An evaluation of incentive regulation for electric utilities

This empirical study examines the determinants and impacts of incentive regulations introduced by utility commissions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Rewards for generating plant utilization and low heat rates were found to have been introduced in states whose firms exhibited relatively high managerial slack (or relatively higher costs). However, the empirical results did not find that the introduction of specific cost component incentives improved overall operating cost performance.     

Hospital-physician partnerships: a fairy tale?

To work together more effectively, clinical and finance leaders should: Recognize the cultural causes of tension, Conduct honest conversations to help build trust, Acknowledge their own blind spots to understanding.     

Trends in experimental high-energy physics

Data from a scan of papers in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review are used to demonstrate that American high-energy physicists show a pattern of accelerator and instrumentation usage characteristics of that expected from the logistic-substitution model of Marchetti and of Fischer and Pry.     

Urbanizing economics

Action takes place at a given time and place. As a science of human action, economics is, therefore, just as much about the spaces where real action occurs as it is about real time. The implications of real time for social order is better recognized than the significance of “action space.” The living city is the principal locus of action space and enabler of social change as well as the source of fundamental concepts in economic theory. Just as a loss of density and diversity in cities tends to retard dynamic discovery and development, the turn in economic theory in the mid-20th century toward static equilibrium reflected a move from an urban-based to a plantation-based conception of the economy—from the city to the farm. Some recent developments in network theory, game theory, and geography, however, can be interpreted as a re-urbanization of economics.

The nature and limits of Gary Becker’s theory of racial discrimination

To what extent does Gary Becker’s model of discrimination capture “the essence of prejudice and discrimination”? After providing a general outline of Becker’s original model and summarizing some subsequent developments, this paper takes a critical perspective on the model to suggest that the absence of imperfect information in his approach unhelpfully limits its explanatory power. Instead, an approach that allows for the possibility of genuine error and draws on Adam Smith’s analysis of the impact of markets on one’s moral sense offers a deeper, more realistic understanding of what it means for people to express their prejudice (or not) through their choices.     

Vermont's Act 250 legislation: a citizen-based response to rapid growth and development

Unregulated land development, dramatic increases in population, soaring land prices, and environmental degradation are significant factors responsible for the widespread concern among Vermonters that the state is losing its distinctive rural character and its small, picturesque villages. The citizen legislature responded by adopting Act 250, Vermont's principal land development and land use law. This paper describes the events leading to the passage of this law, examines the major components of this progressive legislation, and analyzes its effectiveness in protecting Vermont's natural resources.     

Jane Jacobs on Henry George: Progress or Poverty?

Henry George and Jane Jacobs each have devoted followers today who remain mainly outside the intellectual mainstream, both are iconic American intellectuals largely sympathetic to and quite knowledgeable about how markets work, and they each challenged the prevailing economic orthodoxies of their day. Much has been written, pro and con, on George's single tax and on Jacobs's battles with urban planners, and while I don't directly address either here, what I say does have implications for those controversies. In particular, I show how and why their views on the nature of economic progress, and of cities in that progress, fundamentally differ. I trace the difference to George's essentially classical approach to economics in contrast to Jacobs's subjectivist approach, which more radically transcends the economics of her time.     

Territorial Differentiation and Societal Change in the United States and Canada *

Abstract A theory based on four stages of social and cultural changes for large territorial units is presented and three hypotheses are deduced linking territorial differentiation to societal change. The stages are measured by die degree to which the territorial units of a society display similar characteristics, and whether the units are diverging or converging from one another. Hypothesis I asserts that the form of societal change among territorial units over time is curvilinear. Hypothesis II maintains that changes in technological efficiency lead to changes in territorial differentiation on selected social and cultural characteristics. Finally, according to Hypothesis III, changes in territorial differentiation on technological efficiency are directly related to changes in territorial differentiation on selected social and cultural characteristics. The hypotheses are tested in terms of changes in the United States and Canada and receive strong support from the direction and magnitude of the relations.