Labor force migration, non-labor force migration, and non-employment reasons for migration

This paper documents the extent and nature of non-employment factors in migration. The labor force status of over 18 million recent interstate migrants in the United States and stated reasons for moving reported in several surveys in the U.S. are examined. Labor force migrants are heterogeneous in terms of the relationships between acquisition of employment and the migration decision, and in terms of the influence of decision makers outside of the migrant household including firms and the government. Numerically important categories of migrants not traditionally captured in migration models exist, including the elderly, the military, and movers from abroad. Whereas non-employment reasons are secondary to employment reasons for a majority of labor force migrants, non-employment factors are singularly important or operate in combination with employment factors for the majority of all migrants. The heterogeneity of migrant types and migration reasons needs to be better captured in migration models.     

Variables sampling plans for the Poisson and the binomial

Variables sampling plans based upon continuous distributions are well known. The usual assumption is that a measurable characteristic associated with a product has a normal distribution, a case which has been treated extensively in the literature. Other continuous distributions, particularly the exponential, have also been used as models. In this paper we discuss variables sampling plans for situations in which the measurable characteristic has either a Poisson or a binomial distribution.     

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.     

Foundations of Dominant-Strategy Mechanisms

Robert Wilson criticizes applied game theory's reliance on common-knowledge assumptions. In reaction to Wilson's critique, the recent literature of mechanism design has adopted the goal of finding detail-free mechanisms in order to eliminate this reliance. In practice this has meant restricting attention to simple mechanisms such as dominant-strategy mechanisms. However, there has been little theoretical foundation for this approach. In particular it is not clear the search for an optimal mechanism that does not rely on common-knowledge assumption would lead to simpler mechanisms rather than more complicated ones. This paper tries to fill the void. In the context of an expected revenue maximizing auctioneer, we investigate some foundations for using simple, dominant-strategy auctions.     

The First U.S. Food Stamp Program: An Example of Rent Seeking and Avoiding

Abstract . Rent seeking involves the wasteful expenses incurred to secure, acquire, or maintain a monopoly position. Rent avoiding involves the expenditures undertaken to avoid the imposition of rent-seeking costs. Each represents a social cost of Tullock rectangle loss in addition to the dead-weight or Harberger triangle loss that combined to form the Harberger-Tullock trapezoid social cost. The first Food Stamp Program in the United States came about through the rent-seeking and/or rent-avoiding efforts of farmers, grocers, bankers, and other economic agents and did not lead to the promotion of social welfare. The evidence of these self-interested efforts was gleaned from articles in the New York Times and government documents. The first Food Stamp Program also fits the economic theory of regulation developed by Stigler, Jordan, Peltzman and others, and it involved imposed costs on economic agents as the program evolved.     

Political Profit: Taxing and Spending in the Hierarchical State

A bstract . The actions of government fall into two types: taxes (the taking of property ) and expenditures (the awarding of gifts ). Politicians profit as long as the value of resources raised from taxation exceeds the cost of expenditures. From their point of view, fiscal efficiency consists in maximizing the support obtained by spending and minimizing the opposition generated by taxing. This is accomplished by spending on well-organized groups and taxing the uninformed public. This results in the "iron law of political redistribution" in which income and wealth are transferred from the latter to the former. In a hierarchical State , it is usually profitable for those at the top to centralize control over taxing and spending, if for no other reason than to make it difficult for politicians at lower levels to compete against them. This gives rise to the "law of hierarchical centralization "—in a hierarchical State, power becomes centralized over time. The greater the power of government, the faster this process takes place. In order to avoid this problem, one could design constitutions which are non-hierarchical in nature, in which each unit of government is completely autonomous from the others, as firms are in a free market.     

Robustness to the unavailability of data in block designs

We present general results for finding or boundingt _maxB , the maximum number of arbitrary whole blocks of observations which can be removed from a block design, and still leave all of the elementary treatment contrasts estimable. The block sizes may be larger than the number of treatments. The results are applied to BBDs, reinforced BIBDs and BBDs, BTIBDs, and a series of variance balanced incomplete block designs with two block sizes. Also given for most of these designs, are results fort _max, the maximum number of arbitrary, scattered observations that can become unavailable, and still leave all of the elementary treatment contrasts estimable.The work was undertaken while Dr. Whittinghill was visiting Ohio State University, and supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences Division, Colby College, Waterville, Maine.