We performed experiments using Aplysia neurons to identify the mechanism underlying the changes in the firing patterns in response to temperature changes. When the temperature was gradually increased from 11℃ to 31℃ the firing patterns changed sequentially from the silent state to beating, doublets, beating-chaos, bursting-chaos, square-wave bursting, and bursting-oscillation patterns. When the...

Hospital care is characterized by inpatient and outpatient departments; however, Medicare reimburses hospitals differently for treatment in each department. In this paper, I examine how hospitals respond to Medicare’s disjointed payment system. I exploit the conversion of rural hospitals to Medicare’s Critical Access Hospital (CAH) program, which implemented a universal payment system. Although...

This paper evaluates the effect of excise taxes and bans on smoking in public places on the exposure to tobacco smoke of non-smokers. We use a novel way of quantifying passive smoking: we use data on cotinine concentrationa metabolite of nicotinemeasured in a large population of non-smokers over time. Exploiting state and time variation across US states, we reach two important conclusions. Firs...

In this paper we investigate the impact of ethnic German immigration on the German labour market. Ethnic German immigrants are exogenously allocated to local labour markets upon arrival in Germany. The ethnic German immigrant inflows therefore serve as a natural experiment of immigration, avoiding the typical endogeneity problem of immigrant inflows with regard to local labour market conditions...

F ossil fuels provide substantial economic benefits, but in recent decades, a series of concerns have arisen about their environmental costs. In the United States, for example, the Clean Air Act in 1970 and 1977 addressed concerns over the emissions of so-called conventional pollutions, notably airborne particulate matter, by imposing fuel economy standards on vehicles and regulations to reduce...

Powell's(1984) Censored Least Absolute Deviations (CLAD) estimator for the censored linear regression model has been regarded as a desirable alternative to maximum likelihood estimation methods due to its robustness to conditional heteroscedasticity and distributional misspeci ̄cation of the error term. However, the CLAD estimation procedure has failed in certain empirical applications (e.g. Hon...

United States prisons release more than 600,000 individuals each year. Within three years of release, 50 percent of released prisoners are back in prison. Work release has the potential to serve as a structured re-entry into the mainstream labor market. In an economic model of crime, an improvement in legal labor market opportunities should reduce criminal activity. After using a variety of eco...