urban infrastructure for development the paper discusses the importance of infrastructure investment in growing cities arguing that in addition to its direct benefits infrastructure plays crucial roles in enabling density and coordinating private investment decisions many cities have failed to invest in sufficient infrastructure due to inadequate financing tools in particular failure to capture benefits through land value taxation and fragmented urban authority

comparing costs of living across world cities this paper compares costs of living across world cities the international comparison program icp reports price levels across world economies in its calculation of purchasing power parity through

snap benefits and crime evidence from changing disbursement schedules in this paper we study the effects of the timing of nutritional aid disbursement on crime using two main sources of variation a a policy change in illinois that substantially increased the num

demand for football and intramatch winning probability an essay on the glorious uncertainty of sports the aims of this study are i to identify the main determinants of the demand for french premiere division football matches using all matches played during the 1997 1998 season ii to estimate a team specific probability of success and iii to propose an updating process for the intramatch winning probability the methodology is tested empirically over an out of sample data set using matches of the 1998 1999 season the results show that football appears to be an inferior product affected by both socio economic and football variables and that the main football variables have only a tenuous explanatory power concerning the final outcome of a given match

breaking into tradables urban form and urban function in a developing city many cities in developing economies particularly in africa are experiencing urbanization without industrialization this paper conceptualizes this in a framework in which a city can produce non tradable goods and if it is sufficiently competitive also internationally tradable goods potentially subject to increasing returns to scale a city is unlikely to produce tradables if it faces high urban and hinterland demand for non tradables or high costs of urban infrastructure and construction the paper shows that if there are increasing returns in tradable production there may be multiple equilibria the same initial conditions can support dichotomous outcomes with cities either in a low level non tradable only equilibrium or diversified in tradable and non tradable production the paper demonstrates the importance of history and expectations in determining outcomes essentially a city can be built in a manner that makes it difficult to attract tradable production this situation might be a consequence of low and self fulfilling expectations or history the predictions of the model are consistent with several observed features of african cities

demand for sport this article reviews international literature on the demand for professional sport the first part presents a conceptual framework for understanding the sources and determinants of the demand for professional sporting contests the second part reviews empirical evidence on key determinants of attendance at sporting events and on other sources of demand such as broadcasting sponsorship and merchandising the review concludes that there is still much to be learned about demand for professional sport and that there are no simple lessons to be drawn from existing literature but important messages do emerge from studies of demand for attendance with regard to effects of uncertainty of outcome quality of contest and quality of viewing copyright 2003 oxford university press

the effects of the macroeconomy and welfare reform on food stamp caseloads since 1994 there has been an unprecedented decline in the number of people receiving food stamp benefits from a record high of 27 5 million in 1994 the number of food stamp recipients fell over 30 to 18 0 million by mid 1999 during this period the united states has experienced the third longest economic expansion of the twentieth century this has resulted in a dramatic growth of new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in a generation simultaneously the welfare system has undergone a major transformation beginning in the early 1990s when many states made changes to their welfare programs through federal waivers from aid to families with dependent children afdc requirements the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act of 1996 prwora furthered these changes by replacing afdc where states contributions were matched by the federal government with a block grant program called temporary assistance for needy families tanf prwora introduced new rules on tanf recipients such as terminal time limits work requirements and personal responsibility measures it also directly changed the food stamp program by ending the eligibility of some recipients and reducing average benefit levels at the same time innovative changes in the delivery of food stamp benefits have been taking place with the introduction of electronic benefit trans

competitive balance measures in sports leagues the effects of variation in season length appropriate measurement of competitive balance is a cornerstone of the economic analysis of professional sports leagues we examine the distributional properties of the ratio of standard deviations rsd of points percentages the most widely used measure of competitive balance in the sports economics literature in comparison with other standarddeviation based measures simulation methods are used to evaluate the effects of changes in season length on the distributions of competitive balance measures for different distributions of the strengths of teams in a league the popular rsd measure performs as expected only in cases of perfect balance if there is imbalance in team strengths its distribution is very sensitive to changes in season length this has important implications for comparisons of competitive balance for different sports leagues with different numbers of teams and or games played jel l83 d63 c63

consumption benefits of national hockey league game trips estimated from revealed and stated preference demand data this paper examines the demand for hockey game trips among metropolitan and nonmetropolitan residents of alberta canada using data on both revealed and stated preference game trip behavior from a telephone survey conducted throughout alberta we estimate the effect of ticket prices team quality arena amenities and capacity on the latent demand for national hockey league hockey games we nd that lower ticket prices higher team quality and additional capacity encourage attendance in the status quo scenario consumer surplus per game is 50 for those who had attended hockey games and about 50 less for those who had not attended games exploiting the stated preference data we develop a number of other consumer surplus estimates we also include travel costs in the estimation of the demand function and estimate the full value of the game trip considering both ticket prices and travel costs sold out arenas in calgary and edmonton generate annual consumption bene ts of 40 and 35 million when only ticket prices are used to calculate consumer surplus i e excluding travel costs considering the full price consumer surplus for the calgary flames of 103 per game trip the annual consumption bene ts may be as high as 82 million jel r22 l83 d61

on the optimal realignment of a contest the case of college football this article examines the relationship between demand and scheduling in college football we first derive two different metrics for team quality and then use those metrics to see how they impact attendance we find that there is a positive interaction between the quality of the teams then various simulations are run to see how attendance would change under different scheduling scenarios if teams are put into conferences based on the team quality measures the average per game attendance only rises 1 2 this is true if 1 year or 10 year quality measures are used however our simulation suggests that this effect would be more than offset mainly because schools with larger capacity would play fewer home games and so aggregate attendance would fall we discuss whether this effect would be mitigated by capacity adjustments in the longer term jel l83 z20 c78

the impact of medicaid on labor market activity and program participation evidence from the oregon health insurance experiment united states dept of health and human services assistant secretary for planning and evaluation

do husbands and wives pool their resources evidence from the united kingdom child benefit common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband s income and wife s income affects the allocation of goods and time testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed in this paper we present an alternative test based on a natural experiment a policy change in the united kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s using family expenditure survey data we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women s clothing and children s clothing relative to men s clothing coincided with this income redistribution

uncertainty of outcome or strengths of teams an economic analysis of attendance demand for international cricket a significant body of theoretical literature has argued that popular interest in sporting contests between teams is heavily influenced by how difficult it is to predict the result ex ante empirical research has however been unable to reach a consensus on the magnitude of uncertainty of outcome on demand in this article we seek to resolve this impasse by distinguishing between uncertainty of outcome in the short run and uncertainty of outcome in the long run we also show that it is important to control for the independent effect of absolute team strength when testing the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis using data on over 380 test cricket matches played in england australia and new zealand since 1980 we find that short run uncertainty of outcome has a significant impact on attendance demand and that absolute team strength has better explanatory power for attendance demand than does long run uncertainty of outcome our results suggest some policy implications for the management and organization of international cricket

the demand for semi pro league football in malaysia 1989 91 a panel data approach this article arguments the literature on the demand for professional team sports by estimating a demand function for attendance at home matches in the malaysian semi pro football league mspfl between 1989 and 1991 a single equation demand attendance function based on a pooled cross section and time series panel data set of 399 games is estimated by ordinary least squares a fixed effects dummy variable covariance model and an error components model our findings confirm the importance of market size and championship prospects for the home team but not the visiting team as well as divisional status and star players the first match of the season and derby matches also increased attendance

dietary effects of the food stamp program based on data from the 1979 80 survey of food consumption in low income households this paper estimates the effects of changes in cash income and the food stamp benefit on household nutrient availability while controlling for two potential sources of selection bias the major finding of the empirical analysis is that the estimated dietary effects of changes in food stamp benefits are considerably larger than those resulting from changes in cash income with estimates of the ratios of the mpc for the food stamp benefit to the cash income mpc ranging from three to seven across nutrients no significant evidence of selection bias was found and the estimated dietary effects of food stamp benefits from the selection bias models are similar to those from the basic model estimated by ordinary least squares regression

our fans in the north the demand for british rugby league this paper reports the results of estimating a single equation model of an attendance function for british rugby league over the seasons 1982 83 to 1990 91 the data are panel data covering virtually every team which played in the two division league over the nine year time period diagnostic tests indicate that the appropriate model is a semilog random effects model where the dependent variable is league attendance weighted by population the major results are as follows there are significant positive relationships between league attendance and various measures of team success although the direction of causality is moot team quality as proxied by the two divisions and the economic quality of team location as proxied by the unemployment rate but there is no discernible relationship between league attendance and either success in nonleague trophy competitions or measures of exceptional player quality

the effects of benefit timing and income fungibility on food purchasing decisions among supplemental nutrition assistance program households the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap is the largest nutritional safety net in the united states prior research has found that participants have higher consumption shortly after receiving their benefits followed by lower consumption towards the end of the benefit month known as the snap benefit cycle this consumption pattern has been found to have negative effects on beneficiaries we hypothesize two behavioral responses of snap participants may work in tandem to drive much of the cycle 1 short run impatience a higher preference to consume today and 2 fungibility of income the degree of substitutability between a snap dollar and a cash dollar using data from the national food acquisition and purchase survey foodaps a newly developed nationally representative survey of daily food acquisitions by snap households we find evidence of both behavioral responses however the degree of short run impatience and fungibility of income is found to differ significantly across poverty levels and use of grocery lists to plan food purchases snap households could gain from food purchase planning education

income inequality competitive balance and the attractiveness of team sports some evidence and a natural experiment from english soccer this chapter examines the relationship between financial inequality competitive balance and attendance at english professional league soccer it shows that while financial inequality among the clubs has increased competitive balance has remained relatively stable and match attendance appears unrelated to competitive balance a clearer test of the relationship is suggested by comparison with fa cup matches because income inequality is primarily driven by inter rather than intradivisional inequality the fa cup has been a much more unbalanced competition than the divisional championships attendance at fa cup matches relative to the corresponding league matches has fallen over the last 20 years

the demand for english league football a club level analysis a demand equation is estimated for 19 large urban based english football league clubs over the period 1962 3 to 1991 2 in order to analyse the economic determinants of club attendances while controlling for football specific factors attendances are measured with and without correction for admission of season ticket holders using an error correction specification to model attendances it is shown that both adjusted and unadjusted attendances respond to real ticket prices in the long run in 17 and 18 clubs respectively the price elasticity is typically larger for adjusted attendances suggesting that casual spectators are more price sensitive than season ticket holders among football specific factors league position goals scored and promotion and relegation between the divisions are all important determinants of attendance patterns

inequality among equals embedding market and authority in league sports in league sports the regulatory authority of leagues is thought to counter market pressures that would otherwise concentrate player talent in smsas with the largest market potential the presumed opposition between authority and markets is not supported by league histories in the four major team sports these histories show that contrary to expectations market potential has the greatest influence on winning when league authority is formally strongest market potential has no influence on performance when league authority is opposed by antitrust law player unions rival leagues or league members to explain this anomaly authority and market relations must both be seen as embedded within the multiplex relations among team owners these relations changed dramatically with the rise of national audiences in the past three decades inequality among equals replaced inequality among unequals as the support of a rootless national audience replaced rooted and unequal local audiences altering the opportunity

on outcome uncertainty and scoring rates in sport the case of international rugby union in this paper we investigate the relationship between outcome uncertainty and scoring rates in the framework of a poisson match we argue that increasing scoring rates in the hope of increasing entertainment may have a detrimental impact on the popularity of sport the basis of our argument is that higher scoring rates decrease outcome uncertainty we use international rugby to demonstrate our findings and show that scoring rates have indeed increased significantly over the previous half century in this sport therefore administrators should recognise our general point and we suggest that rugby union administrators in particular ought to consider the introduction of new laws to reduce scoring rates scenarios in which the scoring rate is radically reduced are illustrated through a simulation of the rugby world cup tournament

renewing expectations about africa s cities built with great expectations to connect africa with growing global trade in the nineteenth century many of africa s cities today have economies that are predominantly local not regional or global in their reach at the same time africa s cities are experiencing rapid population growth with the urban population predicted to exceed 1 billion by 2040 why have africa s urban economies not been able to keep pace with their burgeoning populations and get into the production of regionally and globally tradable goods and services and what should policy makers focus on to renew expectations about africa s cities this paper makes the case that as long as african cities lack functioning land markets and regulations and early coordinated infrastructure investments they will remain local cities closed to regional and global markets trapped into producing only locally traded goods and services and limited in their economic growth

there is no free house abstract this paper estimates the effect of a housing relocation program on the labor supply and living conditions of low income households across major cities in south africa using panel microdata collected between 2008 and 2014 it exploits the arbitrary eligibility rules of the policy with a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to obtain reduced form estimates there are three main findings first in the short term of 2 to 4 years following relocation the labor supply of recipient households decreases driven mostly by a reduction of female hours second the large increase in distance km to economic opportunities seems to be an important factor behind the decline directly or indirectly through family shifts in earning strategies finally evidence is limited regarding improvements in housing and neighborhood quality overall there is no clear indication that the net welfare effect of relocation is positive

is there a daily discount rate evidence from the food stamp nutrition cycle abstract quasi hyperbolic discounting predicts impatience over short run tradeoffs i present a direct non laboratory test of this implication using data on the nutritional intake of food stamp recipients caloric intake declines by 10 to 15 percent over the food stamp month implying a significant preference for immediate consumption these findings constitute a rejection of the permanent income hypothesis and are extremely difficult to reconcile with exponential discounting the data support an explanation based on time preference and reject several alternative explanations including highly elastic intertemporal substitution i explore implications for the optimal timing of transfer payments under alternative assumptions about preferences

league level attendance and outcome uncertainty in u s pro sports leagues we extend the breakpoint literature regarding annual league level attendance and the impact of outcome uncertainty to the national basketball association national football league and national hockey league as our measures are different than past work on baseball we also apply our model to the american and national leagues attendance series for each league under consideration are not stationary overall but are stationary with break points no form of outcome uncertainty game play off or across seasons matters for attendance in hockey or baseball regardless of which game uncertainty variable is used under the measure of game uncertainty that recommends itself for football only play off uncertainty matters for attendance whether outcome uncertainty matters for basketball depends on the measure of game uncertainty situational similarities in the break points across leagues suggest general areas for future research jel l83 c22

sport event attendance as a function of education evidence from the uk abstractthis article studies the role of education in the decision to attend sporting events the overall objective is to verify whether more educated individuals are more likely to go to sports events than their less educated counterparts if education socializes persons to focus on sports it would then partially offset negative alternatives such as alcohol drug abuse and unlawful behaviours creating a positive externality sport events consumption is extensive highlighting the potential economic importance of the sports education externality to establish the role of education in sport attendance this article applies a probabilistic linear regression model to data from the uk the econometric formulation associates sport event attendance in the left hand side with education in the right hand side while controlling for the socioeconomic variables that are known to affect a consumer s decision to go to a sport event gender age income employment status children marital status and geographical

long run impacts of childhood access to the safety net a growing economics literature establishes a causal link between in utero shocks and health and human capital in adulthood most studies rely on extreme negative shocks such as famine and pandemics we are the first to examine the impact of a positive and policy driven change in economic resources available in utero and during childhood in particular we focus on the introduction of a key element of the u s safety net the food stamp program which was rolled out across counties in the u s between 1961 and 1975 we use the panel study of income dynamics to assemble unique data linking family background and county of residence in early childhood to adult health and economic outcomes the identification comes from variation across counties and over birth cohorts in availability of the food stamp program our findings indicate that the food stamp program has effects decades after initial exposure specifically access to food stamps in childhood leads to a significant reduction in the incidence of metabolic syndrome obesity high blood pressure and diabetes and for women an increase in economic self sufficiency overall our results suggest substantial internal and external benefits of the safety net that have not previously been quantified

paycheque receipt and the timing of consumption this article examines the consumption response to monthly paycheque receipt since the amount and arrival date of paycheques are known in advance the receipt of a paycheque does not coincide with the receipt of new information under the basic rational expectations life cycle permanent income hypothesis household consumption should not respond to paycheque arrival using data from the uk s family expenditure survey this article finds that household consumption is excessively sensitive to paycheque receipt the results cannot be explained by any underlying monthly expenditure fluctuations common to all households the presence of liquidity constraints as measured by wealth and age can account for the excess sensitivity results

unemployment insurance and disability insurance in the great recession social security disability insurance ssdi awards rise during recessions if marginal applicants are able to work but unable to find jobs countercyclical unemployment insurance ui benefit extensions may reduce ssdi uptake exploiting ui extensions in the great recession as a source of variation we find no indication that expiration of ui benefits causes ssdi applications and can rule out effects of meaningful magnitude a supplementary analysis finds little overlap between the two programs recipient populations only 28 of ssdi awardees had any labor force attachment in the prior calendar year and of those only 4 received ui

team roster turnover and attendance in major league baseball empirical support is shown for the propositionthat sports fans prefer the composition of their home team to remain the same from season to season controlling for price income population team quality league year the stadium effects the regression results indicate that for each percentage point increase in the turnover of the composition of the team attendance will fall by about 0 7 the implications of this heretofore ignored tendency are briefly discussed

impact of league restructuring on team sport attendances the case of rugby league an econometric analysis of attendances at rugby footbal league matches in england over the period 1966 1990 is presented the major finding is that the move from one to two leagues in 1973 had a substantial impact on attendances teams in the upper league experienced greater attendances ceteris paribuswhilst those in the lower league had reduced attendances

aching to retire the rise in the full retirement age and its impact on the social security disability rolls abstract the social security amendments of 1983 reduced the generosity of social security retired worker benefits in the u s by increasing the program s full retirement age from 65 to 67 and increasing the penalty for claiming benefits at the early retirement age of 62 these changes were phased in gradually so that individuals born in or before 1937 were unaffected and those born in 1960 or later were fully affected no corresponding changes were made to the program s disabled worker benefits and thus the relative generosity of social security disability insurance ssdi benefits increased in this paper we investigate the effect of the amendments on ssdi enrollment by exploiting variation across birth cohorts in the policy induced reduction in the present value of retired worker benefits our findings indicate that the amendments significantly increased ssdi enrollment since 1983 with an additional 0 6 of men and 0 9 of women between the ages of 45 and 64 receiving ssdi benefits in 2005 as a result of the changes our results further indicate that these effects will continue to increase during the next two decades as those fully exposed to the reduction in retirement benefit generosity reach their fifties and early sixties

pre and within season attendance forecasting in major league baseball a random forest approach this study explores the forecasting of major league baseball game ticket sales and identifies important attendance predictors by means of random forests that are grown from classification and regre

urbanization in developing economies the assessment urbanization is an inherent part of economic development yet its success in delivering jobs productivity and liveability varies widely this issue of the oxford review of economic policy compares the experience of different countries and analyses the causes of their different performance cities are policy intensive requiring public provision of infrastructure regulation and coordination this in turn requires authorizing environments with a sufficiently broad span of control and correspondingly powerful checks and balances to prevent abuse

the monthly food stamp cycle shooping frequency and food intake decisions in an endogenous switching regression framework mean food spending by food stamp households peaks sharply in the first three days after benefits are received for those who conduct major grocery shopping trips only once per month 42 of all food stamp households mean food energy intake drops significantly by the fourth week of the month for the remaining households intake remains steady over the course of the month these patterns motivate an empirical model that simultaneously accounts for the shopping frequency and food intake decisions over time results have implications for policies that may affect the frequency of grocery shopping by food stamp households

social welfare in sports leagues with profit maximizing and or win maximizing clubs this article develops a contest model to compare social welfare in homogeneous leagues in which all clubs maximize identical objective functions with mixed leagues in which clubs maximize different objective functions we show that homogeneous leagues in which all clubs are profit maximizers dominate all other leagues mixed leagues in which small market clubs are profit maximizers and large market clubs are win maximizers type i mixed leagues are dominated by all other leagues from a welfare perspective large market clubs win too often in purely win maximizing and type i mixed leagues whereas small market clubs win too many games in purely profit maximizing leagues and in mixed leagues in which large market clubs are profit maximizers and small market clubs are win maximizers type ii mixed leagues these results have important policy implications social welfare will increase if clubs are reorganized from non profit member associations to profit maximizing corpora tions moreover we show that revenue sharing decreases increases social welfare in mixed homogeneous leagues

unscripted drama soccer audience response to suspense surprise and shock by modeling minute by minute television audience figures from english premier league soccer matches with close to 50 000 minute observations we show that demand is partly driven by suspense and surprise we also identify an additional relevant factor of appeal to audiences namely shock which refers to the difference between pre match and current game outcome probabilities suspense surprise and shock remain significant in the presence of a traditional measure of outcome uncertainty jel c23 d12 l82 l83 z20

dyed in the wool an empirical note on fan loyalty this article attempts to investigate empirically the strength of intracity football club support and seeks to test the commonly held belief among the sports community that supporters will not switch allegiance between city rivals very readily to test this phenomenon data on the attendances of five english and two italian city rival clubs is used to conduct a cointegration analysis the results imply that a stable relationship does not exist between the attendance series which throws doubt on the proposition that supporters of a team are unlikely to switch their support to a rival club to test the possibility that this result could be due to fickle supporters ceasing to attend a sensitivity analysis is conducted between attendances and performance

inside the war on poverty the impact of food stamps on birth outcomes this paper evaluates the health impacts of a signature initiative of the war on poverty the introduction of the modern food stamp pro gram fsp using variation in the month fsp began operating in each u s county we find that pregnancies exposed to fsp three months prior to birth yielded deliveries with increased birth weight with the largest gains at the lowest birth weights we also find small but statistically insig nificant improvements in neonatal mortality we conclude that the sizable increase in income from fsp improved birth outcomes for both whites and african americans with larger impacts for african american mothers n this paper we evaluate the health consequences of a sizable improvement in the resources available to ameri ca s poorest in particular we examine the impact of the food stamp program fsp which in 2007 provided 34 billion in payments to about 13 million households on infant health our paper makes two distinct contributions first although the goal of the fsp is to increase the nutri tion of the poor few papers have examined its impact on health outcomes second building on work by hoynes and schanzenbach 2009 we argue that the fsp treatment represents an exogenous increase in income for the poor our analysis therefore represents a causal estimate of the impact of income on health an important topic with little convincing evidence due to concerns about endogeneity and reverse causality currie 2009 we use the natural experiment afforded by the nation wide rollout of the modern fsp during the 1960s and early 1970s our identification strategy uses the sharp timing of the county by county rollout of the fsp which was initially constrained by congressional funding authorizations and ultimately became available in all counties by 1975 speci fically we use information on the month the fsp began operating in each of the roughly 3 100 u s counties and examine the impact of the fsp rollout on mean birth weight low birth weight gestation and neonatal mortality throughout the history of the fsp the program para meters have been set by the u s department of agriculture usda and are uniform across states in the absence of the state level variation often leveraged by economists to eval uate transfer programs previous fsp research has typically resorted to strong assumptions as to the comparability of fsp participants and eligible nonparticipants currie 2003 not surprisingly the literature is far from settled as to what casual impact if any the fsp has on nutrition and health hoynes and schanzenbach 2009 use this county rollout to examine the impact of the fsp on food consumption using the psid they found that the introduction of the fsp increased total food spending and decreased out of pocket food spending importantly consistent with the predictions of canonical microeconomic theory the magnitude of the increase in food expenditures was similar to an equivalent sized income transfer implying that most recipient house holds were inframarginal that is they would spend more on the subsidized good than the face value of the in kind transfer as one of the largest antipoverty programs in the united states comparable in cost to the earned income tax credit eitc and substantially larger than temporary assistance to needy families tanf understanding fsp effects is valuable both in its own right and for what it reveals about the relationship between income and health 1

coaching team production coaching team production the actual function of managers is the subject of much debate using data on more than 3000 male college basketball players their coaches and their skill levels we find a positive and significant relation between our ability to replicate an individual coach s allocation of playing time across players and his winning percentage although this result does not answer the central question of just what it is that managers contribute the results do support the property rights paradigm managers are the employees of workers and more generally sports data can be used to help understand related economic processes where quantifiable measures of inputs and outputs are more costly to obtain what is meant by performance input energy initiative work attitude perspiration rate of exhaustion or output sometimes by inspecting a team member s input activity we can better judge his output effect it is not always the case that watching input activity is the only or best means of detecting measuring or monitoring output effects of each team member but in some cases it is a useful way i introduction a major tenet of the alchian demsetz 1972 representation of the firm is that managers are hired by workers to prevent shirking and malfeasance in their own ranks absent overseers individual workers bear only a fraction of the cost of shirking and hence everyone undersupplies labor relative to its opportunity cost in this world the managerial function is to monitor inputs and meter rewards thereby reducing the incentive to shirk and raising each worker s marginal productivity the more dependence there is in the marginal products of laborers the more important the role of management this view of supervision is simultaneously intuitively pleasing and difficult to quantify this paper investigates the role of management in a setting where indisputably there is team production intercollegiate basketball 1 data on 3012 college basketball players across ten years and sixty five teams are used to replicate one aspect of coaching the allocation of playing time next we attempt to link coaching decisions to winning the goal is to determine if coaches who manage well by our standards are successful section ii motivates the paper in section iii the empirical methodology is detailed the monitoring function is estimated and related to coaching success section iv contains a summary and conclusion ii coaching decisions the essence of team production is interdependence and the inherent immeasurability of marginal productivity across workers however this does not mean that proxies for marginal productivity cannot be developed managers monitor worker inputs and deduce marginal products accordingly of course some inputs are more cheaply quantified than others attitude is hard to measure but heart rate is easy sweat is observed cheaply but workers can feign exhaustion in the famous chinese boatpullers fable the coxswain uses his whip to insure that coolies pull efficiently to persuade each worker to give the appropriate effort 2 mcmanus 1975 341 relates a story told by cheung boats are pulled upstream by a team of coolies prodded by an overseer with a whip an american lady horrified at the sight of the overseer whipping the men as they strained at their harness demanded that something be done about the brutality she was quickly informed those men own the rights to draw boats over this stretch of water and they have hired the overseer and given him his duties here the monitor uses his vision intuition and experience to determine shirking counseling the loafers with his whip but employing subjective observation is just one way to monitor

location and survival in the national hockey league a model of professional sport franchises is introduced and used to explore the locational and other determi nants of profitability particular attention is paid to the effect of location on attendance market power and long run team quality whe n estimated using data for the national hockey league in 1977 78 the model indicates that location has an effect on each of these and tha t their combined effect on profitability is effective in explaining p rior and subsequent decisions concerning league expansion and franchi se relocation a number of other matters are also addressed includin g league arguments for antitrust exemption and league policies to res trict expansion copyright 1988 by blackwell publishing ltd

who feels the calorie crunch and when the impact of school meals on cyclical food insecurity abstract monthly welfare programs such as the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap produce consistent cycles of expenditure and consumption among recipients food insecurity health status crime poor behavior and test scores track these cycles this paper leverages new data from the usda the foodaps survey to better understand these cycles in three ways first i find that expenditure and consumption cycles are correlated within households a fact not previously established second i study diet quality over the benefit month and find that it worsens potentially compounding the harmful consequences of cyclical food insecurity third i find that kids bear less of the burden of the consumption cycle than adults and that much of this difference may be driven by school meal programs this finding suggests large potential gains in child welfare from expanding summer meal programs

the impact of stricter criteria for disability insurance on labor force participation this paper studies the effect of a large scale policy change in the austrian disability insurance program which tightened eligibility criteria for men above a certain age using administrative data on the universe of austrian private sector employees the results of difference in difference regressions suggest a substantial and statistically significant decline in disability enrollment of 6 to 7 4 percentage points and an increase in employment of 1 6 to 3 4 percentage points the policy change had important spillover effects into the unemployment and sickness insurance program specifically the share of individuals receiving unemployment benefits increased by 3 5 to 3 9 percentage points and the share receiving sickness insurance benefits by roughly 0 7 percentage points

financial fair play in european football in 2010 uefa the governing body of european football announced a set of financial restraints which clubs must observe when seeking to enter its competitions notably the uefa champions league we analyse the financial and sporting impact of these financial fair play ffp regulations in four major european football leagues we first discuss the details of ffp and frame these regulations in the institutional set up of the european football industry we then show how the break even constraint embedded in ffp could substantially reduce average payrolls and wage to turnover ratios while strengthening the position of the traditional top teams since the benefits of the break even rule to consumers remain unclear we argue that these rent shifting regulations might fall foul of european competition law thomas peeters and stefan szymanski

consumption versus expenditure previous authors have documented a dramatic decline in food expenditures at the time of retirement we show that this is matched by an equally dramatic rise in time spent shopping for and preparing meals using a novel data set that collects detailed food diaries for a large cross section of u s households we show that neither the quality nor the quantity of food intake deteriorates with retirement status we also show that unemployed households experience a decline in food expenditure and food consumption commensurate with the impact of job displacement on permanent income these results highlight how direct measures of consumption distinguish between anticipated and unanticipated shocks to income whereas measures of expenditures obscure the distinction

3rd of tha month do social security recipients smooth consumption between checks this paper examines the response of consumption expenditures to the monthly receipt of social security checks since the amount and arrival date of these checks are known to the recipients the basic life cycle permanent income hypothesis lcpih predicts that consumption should not respond to the receipt of these checks using daily diary data from the consumer expenditure survey this paper finds evidence that both the dollar amount and probability of expenditures increase immediately following the receipt of this check most relevant to testing the lcpih categories of instantaneous consumption expenditure such as food away from home increase on the check arrival date the response is found primarily amongst households for whom social security is the primary source of income however the magnitude of the estimated responses are relatively small and do not suggest that the utility losses are large from this non smoothing behavior this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

using satellite imagery to create tax maps and enhance local revenue collection although taxes on land and property have many desirable attributes the challenge of ensuring completeness of tax rolls and currency of valuations preclude their effective use to support urbanizati