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.     

Industrial Sickness, Primary and Secondary: The Effects of Exit Constraints on Industrial Performance

In an attempt to protect workers from unemployment, governmentsin some countries subsidize firms which would otherwise fail.This article examines the effects of such subsidies on output,prices, and welfare. It also briefly reviews the effects forvarying price elasticities of supply and demand, for nontradedand fully traded goods, and for firms in which wages exceedtheir free market level. If the firm produces a nontraded good,the "sickness" of one firm that is subsidized to maintain productioncan spread to other firms that would be viable in the absenceof the subsidies. The analysis shows that the exit constraintshave the most detrimental effect when the elasticity of demandis low and supply elasticity is high, and when the governmentweighs the welfare of the firm's workers and consumers lessthan that of the general taxpayers and the firm owners. Whenlabor costs are higher than their free market levels and outputis thus less than the optimal levels, the subsidies could havean effect similar to that of an optimal production subsidy.In practice, however, this possibility is likely to be outweighedby associated rent-seeking costs and other distortions.     

The use of DRCs to evaluate indigenization programs: The case of the ivory coast

The DRC methodology is extended to evaluate education programs for purposes of indigenization. Such programs can be likened to an import-substitution activity in which local labor is produced to replace previously imported skilled foreign labor. The method is then applied to the problem of expatriate labor replacement in the Ivory Coast.