Employer Penalties for Failure to Provide Individual Employee Notification Under the Family and Medical Leave Act: “Clarifications” Following Ragsdale v. Wolverine Worldwide, Inc.

This article examines the Supreme Court's ruling in Ragsdale v. Wolverine Worldwide, Inc. (2002) and considers its implications for employer and employee rights and responsibilities relative to implementing the FMLA policies. We provide an overview of the pre-decision regulatory environment including the general leave provisions of the FMLA and DOL's regulations requiring employer notification of leave designated as FMLA leave. We also identify those provisions that the decision did not alter and provide a broader consideration of the issues and implication of this decision for employers and employees.     

The Lifetime Distributional Impact of Government Health Outlays

This article examines the lifetime redistributive impact of government health outlays and finds that such outlays redistribute income from the lifetime rich to the lifetime poor and from men to women.     

Uncertainty and the theory of international trade in long-run equilibrium

We consider a country with two factors and two industries, each of which faces technical and price uncertainty. Entrepreneurs choose outputs in order to maximize the expected utility of profits. They also draw factor payments and purchase consumption goods after the uncertainty isresolved. They enter and exit from an industry according to whether participation there increases their expected utility. Within this model, the validity of the propositions of neoclassical trade theory depends on how the entrepreneurs' entry decisions are affected by parameter changes via their roles as risk bearers, consumers and factor owners.     

Minority banks and minority communities: Are minority banks good neighbors?

The lagging development of many minority communities has had an adverse effect on economic growth in the United States. One factor historically associated with creating or exacerbating this minority problem is the unwillingness of banks to service minority communities adequately. The federal government used two initiatives to address banks' reluctance to aid minorities: the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that ended the practice of redlining and required all federally regulated banks to demonstrate that they served the convenience and credit needs of their local communities, particularly minorities, women, and other underserved groups, and the establishment and preservation of minority owned banks that were expected to be more sympathetic to the needs of their communities. This paper evaluates the extent to which minority banks have met the needs of minority communities. The assessment is conducted in the context of the ratings received by minority banks on their Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) audits. Through the use of CRA audits, the performance of minority banks is also compared to the performance of the general banking community to determine the validity and success of the government's minority banking initiative. Analysis of CRA audit ratings also compares the performance of minority banks among different ethnicities.     

The Distributional Impact of Selected Commonwealth Outlays and Taxes and Alternative Commonwealth Grant Allocation Mechanisms

This article examines the redistributive impact of Commonwealth outlays and taxes (including outlays directed through and to the States)and two possible alternative systems of distributing Commonwealth funding amongst the States.     

Linking Public Investment to Private Investment. The Case of Spanish Regions

Public investment constitutes one of the main instruments of regional policies. The existence of a direct link between infrastructure and regional income per capita is usually accepted. Literature also describes a positive effect of public investment on private capital accumulation. This paper seeks to provide new empirical evidence on this latter relationship for the case of Spanish regions over the period 1965–1997 using panel data methodology. The results show a positive effect of productive and social public investment (especially in education) on private investment. The spillover effects generated by the productive infrastructures located in other regions do not seem to encourage the private investment in neighbouring regions. Public consumption and interest rate exert a negative influence on private capital accumulation. These results are robust to changes in the econometric specification.     

Credible assignments in coordination games

This paper uses the experimental method to examine an arbiter's ability to determine the outcome of two-person coordination games. All of the arbiter's assignments in the experiments were strict equilibrium points, but some assignments violated payoff-dominance or symmetry. An assignment that corresponds to the game's outcome is a credible assignment. The experiments test the hypothesis that an assignment to a strict equilibrium is a credible assignment. Our subjects did not find the individual rationality and mutual consistency of an equilibrium assignment to be sufficient reason for implementing the assignment when doing so conflicts with payoff-dominance or symmetry.     

Risk Aversion,Uncertain Information,and Market Efficiency

Abstract. We reexamine and extend tests of the uncertain information hypothesis (UIH) proposed by Brown, Harlow, and Tinic (1988, 1993). We find that their empirical results are sensitive to the sampling procedure employed and that their particular methodology does not sufficiently distinguish between event and nonevent periods. When the sampling procedure is modified to identify only relatively large, isolated events, the test results generally do not support the UIH. Instead, significant price shocks are consistently followed by short-lived price reversals. We observe this behavior following positive and negative events regardless of whether the event is classified as risk increasing or risk decreasing.     

领先技术能挽救EDA行业吗?--商业化的半导体设计软件业未雨绸缪

也许从表面上看,EDA(电子设计自动化)领域风平浪静,但其实一些大的改变正在酝酿着.