TOWARDS PRACTICAL GUIDELINES FOR MULTIPLE USE MANAGEMENT*

The general acceptance of multiple use as a desirable management goal has not been matched by practical guidelines to implement and achieve that goal. As Pearse [5] rightly noted, the most serious obstacles to applying multiple use principles are usually the lack of appropriate data and lack of established methodology. This study did not face prohibitive problems in valuing extra-market goods, but as with all multiple use studies, it did face the problem of applying the standard economic model of the multi-product firm. It is hoped this particular empirical application of the model contributes generally to the provision of guidelines for multiple use management.     

Learning to surf: Spillovers in the adoption of the Internet

This paper develops an identification strategy to generate unbiased estimates of Internet usage spillovers using a unique data set of US households. This strategy addresses the effects of variables that affect consumers' decisions but are unobservable to the researcher that lead to biased estimates. The estimator developed here examines changes in household behavior over time and uses county level instrumental variables for county level spillover measures.Multiple potential sources of learning are identified including those from the household's locality, from educational Internet subsidies, and from universities. There is general support for all sources, but the locality and subsidy results are both more robust and larger. These findings directly address the policy relevance of these spillover sources and they have implications for policies to encourage Internet use as well as for identification strategies for the effects of the Internet on behavior.     

A field experiment investigating age discrimination in four European labour markets

In a field experiment investigating age discrimination, pairs of men, aged 27 and 47, inquired about employment as waiters in towns across England, France, Germany and Spain. Statistically significant discrimination against the older waiter was found in all four countries, but it was considerably higher in France and Spain than in England and Germany.     

Human capital and the time-profile of human fertility

This is a 1st attempt at an explicitly intertemporal, microeconomic theory of the distribution of births over a woman's fertile period. The main results are that: 1) the optimal time-profile will satisfy the Hotelling rule for the depletion of a natural resource (in the present case of the women's stock of human capital at marriage); and 2) under certain simplifying assumptions, women with "high" initial endowments of human capital will have all their children in the 1st part of married life and then return to full-time employment, while women with "low" initial endowments will spread childbearing more evenly over the fertile period. It must also be pointed out that the characteristics of the optimal fertility profile might be different if utility depended directly on the profile itself--e.g., if the quality of children increased with the interval between the pregnancies, as assumed in the literature on birth spacing.