Economists have long used state-collected discharge data to construct Hirschman-Herfindahl (HH) indices measuring hospital competition. Since data are collected to determine the facility providing the service rather than ownership, the difference between the number of reporting facilities and the number of competitors has grown over time due to mergers and networking activities. Consequently, t...

The trade-offs associated with getting an education Usually higher education is associated with higher income. The main reason why people go to college is that they expect to earn more once they obtain their degree than they would with just a high-school diploma. Consider the hypothetical decision of Ann, who is currently employed with a salary of $35,000 per year. She is considering quitting h...

This study provides new estimates of systematic risk and the cost of equity capital for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device sectors using data for firms with publicly-traded stock on U.S. exchanges during 2001-2005 and 2006-2008. Two frameworks are employed for estimating firms’ risk and the cost of equity capital: (1) the capital asset pricing model, and (2) the Fama-French t...

Taking advantage of the opportunities created by the price adjusted performance improvement in IT depends in part on the ability of IT capital to substitute for other inputs in production. Studies in the IS literature as well as most economics training that examine substitution of IT capital for other inputs use the Allen elasticity of substitution (AES). We present a less-well-known measure fo...

Shucksmith (2012) has recently suggested that rural research might be refreshed by incorporating theoretical insights that have emerged through a renewal of class analysis. This article seeks to advance this proposed research agenda by exploring the concept of asset-based class analysis and its association with the concept of social capital. The article explores connections between social capit...

This paper presents a simple model of human capital, ideas, and economic growth that integrates contributions from several different strands of the growth literature. The model generates a regression specification that is very similar to that employed by Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992), but the economics underlying the specification is very different. In particular, the model emphasizes the impor...

A surprising finding in our seminars in Latin America and Spain was that approximately half of the participants continued to use the old French anatomical nomenclature. The substance of this paper is a table in which we compare the anatomical names for the items reviewed in our seminar, in a Spanish version of the old French nomenclature and in the Spanish, Portuguese, and English versions of t...

We argue that combined observations of galaxy rotation curves and gravitational lensing not only allow the deduction of a galaxy’s mass profile, but also yield information about the pressure in the galactic fluid. We quantify this statement by enhancing the standard formalism for rotation curve and lensing measurements to a first postNewtonian approximation. This enhanced formalism is compatibl...