A Tale of Two Gate-Sharing Plans: The National Football League and the National League, 1952-1956

Do professional sports leagues design revenue-sharing rules primarily to help financially weaker teams, or do such organizations view revenue-sharing rules as ways to reward teams for being competitive? Baseball's National League and the National Football League provide evidence from the 1950s that revenue-sharing plans may have surprising effects. If strong teams draw well on the road, revenue-sharing plans may provide modest succor to teams in smaller cities and may benefit teams in larger cities. The two leagues' experiences also suggest that owners are willing to enact regressive aspects in their revenue-sharing plans, possibly to forestall moral hazard possibilities arising from automatically helping teams that remain poor draws or that fail to improve.     

The Rise and Fall of Exceptional Australian Incomes Since 1800

We gauge how productivity and factor endowments shaped the rise and fall of Australia's exceptional incomes using new measures of total factor productivity (TFP), which include natural resource inputs, in an accounting of income growth. Further, we explore the drivers of TFP growth. Pastoralism and mining had negative TFP externalities, and we incorporate these findings into a unified accounting of incomes, which distinguishes the roles of endowments and productivity. Nevertheless, TFP growth played an important role in promoting exceptional incomes between 1842 and 1890. Our findings favour a more balanced interpretation of Australian growth that has roles for natural resources, labour participation, and productivity.     

矿城兴衰的铁律

城市是人类文明的结晶。作为一类特殊的城市群体，矿业城市的出现和迅速崛起，为工业文明的发展立下了汗马功劳。从我国的情况看，据中国矿业联合会统计，目前全国共有矿业城市（镇）426座，其中属于县级和县级以上建制市的178座，占全国城市总数的27%。这些城市提供了我国93%以上的煤炭、90%以上的石油、80%以上的铁矿石和70%以上的天燃气。     

世界不平等上升了还是下降了--一个虚假的争论吗?

在这个全球化的年代,世界不平等是上升了还是下降了的问题是一个热门话题。研究经济不平等的测量的前沿学者发展了各种方法来实证地估计世界居民的福利分配。尽管他们使用了类似的方法,但是并没有形成一致的结论。目前的论文已经形成两种完全相反的观点。SalaiMartin(2002a,b)认为,从二十世纪七十年代末到二十世纪九十年代末,世界不平等在下降是毋庸置疑的。Milanovic(2002a,b,c)并不否认这一点,但是他以经验为依据阐明了国家内部(尤其是城镇和农村之间)不平等趋势的重要性,估计了真实世界的不平等,并且得到了与前者相反的结论。然而,大家(尤其这里所引述的文献)对世界收入分配不平等的测量上是一致的。我们的结果表明,至少对于国际不平等,我们有经验证据证明一般的熵方法测量的不平等的排序发生了变化,并且我们希望这对于世界不平等也是正确的。然而,关于使用哪一种不平等测量方法来估算真实的世界不平等的规范的争论还没有正式开始。     

山东运河区域民间信仰的兴衰与其现状

山东运河流域随着漕运的兴起,形成对神灵的信仰崇拜的宗教特色和民间活动.运河人家独特的文化观念增强了地域文化认同感和归属感.随着运河不再发挥经济和航运功能,运河文化衰落,民间信仰逐渐销声匿迹.利用好,发展好,作为运河文化重要部分的地域民间信仰对于当今运河文化的传承具有意义.     

The National Football League season wins total betting market: The impact of heuristics on behavior

Sports and racetrack betting markets have been investigated by researchers for more than 50 years. Many authors have argued that the observed biases and inefficiencies in these markets are a consequence of bettors incorrectly assessing the objective probabilities that favorites or underdogs will win. This article is the first examination of the National Football League season wins total over/under betting market where the designations of favorite and longshot do not apply. The market is found to be highly inefficient, providing several opportunities for profitable wagering. We believe these inefficiencies are a consequence of the representativeness heuristic. Most significantly, there is evidence that bettors, when considering teams with strong records in the previous season, overreact to historical performance and fail to recognize the statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean.     

Turkish Clothing in Amsterdam: The Rise and Fall of a Perfectly Competitive Labour Market

While the Dutch textile industry declined rapidly, Turkish entrepreneurs created a growing industry for fashion goods with highly flexible demand in an informal sector that was initially tolerated by the authorities and attracted many undocumented immigrants. It led to the unusual spectacle of a labour market visibly in perfect competition; predictions of that model are clearly supported. Crackdown of the authorities led to the demise of the sector: production, capital, and labour all proved internationally mobile.     

Rise and Fall of the First Financial Futures Market in China： The Case of Chinese Government Bond Futures

This paper studies the rise and fall of the first financial futures market in China. We compare the characteristics in the Chinese Government bond futures market with those in the US T-bond futures market. They differ in market design and structure, market governance, margin requirements, position limits, delivery process, and the way in which the settlement price is calculated. Furthermore, with a unique dataset, we show that prior to maturities of government bond futures, traders began to accumulate significant amounts of long positions for several selected contracts without the intention to offset, forcing short position holders to either purchase deliverable bonds or offset futures at highly inflated prices, causing higher market volatility and price disequilibrium in both spot and futures markets. Arbitrage opportunity arises and the market eventually collapses. The lessons learned from the suspension of the Chinese Government bond futures market offer an invaluable learning experience.     

产业簇群兴衰规律及其政策含义探讨

产业簇群的起源及发展背景是技术进步和社会分工与合作，产业簇群的形成与发展是由内部因素和外部因素共同作用的结果，产业簇群的生命周期是客观存在，其生命周期可划分为成长期、高峰期和衰退期，这也决定了产业簇群的后继发展有消失、更替和升级三种可能。产业簇群兴衰规律的政策含义主要包括接规律办事，正确定位政府职能，加强技术研发和专利保护，成立产业簇群的行业协会，善于抓住偶然性机会，高度重视产业簇群的更替和升级等。     

Compensation Discrimination: an Analysis of Linebackers,Defensive Linemen,and Defensive Backs in the National Football League

Previous studies have analyzed compensation discrimination in the National Football League with mixed results. We examine the market for defensive players: defensive linemen, linebackers, and defensive backs and find some evidence of discrimination against Black linebackers. We do not find any evidence of discrimination against Black defensive linemen and defensive backs. Our results provide some support for the hypothesis that employers, employees, or customers discriminate against Black linebackers due to prejudice against Black players who have to make decisions that play a major role in the success of the entire defense.     

Pass or Run: An Empirical Test of the Matching Pennies Game Using Data from the National Football League

This article examines play calling in the National Football League (NFL). It finds that a mixed strategy equilibrium game explains NFL play calling better than standard optimization techniques. When a quarterback is injured and replaced with a less capable backup, standard optimization theory suggests that the offense will run more often, passing less. Our game theoretic model predicts that the offense will not change its play calling because the defense will play against the run more often. Using every first half play from the 11 teams that had a starting quarterback miss action because of injury in the 2006 season, we find that the injury did not alter the likelihood that the offense would pass. We also find that coaches randomly mix passing and running plays, as the mixed strategy games predict.     

Taking Advantage of an Untapped Pool: Assessing the Success of African American Head Coaches in the National Football League

Noting that only five African American coaches had been hired to lead National Football League (NFL) teams from 1989–2002, Madden (J of Sports Econ, 5(1):6–19 2004) found that teams coached by African Americans in the NFL outperformed their counterparts in the regular season but were significantly below average in the playoffs. This analysis, with data that includes nine African American coaches and extends through 2007, reconfirms Madden’s finding that African American head coaches outperform their rivals in the regular season, but also finds that African American coaches no longer suffer from poor playoff performance. Using fixed effects pooled cross section time series models, this analysis confirms that teams with African American head coaches can expect more wins in the regular season than their peers, other things equal. However, there is some evidence that as the pool of African American coaching talent diminishes from additional hires their extraordinary performance may be slightly regressing. The playoff analysis shows that that when controlling for seeding, organizational strength and regular season wins, African American coaches perform at the same level as their counterparts.

The Rise of the Sunbelt

In the last 50 years, population and incomes have increased steadily throughout much of the Sunbelt. This paper assesses the relative contributions of rising productivity, rising demand for Southern amenities, and increases in housing supply to the growth of warm areas, using data on income, housing price, and population growth. Before 1980, economic productivity increased significantly in warmer areas and drove the population growth in those places. Since 1980, productivity growth has been more modest, but housing supply growth has been enormous. We infer that new construction in warm regions represents a growth in supply, rather than demand, from the fact that prices are generally falling relative to the rest of the country. The relatively slow pace of housing price growth in the Sunbelt, relative to the rest of the country and relative to income growth, also implies that there has been no increase in the willingness to pay for sun-related amenities. As such, it seems that the growth of the Sunbelt has little to do with the sun.     

The Rise and Decline of Mancur Olson's View of The Rise and Decline of Nations

The evolution of Mancur Olson's views regarding The Rise and Decline of Nations, the second of his three main books, is examined. It expands and extends to history and to the world the arguments presented in his earlier work, The Logic of Collective Action. Although Olson never abandons the idea that the accumulation of interest groups in a democratic society can lead to its economic stagnation, how this comes about and can be overcome changes somewhat by the time of his final book, Power and Prosperity, which focuses on the problems of transition economies and proper political governance. A sign of the greater complexity of his later views emerges in his analysis of the U.S. South, presented in his 1983 presidential address to the Southern Economic Association.     

王志杰：世界多大 擂台多宽

网上摆擂,广撒英雄帖重庆是个年轻的直辖市,经济和社会发展已经步入了快车道,如何保持重庆发展的强劲势头?重庆的明天要如何发展?在广泛采纳本土有识青年意见的同时,重庆市青年人才论坛组委会开设海外分论坛,广开门路,依托重庆,面向全国,跨出国门,通过网络这一现代工具,以"     

国际竞争视角下的产权制度与大国兴衰——一个新古典政治经济学的分析框架

本文试图为解释大国兴衰提出一个基于非中性产权制度的新古典政治经济学分析框架。经济学现有的国家兴衰模型大都是内生增长模型。我们将国际竞争环境这一关键的外部变量引入到理论框架中。本文的分析假定:在开放条件下,民族国家为基本竞争单位,长期经济增长是实现国家利益的首要目标,大国兴衰在很大程度上得益或受制于外部环境。我们尝试从商人集团与统治集团的合作方式入手,阐释大国在国际竞争中的得失。本文认为,以长期增长为核心的国际竞争,其实质是大国非中性产权制度之间的竞争。在开放世界中,特别在大国经济"起飞"阶段,商人集团和统治集团之间形成"收买型"合作,并由此建立倾向于生产性集团的非中性产权保护制度对大国崛起至关重要。