4,209 research outputs found

    Building and Defining Behavioral Economics

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    Contains fulltext : 95156.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)George Loewenstein, a prominent behavioral economist, recalls thatIn 1994, when Thaler, Camerer, Rabin, Prelec and I spent the year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, we had a meeting to make a kind of final decision about what to call what we were doing. Remarkably, at that time, the name behavioral economics was not yet well established. I actually advocated “psychological economics,” and Thaler was strong on behavioral economics. I'm kind of glad that he prevailed; I think it's a better, catchier, label, although it creates confusion due to association with Behaviorism. (G. Loewenstein, personal email to author, June 16, 2008

    The educational effectiveness of bilingual education

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    Bilingual education is the use of the native tongue to instruct limited Englishspeaking children. The authors read studies of bilingual education from the earliest period of this literature to the most recent. Of the 300 program evaluations read, only 72 (25%) were methodologically acceptable - that is, they had a treatment and control group and a statistical control for pre-treatment differences where groups were not randomly assigned. Virtually all of the studies in the United States were of elementary or junior high school students and Spanish speakers; The few studies conducted outside the United States were almost all in Canada. The research evidence indicates that, on standardized achievement tests, transitional bilingual education (TBE) is better than regular classroom instruction in only 22% of the methodologically acceptable studies when the outcome is reading, 7% of the studies when the outcome is language, and 9% of the studies when the outcome is math. TBE is never better than structured immersion, a special program for limited English proficient children where the children are in a self-contained classroom composed solely of English learners, but the instruction is in English at a pace they can understand. Thus, the research evidence does not support transitional bilingual education as a superior form of instruction for limited English proficient children

    The IPHAS catalogue of H alpha emission-line sources in the northern Galactic plane

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    We present a catalogue of point-source H alpha emission-line objects selected from the INT/WFC Photometric Ha Survey (IPHAS) of the northern Galactic plane. The catalogue covers the magnitude range 13 <= r' <= 19.5 and includes Northern hemisphere sources in the Galactic latitude range -5 degrees < b < 5 degrees. It is derived from similar to 1500 deg(2) worth of imaging data, which represents 80 per cent of the final IPHAS survey area. The electronic version of the catalogue will be updated once the full survey data become available. In total, the present catalogue contains 4853 point sources that exhibit strong photometric evidence for Ha emission. We have so far analysed spectra for similar to 300 of these sources, confirming more than 95 per cent of them as genuine emission-line stars. A wide range of stellar populations are represented in the catalogue, including early-type emission-line stars, active late-type stars, interacting binaries, young stellar objects and compact nebulae. The spatial distribution of catalogue objects shows overdensities near sites of recent or current star formation, as well as possible evidence for the warp of the Galactic plane. Photometrically, the incidence of Ha emission is bimodally distributed in (r' - i'). The blue peak is made up mostly of early-type emission-line stars, whereas the red peak may signal an increasing contribution from other objects, such as young/active low-mass stars. We have cross-matched our H alpha-excess catalogue against the emission-line star catalogue of Kohoutek & Wehmeyer, as well as against sources in SIMBAD. We find that fewer than 10 per cent of our sources can be matched to known objects of any type. Thus IPHAS is uncovering an order of magnitude more faint (r' > 13) emission-line objects than were previously known in the Milky Way

    Testing protoplanetary disc dispersal with radio emission

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    We consider continuum free–free radio emission from the upper atmosphere of protoplanetary discs as a probe of the ionized luminosity impinging upon the disc. Making use of previously computed hydrodynamic models of disc photoevaporation within the framework of extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) and X-ray irradiation, we use radiative transfer post-processing techniques to predict the expected free–free emission from protoplanetary discs. In general, the free–free luminosity scales roughly linearly with ionizing luminosity in both EUV- and X-ray-driven scenarios, where the emission dominates over the dust tail of the disc and is partial optically thin at cm wavelengths. We perform a test observation of GM Aur at 14–18?GHz and detect an excess of radio emission above the dust tail to a very high level of confidence. The observed flux density and spectral index are consistent with free–free emission from the ionized disc in either the EUV- or the X-ray-driven scenario. Finally, we suggest a possible route to testing the EUV- and X-ray-driven dispersal model of protoplanetary discs, by combining observed free–free flux densities with measurements of mass-accretion rates. On the point of disc dispersal one would expect to find an M?2? scaling with free–free flux in the case of EUV-driven disc dispersal or an ?* scaling in the case of X-ray-driven disc dispersa

    The Benefits of Being Economics Professor A (and not Z)

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    Alphabetic name ordering on multi-authored academic papers, which is the convention in the economics discipline and various other disciplines, is to the advantage of people whose last name initials are placed early in the alphabet. As it turns out, Professor A, who has been a first author more often than Professor Z, will have published more articles and experienced afaster growth rate over the course of her career as a result of reputation and visibility. Moreover, authors know that name ordering matters and indeed take ordering seriously: Several characteristics of an author group composition determine the decision to deviate from the default alphabetic name order to a significant extent.performance measurement, incentives, economists, name ordering

    The Effect of Consumption Based Taxes on Agriculture in the United States

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    Recently several proposals have arisen to replace the current income tax system in the United States with a consumption based or Fair Tax. This study investigates the effect of such a consumption based tax on agricultural investment decisions using stochastic optimal control to model the investment decision at the farm level. The results indicate that a consumption tax rate of 25.9 percent would be equivalent to the income tax rate paid by very large producers in the United States.Public Economics,
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