Contemporary Economic Policy articles from January 2005

Contemporary Economic Policy archives from January 2005

Social Security benefit uncertainty under individual accounts.
January 1, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION Various Social Security reform proposals put forth in recent years have included individual accounts. Two of the three reform options offered by the 1994-1996 Advisory Council on Social Security (1997) incorporated such...

Economic growth and Medicare funding systems.
January 1, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION More than 35 years since its inception, the Medicare program in the United States has been under severe financial pressure resulting from various unpredicted demographic and economic changes. These changes have occurred...

Delivering public health care services: substitutes, complements, or both?
January 1, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION The number of uninsured Americans has been increasing steadily over the past decade. As of 2001, an estimated 41 million people were uninsured during the entire calendar year (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2002). There is...

Welfare payments and the spread of HIV in the United States.
January 1, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION The history of the human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) epidemic began 23 years ago in the United States when the first reports of a previously unrecognized illness were reported to the...

Changes in the distribution of air pollution exposure in the Los Angeles basin from 1990 to 1999.
January 1, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION Throughout the decade of the 1990s, pollution levels fell substantially throughout the South Coast Air Basin of California (hereafter, the basin), continuing a trend of significant reductions from the mid-1970s to 1990....

Stopping the drain: third-party responses to California's water market.
January 1, 2005... I. WATER MARKETING AND THIRD-PARTY IMPACTS In California, as elsewhere in the American West, the water needs of a growing population were met over much of the past century by investments in large reservoirs and conveyance systems, often...

Are there differential effects of price and policy on college students' drinking intensity?
January 1, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION A recent survey by the American Medical Association found that college binge drinking is among the top concerns of parents with college-age children. (1) This finding reflects the persistence of excessive alcohol use on...

Excessive government fee collection in China.
January 1, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION There has been growing criticism from business enterprises and farmers regarding excessive fee collection in China. As China's former Premier Zhu (1998) mentioned, the fee revenue was greater than the tax revenue and the...

Empirical analysis of entry in the local exchange market: the case of Pacific Bell*.
January 1, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION The Telecommunications Act of 1996 marked a major legislative effort to change the structure of telecommunications markets in the United States. While the law affected many aspects of the telecommunications industry, the...

Knowledge spillovers and high-technology clustering: evidence from Taiwan's Hsinchu Science-based industrial park.
January 1, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION Regarding the recent clustering phenomenon, it is especially surprising that clustering is particularly strong in the case of firms in high-technology (high-tech), information-intensive sectors, sectors which one might...

The gender pay gap by occupation: a test of the crowding hypothesis.
January 1, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION It is clear that occupational assignment plays a major role in the distribution of wages and hence it may influence the existence and measurement of the gender pay gap. In Becker's (1957) model, discrimination due to...

Do electronic discussions create critical thinking spillovers?
January 1, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION The importance of teaching critical thinking skills is gaining increased attention in the economics literature. This attention can be traced back to Fels (1969), who identified it as an area ripe for teaching and...