Forecasting first births

This study is concerned with one aspect of the family cycle, namely, the transition from young married to young married with small children. The focus is on developing models to forecast entries into this latter stage for the purpose of marketing research. "Using ordinary least squares, forecasting models were estimated for (1) total number of first births, (2) number of white first births, and (3) number of nonwhite first births." Models are estimated for both the United States and California using data from official sources.     

Preferences and the labour supply of married women

The paper reports the main results of using British cross-section data to estimate a labour supply function in which preference variables are interacted with terms measuring the slope and position of the budget constraint.     

Waves of migration: a new situation

An attempt is made to forecast migration trends affecting those countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. "The new migratory trends are characterized by at least three fundamentally important elements: the ouster of the newly arrived population from the social niche that it had recently occupied, emigration from overpopulated regions, and growing emigration beyond the borders of the former Union."     

The aggregate import equation: Price homogeneity and monetary effects

The theoretical and empirical assumptions implied by conventional import equations are identified and tested for the US and UK. The demand for imports is found to respond much more strongly to changes in domestic rather than foreign prices. The elasticity with respect to income estimated by traditional functions is shown to be upward biased. Finally, a direct link between the money supply and imports is established, with consequences for all import elasticities.     

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.     

Evolution of harvesting strategies: replicator and resource dynamics

Abstract. Economic theories of managing renewable resources, such as fisheries and forestry, traditionally assume that individual harvesters are perfectly rational and thus able to compute the harvesting strategy that maximizes their discounted profits. The current paper presents an alternative approach based on bounded rationality and evolutionary mechanisms. It is assumed that individual harvesters face a choice between two harvesting strategies. The evolution of the distribution of strategies in the population is modeled through a replicator dynamics equation. The latter captures the idea that strategies yielding above average profits are demanded more than strategies yielding below average profits, so that the first type ends up accounting for a larger part in the population. From a mathematical perspective, the combination of resource and evolutionary processes leads to complex dynamics. The paper presents the existence and stability conditions for each steady-state of the system and analyzes dynamic paths to the equilibrium. In addition, effects of changes in prices are analyzed. A main result of the paper is that under certain conditions both strategies can survive in the long-run. Correspondence to: J. Noailly