Assumptions,behavioral findings,and policy analysis

Recent empirical studies indicate that many standard economic assumptions used in policy analyses do not reflect people's preferences and choices as well as modifications based on behavioral findings. Differences in the areas of time preferences and the large disparity between valuations of gains and losses illustrate the issues and the distortions that present analyses likely impose.     

Reviews

Gilbert Rozman, Seizaburo Sato & Gerald Segal, eds, Dismantling Communism: Common Causes and Regional Variations. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, x + 405 pp., £28.50. Ben Fowkes, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993, xv + 228 pp., £40.00

Stephen Whitefield, Industrial Power and the Soviet State. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 279 pp; £35.00

Steve H. Hanke, Lars Jonung & Kurt Schuler, Russian Currency and Finance: A Currency Board Approach to Reform. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, xvi + 222 pp., £35.00.

Gregory S. Alexander & Grazyna Skapska eds, A Fourth Way? Privatization, Property, and the Emergence of New Market Economies. New York, London: Routledge, 1994, xxiii + 336 pp., £40.00 h/b, £14.99 p/b.

John and Carol Garrard (eds), World War II and the Soviet People. Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990. New York: St Martin Press, 1993, 268 pp. $45.00.

John Barber & Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II. London and New York: Longman, 1991, xiii + 252pp

Richard Debo, Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918–1921. Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1992, xiii + 502 pp., £42.00.

Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, xvii + 312 pp., $24.95, ;19.95.

Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993, xi + 289 pp. £32.50 h/b, £12.99 p/b.     

How do municipal mayors and councillors communicate with other levels of government? Evidence from a multi-level survey of Canadian elected officials

While past research suggests that informal processes of dialogue play an important role in municipal intergovernmental relations in Canada, we currently know very little about their character and frequency. Who do local elected officials communicate with, and through which channels? And which municipal voices carry the most weight in these conversations? This article answers these questions from the perspective of elected politicians themselves, using a pan-Canadian survey of municipal, provincial, and federal elected representatives. Our findings confirm that municipal intergovernmental relations depend heavily on informal institutions and personal relationships and highlight the key role of municipal mayors as spokespersons and advocates for municipalities in Canadian federalism.     

Hospital selective contracting without consumer choice: What can we learn from Medi‐Cal?

In the selective contracting era, consumer choice has generally been absent in most state Medicaid programs, including California's (called Medi-Cal). In a setting where beneficiary exit is not a threat, a large payer may have both the incentives and the ability to exercise undue market power, potentially exposing an already vulnerable population to further harm. The analyses presented here of Medi-Cal contracting data, however, do not yield compelling evidence in favor of the undue market power hypothesis. Instead, hospital competition appears to explain with greater consistency why certain hospitals choose to contract with Medi-Cal while others do not, the trends in inpatient prices paid by Medi-Cal over time, and the effect of price competition on service cutbacks, such as emergency room closures. Copyright 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

People and Performance: Challenges for the Future Public Service— the Report from the Wye River Conference

What are the key challenges for the public sector at present, and what will the future public service look like if it is to meet these challenges? These questions were put to public‐sector leaders at a conference at the Wye River Plantation in June 1999. The leaders agreed on aspects of a broad vision for the future and the urgent need for a detailed debate on the transition questions that arose.     

Policy analysis in the presence of distorting taxes

This article first describes the new literature in environmental economics on the so‐called “double‐dividend” and then explores its implications for a broad range of economic issues. This literature reveals that in a second‐best, general‐equilibrium setting, environmental measures raise costs and prices and thereby reduce the real wage. This rise in the cost of living reduces slightly the quantity of labor supplied in an already highly distorted labor market, giving rise to losses in social welfare that can be large relative to the basic gains from a cleaner environment. These losses can be offset to some extent by using revenues (if any) from the environmental programs to reduce existing taxes on labor. This same line of analysis applies to many programs and institutions in the economy that raise the cost of living: tariffs and quotas on imports, agricultural price‐support programs, monopoly pricing, programs of occupational licensure that limit entry, and many others. Thus, traditional, partial‐equilibrium benefit‐cost analysis appears, in many instances, to have unwittingly omitted from the calculations a potentially quite significant class of social costs. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy and Management.     

Sensitive Method for the Confident Identification of Genetically Variant Peptides in Human Hair Keratin

Recent reports have demonstrated that genetically variant peptides derived from human hair shaft proteins can be used to differentiate individuals of different biogeographic origins. We report a method involving direct extraction of hair shaft proteins more sensitive than previously published methods regarding GVP detection. It involves one step for protein extraction and was found to provide reproducible results. A detailed proteomic analysis of this data is presented that led to the following four results: (i) A peptide spectral library was created and made available for download. It contains all identified peptides from this work, including GVPs that, when appropriately expanded with diverse hair-derived peptides, can provide a routine, reliable, and sensitive means of analyzing hair digests; (ii) an analysis of artifact peptides arising from side reactions is also made using a new method for finding unexpected modifications; (iii) detailed analysis of the gel-based method employed clearly shows the high degree of cross-linking or protein association involved in hair digestion, with major GVPs eluting over a wide range of high molecular weights while others apparently arise from distinct non-cross-linked proteins; and (v) finally, we show that some of the specific GVP identifications depend on the sample preparation method.