Workplace violence and corporate policy for health care settings

Incidents of workplace violence have been of significant concern to health care employers and the public at large. Many employers now find themselves confronted with sentinel events in the workplace, such as assault; property damage; racially, ethnically, or religiously motivated violence; sexual assault; employee suicide; or homicide. Regardless of a health care agency's size or mission, when employees are unexpectedly confronted with workplace violence, they are typically overwhelmed with shock and multiple questions surrounding how the event could have occurred in the safety of the workplace. It is difficult to imagine returning to work only minutes after hearing such news and, yet, in this modern era of corporate health care, this is what usually happens. Awareness of the dynamics and issues related to workplace violence can guide policy development and related interventions to promote safety, stability, and provide a platform for adapting to the devastation of such a disturbing event.     

A life cycle analysis of social security

Summary We develop an applied general equilibrium model to examine the optimal social security replacement rate and the welfare benefits associated with it. Our setup consists of overlapping generations of 65-period lived individuals facing mortality risk and individual income risk. Private credit markets, including markets for private annuities, are closed by assumption. Unlike previous analyses, we find that an unfunded social security system may well enhance economic welfare. In our benchmark economy, the optimal social security replacement rate is 30%, and an empirically more plausible replacement rate of 60% raises welfare compared with an economy with no social security system.We would like to thank Andy Atkeson, V. V. Chari, Steve Davis, Paul Evans, Lars Hansen, Tim Kehoe, Nobu Kiyotaki, Ed Prescott, José-Victor Ríos-Rull, Richard Rogerson, Tom Sargent, Nancy Stokey, Dick Sweeney, Robert Townsend, and the participants of the NBER Economic Fluctuations Small Group Workshop on Micro and Macro Perspectives on the Aggregate Labor Market in Palo Alto, the NBER General Equilibrium Theory Conference in Minneapolis, the Money and Banking Workshop at the University of Chicago, and the NBER Summer Institute. An earlier version of this paper was titled A Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Analysis of Social Security. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-9210291. We also thank the Minnesota and San Diego Supercomputer Centers for their support.     

Predation among supermarkets: An algorithmic locational analysis

First an algorithm that finds certain polygonal tesselations of R² is described; the polygons involved here are market areas of supermarkets in a city, defined by prices and transport cost proportional to Euclidean distance. Then statistics based on the adjacencies, boundaries, and sizes of all market areas (in Edmonton, Canada, during 1959–1973) are used to test hypotheses on locational predation.     

Do estate and gift taxes affect the timing of private transfers?

Proposals to alter the estate tax are contentious and have been considered largely in an empirical vacuum. This paper examines time series and cross-sectional variation to identify the effects of estate and gift taxation on the timing of private transfers. The analysis is based on data from the 1989, 1992, 1995, 1998, and 2001 Surveys of Consumer Finances. Legislative activity during this period reduced the tax disadvantage of bequests relative to gifts. Moreover, the magnitude of this reduction differed systematically across identifiable household categories. We find that households experiencing larger declines in the expected tax disadvantages of bequests reduced inter vivos transfers relative to households experiencing small declines in the tax disadvantages of bequests. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that the timing of transfers is responsive to applicable gift and estate tax rates. The results also provide evidence of a systematic bequest motive for high-wealth households.     

Using choice question formats to determine compensable values: The case of a landfill-siting process

Siting noxious facilities, such as community landfills, is a challenging problem for local planners who recognize the importance of economic efficiency and equity, political acceptance, and meeting federal regulatory standards. Meeting these criteria requires technical and socio-economic analyses in conjunction with public input. Planners may also recognize that political acceptance requires compensation for the host community, either in the form of monetary or in-kind transfers. Following Breffle and Rowe [Breffle, W.S., Rowe. R.D., 2002. Comparing choice question formats for evaluating natural resource tradeoffs. Land Econ. 78 (2), 298–314], we use a “resource-to-resource” paired-comparison survey method to estimate compensatory values associated with an in-county landfill for both the host and non-host communities. Our results indicate that while a host-community household's minimum willingness to accept payment for hosting a landfill may exceed a non-host-community household's maximum willingness to pay, a large difference in population sizes between the two communities enables the landfill to pass a Kaldor potential compensation test.     

Two families of kurtosis measures

Two families of kurtosis measures are defined as K ₁(b)=E[ab ^−|z|] and K ₂(b)=E[a(1−|z|^b)] where z denotes the standardized variable and a is a normalizing constant chosen such that the kurtosis is equal to 3 for normal distributions. K ₂(b) is an extension of Stavig's robust kurtosis. As with Pearson's measure of kurtosis β₂=E[z ⁴], both measures are expected values of continuous functions of z that are even, convex or linear and strictly monotonic in ℜ⁻ and in ℜ⁺. In contrast to β₂, our proposed kurtosis measures give more importance to the central part of the distribution instead of the tails. Tests of normality based on these new measures are more sensitive with respect to the peak of the distribution. K ₁(b) and K ₂(b) satisfy Van Zwet's ordering and correlate highly with other kurtosis measures such as L-kurtosis and quantile kurtosis. RID="*" ID="*"  The authors thank the referees for their insightful comments that significantly improved the clarity of the article.     

Mobile Labor, Multiple Tax Instruments, and Tax Competition

The tax competition literature shows that local governments keep property tax rates inefficiently low to prevent capital outflows, thereby underproviding local public goods. This paper adds mobile labor and an alternative tax instrument to the model. Jurisdictions have access to a property tax levied on land and capital, plus either a head tax or a labor tax. Scale economies in public good provision create incentives to use the property tax, but these incentives are not accompanied by increased incentives to underprovide public goods. In contrast, underprovision is associated with the use of a distortionary labor tax.     

Hayek Contra Pangloss: A Rejoinder

Whitman (1998) claims that Friedrich Hayek's theory of cultural evolution was not Panglossian. Denis's (2002) refutation relies on an overbroad definition of the term Panglossian, a misunderstanding of the implications of group selection theory, and an incomplete understanding of the nested character of evolutionary processes in Hayek's approach.     

Price communications in a multimarket context: An experimental investigation

This experiment assesses the effects of nonbinding price communications in a multi-market, posted-offer environment. In half of the ten sessions, three symmetric sellers continuously submitted nonbinding prices for two minutes prior to posting final binding prices. In the remaining sessions sellers posted only binding prices. Competitive prices were observed infrequently in either treatment, but prices were persistently higher when communications were possible. The way that communications affect performance is unclear. With or without communications, high prices appear to be more a consequence of some sellers supporting the defections of others, than of a developed language of conspiracy.We wish to thank without implicating Will Gillespie, participants in seminars at the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and at Virginia Commonwealth University, and an anonymous referee. Support for this research was provided by the USC Zumberge Faculty Research and Innovation Fund, the VCU Grants-In-Aid Program, and the National Science Foundation (grant SBR 9319842). Data are archived at FTP address: fido.econlab.arizona.edu.