In the wake of the economic downturn of 2008–2009, researchers and policymakers have focused considerable attention on the extent of unfunded liabilities in US public sector pension plans and the implications for the long term fiscal sustainability of state and local governments. In response to the growth in liabilities, many states have introduced legislation that cuts back on defined benefit ...

In many countries the demand for health care services is of increasing importance. Especially in the industrialized world with a changing demographic structure social insurances and politics face real challenges. Reliable predictors of those demand functions will therefore become invaluable tools. This article proposes a prediction method for the distribution of the number of visits to the medi...

We use the recent introduction of tuition fees at public universities in seven of the sixteen German states to identify the effects of tuition fees on university enrollment of first-year students at German public universities. Our study differs from previous research in two important ways. Firstly, we take into account the location of universities and include a spatial variable, which measures ...

IZA DP No. 11281 JANUARY 2018 The Economic Effects of Providing Legal Status to DREAMers* This study quantifies the economic effects of two major immigration reforms aimed at legalizing undocumented individuals that entered the United States as children and completed high school: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the DREAM Act. The former offers only temporary legal status to el...

Medical marijuana laws generate significant policy debates regarding drug policy. In particular, if marijuana is a complement or a gateway drug to hard drugs, these laws would increase not only the usage of marijuana but hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin. In this paper, I empirically study the relationships between marijuana and cocaine or heroin by analyzing data on drug possession arrests...

From R-band images of 39 Hickson compact groups (HCGs), we use galaxy counts to determine a luminosity function extending to MR = −14.0 + 5 log h75, approximately two magnitudes deeper than previous compact group luminosity functions. We find that a single Schechter function (Schechter 1976) is a poor fit (χν > 4) to the data, so we fit a composite function consisting of separate Schechter func...

The B–twisted topological sigma model coupled to topological gravity is supposed to be described by an ordinary field theory: a type of holomorphic Chern–Simons theory for the open string, and the Kodaira–Spencer theory for the closed string. We show that the B model can be represented as a particle theory, obtained by reducing the sigma model to one dimension, and replacing the coupling to top...

We examine the relative fractions of passive (Type 1), quiet-SF (Type 2) and active-SF (Type 3+4) galaxies as a function of luminosity and number of neighbours in several volume limited samples selected from the 2dFGRS. Neighbours are counted within 1 h−1 75 Mpc projected distance, and ± 1000 km s −1 depth. We apply a maximum magnitude difference criterion and require neighbours to be fainter t...

Viral particles are biological machines that have evolved to package, protect, and deliver the viral genome into the host via regulated conformational changes of virions. We have developed a procedure to modify lysine residues with S-methylthioacetimidate across the pH range from 5.5 to 8.5. Lysine residues that are not completely modified are involved in tertiary or quaternary structural inter...

This paper analyzes optimal procurement mechanisms in a setting typical for postliberalization industries. The procurement agency has incomplete information concerning the firms’ cost functions and cares about quality as well as price. Low type firms are cheaper than high type firms in providing low quality but more expensive when providing high quality. Hence, each type is specialized in a cer...