The influence of the precautionary principle on science-based decision-making: questionable applications to risks of radiofrequency fields

The precautionary principle, recognized by the European Commission as a 'full-fledged and general principle of international law,' has been advanced as a paradigm for response to potential risks to the environment or health when scientific data are uncertain. But lacking the elements and operational qualities that characterize principles that have proven useful in law, politics, science, and ethics, the precautionary principle lends itself to regulation based on the perception of a threat or fear itself. In the absence of scientific evidence for risk, recent application of the precautionary principle to questions about radiofrequency electromagnetic fields of cellular telephones and cellular telephone base stations has produced wasteful and misguided regulations and questionable advice to the public. The formation of scientific 'fire brigades' is suggested for rapid acquisition of targeted scientific data needed so that precautionary policies on technologically driven issues can be based on quantitative risk assessment.     

State and County Incarceration Rates:

ABSTRACT This study examines the direct and indirect effects of race and income inequality on imprisonment rates across states. The analysis is designed to: 1) investigate whether race and income inequality are significantly related to imprisonment when controlling for crime , 2) assess the relative magnitudes of the direct and indirect effects; and 3) assess the relative magnitudes of race and income inequality. Crime is found to be the strongest predictor of incarceration rates in five of the six equations estimated. Income inequality is significantly related to incarceration rates in two of the six equations. There was no clear evidence of a direct race effect. The indirect effect of race was greater than the direct effect in four of the six equations.     

TAX REFORMS IN EAST ASIAN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: Motivations, directions, and implications

This first presents an overview of the level and structure of taxation in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. It then briefly reviews the available literature on tax reform, country by country. It finally gives a comparative analysis, focusing primarily on tax mix and tax structure, and the importance attached to tax administration.     

An analysis of the implications of discontinued operations for continuing income

We examine the extent to which changes in the accounting for discontinued operations affects the usefulness of disaggregated income components in predicting an entity’s future continuing income. Our study is motivated by the joint FASB/IASB convergence project which seeks to define the scope of transactions reported in discontinued operations. To examine our question, we compare the properties of continuing income and discontinued operations reported under SFAS 144 and APB 30, where APB 30 closely parallels IFRS 5. We find that the broader scope of the rule under SFAS 144 results in more persistent continuing income among firms reporting discontinued operations, and that this is concentrated among single-segment firms, which previously were less likely to fall within the scope of APB 30. Because we find no evidence of increased opportunism, we conclude that the broader scope of the rule results in a finer partitioning of recurring and nonrecurring income. Overall, our results support the broader scope of discontinued operations.     

Financing R&D in mature companies: An empirical analysis

We study financing patterns of publicly traded R&D-intensive manufacturing firms in Israel. We further characterize R&D-intensive firms by size, physical capital intensity, and whether they issued stocks in the United States, asking whether these features are associated with particular financing patterns. To address these issues, we present, for the first time, adjusted flow of funds charts that treat R&D expenses as a capital outlay (rather than an operating cost that reduces profits, as standard accounting principles prescribe). We also address the question of how R&D inputs should be measured - using R&D expenses or R&D personnel. We construct both expenditure- and personnel-based R&D measures for each firm in our sample, and investigate to what extent these measures are mutually consistent.     

Refining the search for project success factors: a multivariate, typological approach

Although the causes for project success and failure have been the subject of many studies, no conclusive evidence or common agreement has been achieved so far. One criticism involves the universalistic approach used often in project management studies, according to which all projects are assumed to be similar. A second problem is the issue of subjectiveness, and sometimes weakly defined success measures; yet another concern is the limited number of managerial variables examined by previous research. In the present study we use a project-specific typological approach, a multidimensional criteria for assessing project success, and a multivariate statistical analysis method. According to our typology projects were classified according to their technological uncertainty at project initiation and their system scope which is their location on a hierarchical ladder of systems and subsystems. For each of the 127 projects in our study that were executed in Israel, we recorded 360 managerial variables and 13 success measures. The use of a very detailed data and multivariate methods such as canonical correlation and eigenvector analysis enables us to account for all the interactions between managerial and success variables and to address a handful of perspectives, often left unanalyzed by previous research. Assessing the variants of managerial variables and their impact on project success for various types of projects, serves also a step toward the establishment of a typological theory of projects. Although some success factors are common to all projects, our study identified project-specific lists of factors, indicating for example, that high-uncertainty projects must be managed differently than low-uncertainty projects, and high-scope projects differently than low-scope projects.     

The industrial and commercial demand for electricity under time-of-use pricing

In this paper we have developed and estimated the demand for electricity by an industrial (commercial) firm subject to time-of-use (TOU) pricing of electric power. In the application we use a quadratic production function and directly incorporate into the production process the restrictions that some inputs cannot vary over the day. We show that the TOU structure implies a unique set of parameter restrictions across the demand functions for inputs.