Monitoring State Fulfillment of Economic and Social Rights Obligations in the United States

This article adapts the economic and social rights fulfillment index (SERF Index) developed by Fukuda-Parr, Lawson-Remer, and Randolph to assess the extent to which each of the 50 US states fulfills the economic and social rights obligations set forth in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It then extends the index to incorporate discrimination and examines differences in economic and social rights fulfillment by race and sex within each of the states. The overall SERF Index score varies between states from below 70% to almost 85%, with wider variation on some of the six substantive rights that comprise the overall SERF Index score. The findings reveal limited sex discrimination but pronounced race discrimination.     

COMPETITION BETWEEN CABLE TELEVISION AND DIRECT BROADCAST SATELLITE: THE IMPORTANCE OF SWITCHING COSTS AND REGIONAL SPORTS NETWORKS

We use aggregate firm-level price data and other related demographicvariables to examine the cost of switching between cable televisionand direct broadcast satellite (DBS). We find that switchingcosts appear to affect consumers' desire to switch from oneservice to another. We then use observation-specific dummy variablesthat stratify cable price to examine whether consumer behaviorvaries depending on the size of price change. We find that,when quality-adjusted prices for basic cable services increasesubstantially, subscribers will switch from cable to DBS, presumablyat the point at which the price change is larger than the costof switching. However, we find some evidence that DBS penetrationis suppressed in areas where cable operators offer regionalsports channels.     

Assessing legal change: Recidivism and administrative per se laws

Tougher sanctions for drunk driving have often been advocated as a means to reduce this problematic behavior. In a test of administrative per se laws as a specific deterrent, the impact of introducing such laws is evaluated by examining reconviction rates of offenders before and after implementation of the Jaw in three states (North Dakota, Louisiana, and Mississippi), with comparisons made to a fourth state during the same time period that did not implement an administrative per se law (California). Recidivism is analyzed using survival models. The results indicate that administrative per se laws reduce rates of reconviction in some situations but not in others. In particular, if implementation of the law is accompanied by changes in overall rates of license actions, the specific deterrent effects of the law may be outweighed by the increased efficiencies of this judicial process.     

An empirical estimate of the precision of likelihood ratios from a forensic-voice-comparison system

An acoustic-phonetic forensic-voice-comparison system was constructed using the time-averaged formant values of tokens of 61 male Chinese speakers' /i/, /e/, and /a/ monophthongs as input. Likelihood ratios were calculated using a multivariate kernel density formula. A separate set of likelihood ratios was calculated for each vowel phoneme, and these were then fused and calibrated using linear logistic regression. The system was tested via cross-validation. The validity and reliability of the results were assessed using the log-likelihood-ratio-cost function (C(llr), a measure of accuracy) and an empirical estimate of the credible interval for the likelihood ratios from different-speaker comparisons (a measure of precision). The credible interval was calculated on the basis of two independent pairs of samples for each different-speaker comparison pair.