mortgage interest tax relief reform

Mortgage interest tax relief is unjustified, say Professor Roy Wilkinson, of the Sheffield University School of Management, and Margaret Wilkinson. They argue that it should be phased out.     

Nurse executives: decision points in their careers

Nurse executives identified key decision points in their careers. Typical of executive women, they had a general sense of career direction but reported no overall career plan.     

Nonconvexity,efficiency and equilibrium in exhaustible resource depletion

We consider the problem of efficiency and existence of a competitive equilibrium in exhaustible resource markets where extraction costs are nonconvex. Nonconvexity is shown to imply that (1) (efficient) extraction ceases to the left of the minimum efficient scale, i.e., where average costs exceed marginal costs; and (2) a competitive equilibrium does not exist. Introduction of a backstop technology (which induces a flat portion of the industry demand curve) restores both existence and efficiency, provided that the backstop price is sufficiently low. If firms face even a small amount of uncertainty regarding their rivals' stocks, a backstop technology is sufficient to restore existence of competitive equilibrium, even if the backstop price is very high. In this case, however, the competitive equilibrium is not efficient.     

Constructing trident, reinforcing the network

This paper draws upon the traditions of social construction of technology and actol-net work theory, in an attempt to show that just as these approaches have been used to expose the contingent nature of 'technical' change, they can also be adapted to show the contingency of the 'social' aspects of technology, such as redundancy and technological unemployment, which have in recent years assumed an almost unassailable sense of inevitability. This process is begun when technology is viewed as a social network. Then focusing on the production phase in the life cycle of a technical system, it is argued here that the,jettisoning of both people and technical resources from the network may get presented as part of technology's 'natural' trajectoly, but is often part of the (socio-technical) 'heterogenous engineering' necessary for the stabilization of that technology. and consequently need not be seen as inevitable.