BEA's Regional Economic Accounts Program: Recent and Planned Improvements

This article highlights recent improvements and plans for further improvements to each of BEA’s major regional economic accounts programs. The improvements focus on the acceleration of release of the estimates and on the preparation of new and extended estimates. There also is a brief discussion on BEA’s research effort to improve the regional accounts.JEL Classification E010     

Marginal distributions of sequential and generalized order statistics

Expressions for marginal distribution functions of sequential order statistics and generalized order statistics are presented without any restrictions imposed on the model parameters. The results are related to the relevation transform, to the distribution of the product of Beta distributed random variables, and to Meijers G-functions. Some selected applications in the areas of moments, conditional distributions, recurrence relations, and reliability properties are shown. Key words:Order statistics; Generalized order statistics; Sequential order statistics; Record values; Distribution theory; Meijers G-function; Recurrence relations; Reliability properties.     

Reduced Form Auctions Revisited

This note uses the Theorem of the Alternative to prove new results on the implementability of general, asymmetric auctions, and to provide simpler proofs of known results for symmetric auctions. The tradeoff is that type spaces are taken to be finite.     

Inequality, Crime and Economic Growth. A Classical Argument for Distributional Equality

This paper studies the dynamic general-equilibrium interactions between inequality, crime and economic growth by embedding the rational choice-theoretical approach to criminal behavior in a heterogeneous-agents endogenous-growth OLG model. Based on their respective opportunity costs, individuals choose to specialize in either legal or criminal activities. While legal households contribute to aggregate goods supply over time by either working or building human capital, criminals make a living by expropriating legal citizens of part of the latter's income. An increase in inequality lowers the economy's growth rate and possesses negative welfare effects for all agents with endowments equal to or above average and for agents with endowment below average that are born sufficiently far in the future.     

Competitive balance and gate revenue sharing in team sports

This paper shows that under reasonable conditions, increasing gate revenue sharing among teams in a sports league will produce a more uneven contest, i.e. reduce competitive balance. This result has significant implications for antitrust authorities and legislators, who have tended to assume that revenue sharing arrangements will necessarily promote competitive balance.     

Wer wird Professor für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Journalistik?

Der vorliegende Beitrag fragt nach der demographischen Struktur der zentralen akademischen Akteure der Kommunikationswissenschaft in Deutschland und nach m?glichen Ver?nderungen dieser Struktur in den letzten 50 Jahren. Die Analyse zeigt zum einen, dass von einem einheitlichen Zugang zum Hochschullehrerberuf nach wie vor keine Rede sein kann, und zum anderen, dass das Fach vor einer demographischen Herausforderung steht. Die Kommunikationswissenschaft hat sich durch Akademisierung und ?Versozialwissenschaftlichung? von ihren Wurzeln gel?st. War Berufserfahrung im Medienbereich bis in die 1960er Jahre Voraussetzung für eine Berufung, verfügt heute nur noch eine Minderheit über solche Erfahrungen. Da die Existenz des Faches im Rahmen der Universit?t auch von der Nachfrage der Studierenden abh?ngt, kann man über die Folgen des anstehenden Generationswechsels nur spekulieren. In jedem Fall fehlt es an formal für die Hochschullehrerlaufbahn qualifiziertem Nachwuchs. Deshalb sind erhebliche Anstrengungen erforderlich, wenn der Boom im letzten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts sich nicht als Seifenblase erweisen soll.