perceived tradeoff between jobs and the environment. In particular, opponents of conservation lands often argue that employment will decline significantly when land is diverted from commodity-oriented uses such as wood products production. To evaluate this claim, we estimate a model of simultaneous employment and net migration growth using data on the 92 non-metropolitan counties comprising the region. Growth in employment and net migration are measured over the period 1990 to 1997 and the set of exogenous variables includes the 1990 share of the county land base in public conservation uses. We find that net migration rates were systematically higher in counties with more conservation lands, but the effects are relatively small. Public conservation lands were found to have no systematic effect on employment growth over the 1990 to 1997 period. Two extensions are considered. We examine the separate effects of preservationist and multiple-use lands. We also identify a "natural experiment" involving changes in national forest management that allows us to estimate the effects of diverting private forestland to public conservation uses. Our central conclusions are that existing public conservation lands have a positive, but small, effect on employment and migration in the Northern Forest region and that, over the range of our data, employment and migration are unlikely to be affected by timber harvest reductions resulting from the establishment of new conservation lands.Labor and Human Capital, Land Economics/Use,

Local Employment Growth, Migration, and Public Land Policy: Evidence from the Northwest Forest Plan

Debates over protecting public land reveal two views. Some argue protection reduces commodity production, reducing local employment and increasing out-migration. Others contend protection produces amenities that support job growth and attract migrants. We test these competing views for the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), which reallocated 11 million acres of federal land from timber production to protecting old-growth forest species. We find evidence that land protection directly reduced local employment growth and increased net migration. The total negative effect on employment was offset only slightly by positive migration-driven effects. Employment losses were concentrated in metropolitan counties, but percentage losses were higher in rural counties.amenities, employment growth, migration, Northwest Forest Plan, oldgrowth forests, public land management, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Land Economics/Use,

Hybrid ventilation of a room: A theoretical model for the combined effects of mechanically-imposed and buoyancy-induced driving pressures

A supply fan and an extract fan, at identical settings in identical rooms, do not necessarily have the same effect on the ventilation. For a heated room in which the floor-level vents are larger than the ceiling-level vents, we show that an extract fan provides better ventilation than a supply fan. If the ceiling-level vents are larger, we show that a supply fan is more effective; this for the same, constant fan airflow rate. We investigate the hybrid ventilation of a room in which the, otherwise buoyancy-driven, ventilation is augmented by a forced volume flux, provided by a supply or extract fan. In hybrid ventilation, naturally-occurring and mechanically-imposed pressure differences combine to determine the resulting ventilation airflow. Herein, a mathematical model is developed which enables prediction of: the inflow and outflow volume fluxes; the vertical position of the neutral pressure level; and the steady, uniform temperature, with in a single, isolated room in hybrid ventilation. The physical problem is reduced to a mathematical model with two controlling parameters; namely, the effective vent area ratio, R*, and a ratio of forced and natural volume fluxes, Q_F/Q_N. We demonstrate that the volume flux through an open vent can be controlled remotely, by mechanically imposing the volume flux through an entirely separate vent