Race,revenues, and college basketball

Customer discrimination may result in racial differences in the marginal revenue products generated by workers. College basketball data allow for direct comparisons of the racial differences in the marginal revenues generated by players. This article compares the revenue generating potential of the top black and white college basketball players. A highly skilled white college player generates over $100,000 in per game revenues as compared to around $30,000 for a black player of equal talent, providing a strong incentive for colleges to discriminate against recruiting black student-athletes.     

Full price competition and Dupuit's defense of the long-and-short-haul “discrimination”

Condemnation of the long-and-short-haul discrimination has been nearly ubiquitous in the literature on economic theory and transportation. However, the French economist Dupuit developed a case against all transport regulation by relating it to a defense of the practice of place discrimination before the middle of the nineteenth century. He did so, moreover, within an early elaboration of a full price explanation of competitive functioning. This paper analyzes the idea in Dupuit's context and argues that this so-called form of price discrimination is actually an efficient and necessary form of the competitive process.     

In search of the meaning of entrepreneurship

This paper is an attempt to build a bridge between the popular and the academic usage of the terms entrepreneur and entrepreneurship, and to identify the raw materials needed to construct an interpretive framework capable of illuminating the nature of entrepreneurship and its role in economic theory. We review briefly the contributions made to this topic by Cantillon, Schumpeter, Schultz and Kirzner. We advance a synthetic definition of the entrepreneur as someone who specializes in taking responsibility for and making judgemental decisions that affect the location, the form, and the use of goods, resources, or institutions. We then conclude with some observations on the basic choice confronting economics regarding the place of entrepreneurship in economic analysis.     

Future fall-out from the genetic revolution

It is argued that the genetic engineering revolution now under way is fundamentally different from other industrial revolutions in that humans are developing the technological power to change themselves. This article begins with an overview of the technology involved, discusses the Human Genome Initiative (HGI) programme and gene therapy research, and then uses several possible future scenarios to discuss potential legal and ethical issues.     

Policies for economic growth

Summary The old growth theory of the 1950s led to certain conclusions about the sorts of economic policies that would promote economic growth, and also about their limitations. The new growth theory of the 1980s makes much stronger assumptions and leads to correspondingly stronger conclusions about the scope of growth-promoting policy. This article argues that: (1) empirical work so far has neither confirmed nor denied the strong assumptions underlying the new theory; (2) the theory is worth pursuing because of its intrinsic interest and the possibilities it opens up; (3) whatever the final verdict on the new theory, both theory and evidence support the belief that significant long-run gains, even if not permanent changes in the growth rate, can be achieved by increased investment in the broadest sense, including human capital, technological knowledge, and industrial plant and equipment.Fifth Tinbergen Lecture delivered on October 4, 1991, in Amersfoort for the Royal Netherlands Economic Association     

Force and Influence in Content Analysis: The Production of New Social Knowledge

We examine the two traditions of content analysis: the first in which one substitutes words of a text with categories, and the second in which one looks for clusters of words that may refer to a theme. In the first tradition, preexisting dictionary categories give meaning to the words; in the second, meaning comes after the fact. Preexisting dictionary categories (the substitution model) are calibrated instruments applied within experimental designs that leave no space for doubt; meanwhile, the ability of the correlational model to conjure up complex themes from fragments of a text yields no unique solution. These differences have bearings on the production of new social knowledge. We expound on the epistemological foundations of the two traditions of interpretation and draw from them decision rules upon which one may rely for choosing among appropriate content-analytic tactics. Two reasons make this essay timely and critical: (1) the increasing variety of new content-analyticsoftware for particular purposes and (2) the almost exclusive focusing on software and technology at the expense of adjusting the choice of the software to the nature of the text. Two studies, one in historiometry, the other in autobiography, illustrate the liabilities and benefits of the two models of content analysis.     

Integration of collective bargaining and formal worker participation processes: Boon or barrier to worker rights?

Many employers are extending workplace rights by allowing for more employee voice in decision making. Numerous unionized organizations have established formal worker participation processes to help achieve this end and to improve organizational performance. Based largely on theory, such processes are normally designed to operate independently from the bargaining process. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between participation and bargaining processes, and the effect of this relationship on workplace satisfaction. A total of 712 Midwest union officials were surveyed, and the results indicate that the processes tend to become integrated in the workplace. Further, union officials' workplace satisfaction was greater where formal worker participation is institutionalized within the bargaining process.     

Information value and efficiency measurement for risk-averse firms

This paper has three goals. First, we demonstrate that standard arguments and methods from production and duality analysis can be used to provide a comprehensive and general treatment of the value of information for a risk-averse firm with expected-utility (linear-in-probabilities) preferences and a general stochastic technology. Second, we place bounds on the value of information for a risk-averse firm and relate these bounds to characteristics of the technology and the producer’s preferences. The third and final goal is to derive the implications that information differences can have for measured efficiency differences and to relate the bounds on the value of information to those measured differences.