Tides and Prejudice: Racial Attitudes During Downturns in the United States 1979–2014

What happens to racial prejudice during economic downturns? This paper analyzes white attitudes towards African Americans in the United States at different points in a business cycle from 1979 to 2014. Using a number of indicators of hostility towards African Americans available from the General Social Survey we develop an indicator of racial prejudice. We combine this with data on unemployment from the Current Population Survey and find robust evidence that racial hostility as measured by our indicator of prejudice is counter cyclical and rises during periods of higher unemployment for whites. Specifically a one standard deviation in the unemployment rate being experienced by whites is associated with a .03 to.05 standard deviation increase in the discrimination index. This is of a magnitude comparable with one year less of education. We undertake a quantile regression to show that this effect is widespread across the distribution of prejudice and that apart from those with initially low levels of prejudice, increasing own group unemployment results in statistically significant increases of similar magnitude in prejudice across that distribution.     

Response bias in the measurement of salesperson orientations: The role of impression management

Impression management has long been recognized as a form of response distortion in the self-reported attributes and attitudes of salespersons and job applicants. In this study we examine whether measures of salesperson orientations may be susceptible to this self-enhancing response bias. Salesperson orientations examined include customer and selling orientations, and sales learning and performance orientations. Characteristics of these response biases include extreme responses to job desirable items, low construct reliability, low predictive validity, and a factor structure in which job-desirable items form a common factor. The analysis of a survey of pharmaceutical salespersons suggests self-enhancing responding may be a problem in the measurement of salesperson orientations. We identify steps that firms and researchers can take to identify self-enhancing responses.     

Marx's law of profit: The current state of the controversy

Portions of the material contained in this article were originally presented at the Twenty-Sixth Atlantic Economic Society Conference, October 6–9, 1988, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The present paper also reflects views contained in Johnson [1988].     

Vertical mergers and selective price cutting

A number of reasons have been offered for why businesses vertically merge. These include the facilitation of collusion and selective price cutting to circumvent rigid oligopolistic prices in upstream markets. This article presents a test of the second motive using data from the cement-concrete industries. Mergers in those industries are investigated because they were a controversial series of vertical mergers. The selective price cutting hypothesis is tested using ARIMA models with intervention components. Our results do not support that hypothesis.     

Economic Issues in Health Policy

Economic issues concerning health policy are reviewed and suggestions are made to advance debate on reform.     

Postoperative abscess mimicked by surgicel

Laparoscopic cholecystectomy is a very common surgery in many hospitals today. Thrombogenic agents are important for visualization, especially since the gallbladder fossa is a difficult bleeding source to control. Surgicel, oxidized regenerated cellulose, is a bioabsorbable thrombogenic which given the proper clinical context can be indistinguishable from an abscess on postoperative CT scans.     

An Address by a Georgist Sympathizer: Practical Issues in Georgist Thought

The justice and soundness of the taxation of land rent is acknowledged but problems in assessing imply a need to introduce better methods. This is particularly true when attempting to introduce the more saleable idea of two-rate tax systems because the allocation of total value of real estate parcels between land and buildings is even more arbitrarily done than determining the total assessment. The ideas fit best at the local level and there is little chance of replacing income or sales taxes. A 100% tax would be impossible since it would lead to an avalanche of tax appeals and the abandonment of some land since a high percentage of assessments are in error. The idea of a single tax does not fit modern times when revenue needs determine taxes, rather than the amount of revenue collected determining proper or necessary government expenditure levels. One tax source may be unpopular and regarded as a dangerous concept. Land is probably less important and less relatively valuable than it used to be because of technological change. Some advances in social legislation may mitigate the need for the drastic reform, George who was a moralist deeply concerned about poverty, felt reform was needed in his day. He was right about the impacts of various taxes on economic activity and income distribution.     

Towards an Epistemology for Radical Accounting: Beyond Objectivism and Relativism

This paper reviews some of the ontological and epistemological issues confronting writers who are currently pursuing a "radical" critique of "mainstream" accounting thought. This burgeoning heterodoxy has a common point of departure, that mainstream accounting relies upon the received wisdom that the veracity of competing theories may be adjudicated through criteria that appeal to the accuracy of their correspondence with the facts of a cognitively accessible external reality. This dualism between subject and object is both implicitly and explicitly challenged by the radical as they draw attention to, in a variety of ways, the projective role of the epistemic subject. But the maintenance of such a critique requires further epistemological self-reflection if incoherence and relativism are to be avoided. To contribute to the development of this heterodoxy, realism is explored as an epistemological haven from which this critique may be pursued and three key implications are explored through reference to the work of radical accountants.