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Human
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FY 1994 AwardsThis list provides information about awards on topics related to the Human Dimensions of Global Change made by programs in the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE), Division for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research (SBER), and the Office of Polar Programs from October 1993 through September 1994. Information about awards is from the NSF awards database.
9310459 Ronald Abler Assoc. of American Geographers $8,500 Supplement to award. Total Geography and Regional Science Program support - $25,324. WORKSHOP ON GEOGRAPHIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO GLOBAL CHANGE RESEARCH Workshop and follow-up workshop to explore the ways that human and physical geographers, along with scientists from other disciplines, can better identify important research needs related to the human dimensions of global change. The workshop was designed to facilitate more active involvement of researchers in research on global change while also encouraging meaningful collaborations among scientists.
414719 Alberto Alesina NBER Roberto Perotti Enrico Spolaore $102,710 A 12 month award supported by the Economics Program. DEMOCRATIZATION, SECESSION AND FISCAL INSTITUTIONS This research project studies the interaction between fiscal policy decisions and the definition of boundaries of political jurisdictions. The project considers several aspects of this general problem by focusing on different types of fiscal policy, i.e., public good provision, insurance, redistribution, on different types of institutions, i.e., dictatorial regimes versus democratic ones, different voting rules, and other institutional differences.
9410612 Luc Anselin WV University Research Corp $82,289 A 24 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program and the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program. NEW METHODS FOR THE EXPLORATORY ANALYSIS OF GEOGRAPHICAL DATA This project will provide new statistical tools for exploring geographical relationships throughout space and over time, taking better advantage of the large data bases that are being constructed and organized in geographic information systems (GIS). The proposed research consists of a rigorous assessment of the statistical properties of the new methods by means of a series of carefully designed simulation experiments to be illustrated in a case study of the human impacts of global change.
9209892 Kenneth Arrow Stanford University $30,778 Third-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $221,441. COSTLY INFORMATION AND INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL RESOURCE ALLOCATION This project studies the role of information in individual decision making and in the structure of markets by which resources are reallocated socially. Enhanced information on individual decision making processes will be helpful in constructing a general model for economic activity.
9307588 Peter Ashton Harvard University Nicholas Brokaw Ricardo Godoy $127,481 Second-year increment of a 48 month award supported by the Cultural Anthropology Program. Award total - $335,926. THE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ON THE EXTRACTION OF NON-TIMBER FOREST PRODUCTS BY THE SUMU INDIANS OF NICARAGUA. The goal of this project is to measure, for the first time, the impact of economic development on the extraction of non-timber forest products by the Sumu Indians of Nicaragua. Non-timber forest products (NTFP) such as medicinal plants, fish and game animals and certain vegetable resources are strongly affected by economic development, particularly development related to the wide-spread destruction of rain forests through commerical logging and clear cutting. Through a two and a half year study in both a poor and a rich Sumu village, this research should provide fundamental information on the human, ecological, and economic impacts of development in the rain forest.
9223015 Jonathan Baron U of Pennsylvania $46,289 Second-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Decision, Risk, andManagement Science Program and the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program. Award total - $94,396. THE MEASUREMENT AND EXPRESSION OF VALUES FOR PUBLIC GOODS This research will conduct questionnaire studies designed to isolate crucial features of WTP, or 'willingness to pay' for public goods. The measurement of people's values for public or non-marketed goods - or for the loss of these goods - is a very important issue in benefit-cost anlaysis for public policy decisions and regulations and in an assessment of liability for environmental damage. In order to overcome a number of biases and irrelevant influences, this study will use alternative elicitation methods, such as direct ratings of goods.
9110926 Robert Barro University of Rochester Xavier Sala-i-Martin $111,947 Third-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total $312,069. ECONOMIC GROWTH A key economic issue is whether poor countries or regions tend to grown faster than rich ones: are there automatic forces that lead to convergence over time in levels of per capita income and product? The purpose of this project is to analyze this question in three contexts. First, personal income across the U.S. states from 1840 to the present; second, gross domestic product for over 70 regions of 6 European countries from 1950 to 1985; and third, national accounts and other variables for about 100 countries from 1960 to 1985. A theoretical framework will be developed which is based on extensions of the neoclassical growth model.
9320504 Robert Barro University of Rochester Xavier Sala-i-Martin $99,853 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $304,875. DETERMINANTS OF ECONOMIC GROWTH This research will focus on the key economic issue of the determinants of long-run economic growth. The work will include theoretical models, empirical estimation and testing of theories, and the construction and distribution of related data sets. One data set contains information for 138 countries on educational attainment by level and sex, national accounts, demographics, political variables, government activities, and foreign trade. Another data set will include figures on income and migration across the U.S. states and for regions of the major European countries, Japan, and Canada. Research will examine growth rates of GDP and its relationship to initial human capital, the propensity to invest, and the effect of government policies on a country's long-run economic position.
9210161 Marianne Baxter University of Rochester $72,862 Second-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $190,726. INCOMPLETE MARKETS AND MACROECONOMICS LINKAGES The research investigates the importance of international financial market linkages for macroeconomic activity. It is divided into three related topics, each part designed to improve our understanding concerning financial markets and fiscal policies in an international setting. (1) Financial Markets and Macroeconomic Linkages, (2) The International Transmission of Fiscal Policy, and (3) Incomplete Asset Markets and Optimal Portfolio Choice, including an investigation of welfare effects of the observed deviations from the optimal portfolio under incomplete markets.
9321506 Geert Bekaert Stanford University $79,293 First-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $145,662. EXCHANGE RATE DYNAMICS IN STOCHASTIC MONETARY MODELS This research develops several exchange rate models in an attempt to explain various empirical regularities of exchange rates without having to resort to market inefficiency arguments. This study examines how well the models fit actual exchange rate data. Three models will be developed which concentrate on high variability of exchange rates and how this variability changes over time, the predictability of international asset returns and the effect of the credibility of monetary policy on asset markets, and reasons for differences in prices and consumption across countries.
9122672 Steven Berry Stanford University Ariel Pakes $118,448 Second-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $235,312. EMPIRICAL MODELS OF THE AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY AND IMPLICATIONS OF A CARBON TAX The purpose of this project is to develop a methodology for empirically analyzing differentiated product industries, and apply it to study the changes that have occurred in the U.S. automobile industry over the last two decades. The general methodology has wide applicability, but the specifics of the model are tailored to auto industry application. Therefore, the project will have both a methodological and empirical output. The empirical goals are twofold: to come to a broad understanding of the changes that have occurred in the U.S. auto market during the last twenty years, and to provide an evaluation of public policies that have been suggested for this industry. Of particular interest is the impact of environmental regulation in the form of carbon tax on the auto industry. The research also focuses on three methodological concerns: to develop a tractable model of consumer behavior that allows for reasonable substitution patterns, to incorporate the presence of product characteristics which are unobserved by the researcher, and to account for the process by which firms choose the characteristics of new products.
9320819 Richard Bilsborrow U of NC Chapel Hill $82,256 A 24 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program. COLONIST LAND USE AND DEFORESTATION IN THE ECUADORIAN AMAZON The goal of this research is to investigate the factors influencing land use and deforestation by migrant settlers in the rainforest of the Ecuadorian Amazon. This project builds on a previous grant from NSF which was used to collect critical information from 419 colonist households. This project will analyze those data using Tobit estimation procedures to explain the proportion of settlers' lands devoted to different categories of land use. These proportions will be explained using three major sets of variables: (1) household demographic and socio-economic characteristics, (2) natural resource conditions on the farm, and (3) the policy and institutional context. Results of the research should contribute to the development of more appropriate policies to promote sustainable development in the region.
9308733 Olivier Blanchard Massachusetts Institute of Tech. $81,902 Second-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $159,107. TRANSITION IN EASTERN EUROPE The purpose of this project is to develop an analytical framework for analyzing and better understanding the transition of the centrally planned Eastern Europe economies to a market-oriented system. Throughout the adjustment process, these many businesses have turned to state subsidies since they have been unable to undertake the necessary restructuring to make them efficient and productive enterprises. As a result, unemployment throughout the region has increased dramatically because privatization has not proceeded quickly enough to offset declines in public the sector industries. This project is important because it will develop a much needed analytical framework for assessing policy options for attaining needed reform.
9320826 George Borjas NBER $64,659 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $193,349. THE ECONOMICS OF IMMIGRATION AND ETHNICITY The purpose of this research is to determine and analyze the role of immigration and ethnicity in the U.S. economy. The underlying theme of the various aspects of this project is that immigration has both short and long-run effects, and that these effects are much better understood by grounding the analysis in a solid microeconomic, theoretical foundation. The empirical analysis will use a number of data sets, including the newly released 1990 Public Use Sample of the U.S. Census, the National Longitudinal Surveys, and the General Social Surveys.
9213309 Gardner Brown University of Washington Gary McClelland William Schulze $117,864 Second-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $233,913. ELEMENTS OF VALUING BIODIVERSITY Before one can attempt to preserve the most valuable species, one must understand the ideas of people concerning the determinants of a species' value. Since the perceived importance of biodiversity and species preservation is substantially driven by non-use values, observation of market behavior is precluded and survey research methods are required. The first phase of this study uses in-depth interviews and laboratory experiments to thoroughly study people's mental models of the species domain. The survey instrument will be refined in the second phase and the survey will be administered to a national sample in the third and final phase of the research. The survey results will provide policy makers with quantitative and defensible estimates of the public's values for ecosystems and species preservation.
9406270 David Campbell Michigan State University $9,950 A 12 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program. DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: FOOD SHORTAGE COPING STRATEGIES AMONG RESETTLEMENT AREA HOUSEHOLDS IN ZIMBABWE Food shortage coping strategies, as part of food security, are dependent upon the interplay of complex linkages between society and environment. This analysis is based on a regional political ecology framework that facilitates the linkage of human and environmental variables and views the environment as a dynamic and interactive component of rural societies. Comparative field work will be conducted in two resettlement areas of Zimbabwe, and in adjacent non-resettlement areas, which will serve as control groups. This study will contribute important new insights into the understanding of food shortage coping strategies in the context of resettlement lands and it will assess the efficacy of regional political ecology as a research framework.
9223830 Timothy Cason U of Southern California $28,607 Second-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economcs Program. Award total - $ 85,503. A LABORATORY STUDY OF PRICE FORMATION AND LEARNING IN AUCTION MARKETS By addressing two major shortcomings in existing laboratory data this study will provide new empirical evidence on the price formation process. The price formation process serves as a central component of economic theory and has been subject to varying degrees of uncertainty over the years. The conduct of this study involves the use of four sets of laboratory experiments which incorporate random values (private cost and value parameters drawn independently each period from announced uniform distributions.) In addition, the proposed experiments incorporate wide institutional variations since the price formation process also depends on market institutions. Data analysis will be used to test three promising theoretical approaches to the study of price formation found in recent literature.
9404387 Caron Chess Rutgers U - New Brunswick Kandace Salomone $10,000 A 12 month award supported by the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program. NATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON RISK COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH AND PRACTITIONERS' NEEDS This award is made under the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program to contribute to the funding of a workshop on a research agenda for risk communication that is responsive to the needs of practitioners and agencies which conduct risk communication activities. The purpose of this national symposium for invited researchers and practitioners is to consider a research agenda for the pursuit of communications among different social and cultural groups, approaches to environmental decision making, and evaluation of risk communication. The U.S Environmental Protection Agency also contributed to this workshop.
9216028 Graciela Chichilnisky Columbia University $60,306 Second-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $118,152. ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES IN AN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT Through consideration of the political economy of developing countries, restricted vs. unrestricted international trade markets, and resource use patterns of a global environment, this study will address critical issues related to the market behaviors which guide the global economy for environmental resources. The research is based on the analysis of a general equilibrium model of North-South trade where the environment appears as a renewable common property resource such aquifers, fisheries and forests, whose by-products are used as inputs to the production of traded goods. The data will be provided by simulating the model for representative examples, and used as a foundation for evaluating tax or quota policies in comparison with changing definitions of property rights for environmental resources.
9122509 William Clark Harvard University $34,733 Third-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program. Award total - $133,499. COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: SOCIAL LEARNING IN THE MANAGEMENT OF GLOBAL RISKS This collaborative research project seeks to understand the nature and determinants of long term changes in humanity's competence to deal with global environmental risks. It views that competence as a product of possible interactions among various domestic, state, and international actors: in particular the scientific community, non-governmental organizations, private sector interests, national governments, the media, and international organizations. The principal theoretical goal of the project is to establish the major processes by which such changes occur, the determinants of those processes, and how both change with time. Special attention is paid to determining the extent to which cumulative learning, as opposed to changing bureaucratic structures, interest configurations, or power alignments, underlies observed changes in management.
9320754 Robert Clemen U of Oregon - Eugene $47,303 9320662 Robert Winkler Duke University $48,074 A 12 month collaborative research award supported by the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program. COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH IN DECISION, RISK, AND MANAGEMENT SCIENCE: DEPENDENCE ASSESSMENT FOR RISK AND DECISION ANALYSIS Expert judgments are key inputs in important decision-making problems, and the elicitation and modeling of such judgments are formalized in methodologies such as decision analysis, risk analysis, and expert systems. As problems grow in complexity (e.g., multi-systems modeling for regional and global environmental change), with many variables of interest, assessing and modeling expert knowledge about relationships among variables becomes more crucial. The overall goal of the proposed research is to develop procedures for dependence assessment in practical expert-knowledge encoding situations. In this one-year pilot project, the researchers will focus primarily on the mathematical development and dependence assessments. This initial work will provide the basis for the future development of sound assessment procedures and implementable protocols as well as an analytical framework for using those assessments.
9212263 Susan Collins Harvard University $42,170 Second-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $91,086. THRESHOLDS IN THE EXPECTED TIMING OF DISCRETE POLICY CHANGES One intuitively appealing model of how market participants might formulate their expectations is a "Threshold" model in which policy changes are expected to occur when some underlying indicators cross a critical threshold. The contriubtion of this research comes from (1) deriving a Threshold model to explain the actual and expected timing of discrete policy changes; (2) developing a methodology for empirically extimating and testing the Threshold model; and (3) suing the Threshold model to study a number of discrete policy changes.
9308604 John Comaroff University of Chicago $11,000 A 12 month award supported by the Law and Social Science Program. DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: TRAVERSING LEGAL CHANNELS: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE KENT/CALAIS EUROREGION This project will examine the impact of European Community (EC) law on the development of new patterns of local/regional politics operating inside and outside member-states' national borders. Focusing on the British Kent and French Calais Transmanche Euroregion (1990), the main objective is to present an analytical ethnography of how local attitudes and allegiances to Britain have shifted in Kent over the past five years, overcoming strong British nationalism, and resulting in the region's joining with Calais as a new trans-border territory of Europe sanctioned by EC law. The result of the study will be a thorough description and analysis of how a shared (transnational) legal system is used as both a technical tool to bring about change and an ideological framework to mediate processes of political, economic, and cultural affiliation.
9224440 Thomas Cooley University of Rochester Gary Hansen $86,044 Second-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $173,347. CAPITAL UTILIZATION AND POLICY REFORM IN DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM ECONOMICS Modern business cycle theory starts with the view that growth and fluctuations are not distinct phenomena to be studied using separate mdoels. The first part of this project focuses on significant differences found in production data between the properties of output variation at the individual plant level and output variation at the aggregate level. This project constructs a general equilibirum model economy that is consistent with the features of long run growth observed in aggregate time series, but in which production takes place at individual plants that operate in a manner consistent with the micro evidence. The project studies the properties of the aggreate fluctuations exhibited by the model and compares them with the cyclical properties of a standard business cycle model. This research promises both methodological and substantive contributions to our understanding of economic growth.
9321298 Susan Cozzens Rensselaer Polytech Instit $3,265 A 12 month award supported by the Ethics and Values Studies Program. DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: AGENDA SETTING IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ON GLOBALWARMING This dissertation research explores the roles of interest groups in agenda setting for federally supported research. The focus is the case of environmental research on global warming.
9319842 Douglas Davis Virginia Commonwealth U. $15,071 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $54,070. COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH ON LABORATORY MARKETS WITH POSTED PRICES: DISCOUNTS, SEARCH COSTS, AND DEMAND SHOCKS This project involves the design and execution of laboratory experiments on cooperation in infinitely repeated games. Insights gained from laboratory data on the behavioral significance of cooperation in dynamic multi-stage games may aid in predicting when cooperative outcomes will arise in naturally occurring markets.
9318653 James Davis National Opinion Research Center Thomas Smith $192,049 First-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Sociology Program. INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SURVEY PROGRAM: AMERICAN PARTICIPATION This is the American portion of an international project to administer identical surveys in a number of nations, focusing on attitudes toward environmentalism and on women, work, and the family. The International Social Survey Project (ISSP) will be carried out in the United States and twenty other countries: Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, and Sweden. The module on women, work, and the family will chart changing gender roles, challenges facing the family, the correlates of declining birth rates, and changes in women's labor force participation. The environment module measures attitudes and behaviors related to preservation of the ecology.
9223668 Angus Deaton Princeton University $77,309 Second- year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $ 200,488. TRYING TO UNDERSTAND COMMODITY PRICES Trends and volatility in primary commodity prices present policy makers in developing countries with problems of both macroeconomic and microeconomic management, problems that will not be resolved until there exists a coherent and empirically suppoted theory of the determination of the prices of primary commodities. This research builds on previous analysis of nonlinear dynamic programs and will enrich the basic model to the point where it is either consistent with the evidence, or is clearly rejected. The theory will be extended to accommodate growth in output, more complex supply patterns, and the flow of information between crop years.
9121490 Avinash Dixit Princeton University $57,323 Third-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $ 168,807. INVESTMENT UNDER UNCERTAINTY: THEORY AND APPLICATIONS Recent research on investment decisions under uncertainty has highlighted the importance of option values, or of waiting to resolve some undertainty and gather more information. This work is mostly restricted to 'classical' economic enviornments, with perfect risk markets and without economies of scale or externalities. This project extends the analysis to 'non-classical' settings, using corresponding extensions of techniques of stochastic optimal control. The more general theory will then be applied to some important policy issues.
9311507 Kathryn Dominguez NBER $81,283 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. CENTRAL BANK POLICY AND EXCHANGE RATES The purpose of this research is to analyze the effects of central bank policies, including both monetary policy and sterilized foreign exchange rate intervention, on the behavior of foreign exchange rates. This project will bring together literature on G-5 central bank interventions over the last seven years to examine the effects of U.S. and German monetary intervention policies on the dollar-mark exchange rate since the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system.
9413355 Allan Drazen U of MD - College Park $64,104 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $191, 947. THE EFFECTS OF UNCERTAIN POLICY ON ECONOMIC DYNAMICS Many countries are currently instituting sweeping changes in economic policy in areas such as liberalization of trade and capital flows, monetary and fiscal policy, greater reliance on markets,and privatization. The purpose of this project is to analyze the effects of uncertainty about the timing and nature of shifts in economic policy on the dynamics of consumption, investment, asset accumulation, andcapital flows: and to determine how variability of policy may influence these dynamics.
9321901 Riley Dunlap Washington State Univ. $143,395 A 27 month award supported by the Sociology Program. GLOBAL PERCEPTIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS: ANALYSIS OF RESULTS FROM A 24 NATION SURVEY This is a study of global perceptions of environmental problems. Results from a 1992 international survey of representative samples of adults in 24 economically and geographically diverse nations will be analyzed in detail. Three broad types of investigation will be conducted: (1) Various analyses of individual-level survey data to test models of the nature and sources of environmental concern within nations, as well as across nations; (2) Results from the foregoing analyses will be used to create aggregate-level measures for use in aggregate-level model testing at the national and regional levels; (3) Potential links between national-level characteristics and individual-level perceptions will be investigated using a variety of contextual analysis techniques.
9309935 Jonathon Eaton NBER Samuel Kortum $96,459 Second-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $245,250. INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY DIFFUSION The relationship between technology and international economic growth is one of the central issues in the economics of global change. Through a theoretical and econometric analysis, the investigators will analyze the process of technological innnovation at the national level and the diffusion of technologies across countries. One component of the project is the development of a macroeconomic model of a set of interdependent economies that incorporates technical progress and capital accumulation at the national level as explanations for growth, and that allows for varying degrees of international mobility of both capital and technology. The model is adapted and used for econometric estimation and simulation.
9321032 Maria Enchautegui Urban Institute Duncan Chaplin $48,968 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $154,032. FEMALE INTERNAL MIGRANTS: TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE DETERMINANTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF FEMALE GEOGRAPHICAL MOBILITY IN THE U.S. Despite the fact that women in the United States have migration rates comparable to those of men and that women comprise about half of the moves, there is a dearth of research on women migrants. The purpose of this research is to analyze female migration in the United States and to begin filling this gap in our understanding of the decision of women to migrate and the consequences for them of migration. Results from this project will illuminate debates of gender inequality, affirmative action, and welfare migration.
9320728 Charles Engel NBER $54,597 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $160,044. AN INVESTIGATION OF REAL AND NOMINAL EXCHANGE This research investigates real exchange rate behavior in several industrial countries in order to examine the effectiveness of real exchange rate theories in explaining the movements of relative prices. The study uses a large data set covering a wide range of goods and countries. The data take into account transportation costs, marketing costs, and industry structure. The results from the project will provide a valuable contribution to the empirical real exchange rate literature with potential insight into the expected change or relative price behavior under European and North American market integration.
9310366 Barbara Entwisle U of NC Chapel Hill Ronald Rindfuss Peter Bearman Stephen Walsh $70,499 A 12 month award supported by the Sociology Program. THE INTEGRATION OF SOCIAL AND SPATIAL DATA IN THE STUDY OF SOCIAL CHANGE, POPULATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT This is a study of change in settlement patterns, road systems, cropping patterns, and deforestation in Nang Rong, Thailand. The project will capitalize on the analytic power of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology through an assessment of spatial and social co-occurrences. It will merge satellite data with existing social data collected in 1984 and 1988, and begin descriptive analyses relating social and environmental change.
9320483 David Featherman Soc Sci Res Council $39,920 This is a 6 month award co-funded by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) and the Division of Environmental Biology (BIO). BIODIVERSITY IN AFRICA'S HUMAN LANDSCAPE: A WORKSHOP PROPOSAL This workshop, organized by the Social Science Research Council in cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution and the African Academy of Sciences, brings together African and U.S. scientists from a range of disciplines to examine the question: how has human occupancy of African landscapes affected the biodiversity found within those landscapes? Active researchers from the biological sciences, social sciences, and humanities will consider the relevance of this question and the feasibility of pursuing research initiatives to answer it. The specific research interests of the participants include agriculture and drought, forestry, agroforestry, and rangelands management. The workshop will strengthen collaboration internationally (between US and African scientists), regionally (among scientists in different parts of Africa), and across disciplinary boundaries.
9310369 David Featherman Soc Sci Res Council $110,000 Second-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. Award total - $330,000. Renewal of NSF Awards SBR-8912971 and SBR-9110730. NSF contributions to this project through FY 1994 total $569,684. SUPPORT FOR THE SSRC COMMITTEE FOR RESEARCH Since 1989, the Committee for Research on Global Environmental Change of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) has facilitated research and training on human-environmental interactions that are at least continental in scale and that occur over time periods ranging from decades to centuries. This renewal award continues support for core operations for the committee for three additional years. Through continued operation of the SSRC Committee for Research on Global Environmental Change, major interdisciplinary research and training activities designed to attract more scientists to the study of longer-term, wide-ranging human-environmental interactions will continue.
9320817 Robert Feenstra NBER Robert Lipsey Harry Bowen $129,327 First-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $236,019. GLOBAL CHANGES IN TRADE: DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Understanding the sources of international trade and the impact of policy on trade continues to be an important topic of academic and government inquiry. Essential to this study are large data sets on trade flows and other aspects of trade that span countries, industries, and time and not only span them but are comparable across countries, industries, and time. The purpose of this project is to construct, assemble and concord a number of large data sets on international trade and on country commodity and industry characteristics that determine trade flows, and make them widely available. The project will provide well-annotated and convenient trade sets in machine readable form on U.S. imports and exports, world trade, world prices, country resource supplies, and industry inputs.
9320817 Raquel Fernandez NBER Richard Rogerson $82,817 Second-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $157,715. EDUCATION, INCOME DISTRIBUTION AND POLITICAL ECONOMY Education is central to a large number of issues that economists consider important: the distribution of income, the growth rae of an economy, and the determination of a country;s comparative advantage are a few prominent examples. Despite this, factors that determine the nature of the educational system have received relatively little theoretical attention. The purpose of this project is to develop models to study the endogenous determination of educational policy. It will do so by studying various interactions among income distribution, the political system, and key attributes of the educational system.
9308256 Fereidun Fesharaki Ctr Cult & Tech Interchange $10,000 A 12 month award supported by funds provided by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. SECOND U.S./ JAPAN WORKSHOP ON GLOBAL CHANGE: ENVIRONMENTAL The needs for expanded research on global environmental change has highlighted the need for greater cooperation and collaboration among scientists in different nations to address problems that affect the world as a whole. Under the auspices of the U.S.-Japan Science and Technology Agreement, the Committee on Earth and Environmental Sciences (CEES) is sponsoring a series of bilateral workshops to examine ways that scientists and engineers from both the U.S. and Japan can address significant research problems.
9309428 Baruch Fischhoff Carnegie Mellon University Lester Lave Patrick Stroh Hadi Dowlatabadi M. Granger Morgan $99,999 A 15 month award supported by the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program and the Economics Program. WHAT IS A WORLD WORTH? VALUE ELICITATION FOR GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS Global environmental problems pose difficult and far reaching decisions for societies. As with other visible and important societal problems, attempts to elicit and incorporate views of the public in the decision making process are often frustrated by available survey techniques. This research advances an approach which allows the public to be more involved in this process. The research will provide fundamental methods and tests to develop and demonstrate a new tool in preference and valuation elicitation through focused investigations of the different steps in the elicitation process.
9321029 James Flynn Decision Sci Res Instit Paul Slovic $100,000 A 12 month award supported by the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program. NATIONAL RISK SURVEY This project will design a prototype for a national survey covering a wide range of risk-relatedtopics including risk perceptions, comparative evaluations of societal, technological, environmental, and health risks, and attitudes and opinions about risk management policies and strategies. The research will address questions about demographic characteristics, economic status, worldviews, and political values. The survey instrument will be designed to allow researchers to develop and test theories and models of decision making pertaining to a wide range of societal risk issues, public policy formulation, and analysis.
9310969 Marilyn Fogel Carnegie Inst of Wash $100,000 First-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program and the Directorate for Geosciences. COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: DROUGHT IN THE AUSTRALIAN OUTBACK: MILANKOVITCH AND ANTHROPOGRENIC FORCING OF THE AUSTRALIAN MONSOON The Lake Eyre Basin, an interior basin covering one sixth of the Australian continent, receives the vast majority of its precipitation from cyclonic disturbances associated with the summer monsoon. The Australian summer monsoon is strongly influenced by the Asian winter monsoon, the intensity of which is controlled by changes in solar radiation caused by variations in the Earth's orbit around the sun (Milankovitch effect). This award supports research designed to develop an improved geochronology of lake full events as a first order test of the proposition that January insolation over the Tibetan Plateau can be a proxy for the intensity of the Australian monsoon.
9413334 Don Fullerton Carnegie Mellon University $52,991 A 12 month award supported by the Economics Program. GARBAGE, RECYCLING, AND ECONOMIC INCENTIVES The disposal of household garbage entails both resource and environmental costs, but most residents in the United States still pay no fee per bag for garbage collection. A few communities around the country now charge a price per bag, but not enough is known to estimate household demand for the collection and recycling of garbage as function of price, household income, and demographic variable. The purpose of this project is to collect the necessary data to statistically estimate the household demand for garbage collection and recycling. A new data set will be assembled from almost 200 cities covering a three year period. This research will allow municipal officials to more accurately predict the change in demand for disposal services that would result from a change in the price per bag charged for garbage collection.
9320258 Kathryn George University of Idaho Douglas Lind $24,996 A 12 month award supported by the Ethics and Values Studies Program. A PILOT STUDY FOR AN ISSUE-ORIENTED DATABASE FOR ETHICS, TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT This is a pilot study to develop an on-line issue oriented bibliographic database on ethics, technology, and the environment. The goal of the project is to develop a user friendly database for people who want to make sound social judgments about environmental issues in the Northwest. The database should be useful to humanities teachers and scholars, students, and the media by giving them access to information, commentaries, reviews, and summaries about the scientific aspects of these issues.
9441318 Richard Gonzalez U of Washington $43,267 A 12 month award supported by the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program. This award continues support for this research with total support of $143,783. DECISIONS UNDER UNCERTAINTY: SOURCE DEPENDENCE This project studies how individuals make decisions under uncertainty. The research seeks to characterize risk attitudes as a function of the events (the weighting function) rather than characterizing risk attitudes as a function of the utility curve.
9321119 Michael Goodchild U of CA - Santa Barbara $40,000 First-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program. Award total - $70,000. SUPPORT TO FACILITATE COLLABORATION OF U.S. SCIENTISTS WITH EUROPEAN SCIENTISTS PARTICIPATION IN EUROPEAN SCIENCE FOUNDATION'S GISDATA PROGRAMME In 1988, the National Science Foundation (NSF) provided support that led to the establishment of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), a consortium dedicated to research, education, and outreach with respect to the advancement of geographic information science. Through this award, the NCGIA will encourage collaboration between U.S. and European scientists to understand and remove impediments to integration of geographic information from different disciplines and from multiple national and regional sources. These activities also will develop improved methods for database design, especially those currently inhibited by problems in data integration.
9311671 Robert Gordon Northwestern University $71,707 Second-year increment of a 48 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $215,339. ASPECTS OF PRODUCTIVITY MEASUREMENT This ongoing research project takes a comprehensive approach to the study of the post-1982 slowdown in the growth rates of average labor productivity and multi-factor productivity. Its focus combines three dimensions - (1) long-run historical, (2) cross-country, and (3) individual industry studies - and attempts by studying these dimensions singly and in combination to develop an improved degree of understanding. The cross-country aspect of the research details industry-by- industry data on productivity for other large nations to identify the largest differences between these other countries and the U.S. The study will also involve a detailed industry study of the U.S. construction sector which has exhibited negative measured productivity growth since the mid-1960's. 9310362 Lawrence Goulder NBER $43,955 Second-year increment of a 48 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $136,387. EFFECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL TAXES IN THE PRESENCE OF OTHER TAXES In recent years, there has been a significant increase in interest in the potential of taxes as instruments of environmental policy. This study involves the application of a dynamic general equilibrium model to evaluate major potential environmental tax initiatives, including alternative methods for revenue replacement and alternative treatments of internationally traded goods. Considerations will include effects on aggregate income and consumption and on industry profits and output. Counterfactual simulation will be used to clarify and quantify the relationships between the magnitudes of pre-existing taxes and the costs of achieving emissions reductions. Econometric and other work will be conducted to improve the empirical foundations of the model.
9320991 M.V. Rajeev Gowda U of Oklahoma Thomas James Morris Foster Robert Rundstrom $123,942 A 36 month award supported by the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program. HEALTH-RELATED RISK PERCEPTIONS IN DISTINCTIVE SOCIAL GROUPS The behavior of individuals with respect to risks to their health or to the environment may be significantly affected by how they perceive the risks. In this study, ethnographic methods and a survey instrument will be developed that integrate psychometric and cultural factors in risk perception to capture a richer framework for addressing the risk responses of diverse cultural groups. This study will contribute to the understanding of risk perception and its implications for health and environmental policy designed to manage these risks.
9308295 Clive Granger U of Cal San Diego $63,403 Second-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $170,241. MODELLING NON-LINEAR RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LONG-MEMORY This project develops new procedures for estimating non-linear models of "long-memory" processes, that is relationships between values over long periods. These new procedures can be applied to many questions in macro, financial and labor economics. They are particularly relevant for modeling relationships between macroeconomic and weather variables, e.g. global warming, as these variables are slow moving and the relationships are likely to be non-linear. In order to provide a class of techniques appropriate for modeling non-linear relationships between long variables, this project will develop new definitions and tests of long-memory in the non-linear framework and specify new techniques for testing for linearity and for overcoming the "data-missing" properties of some of the techniques.
9320081 Clive Granger U of Cal San Diego $54,538 A 12 month award supported by the Economics Program. ECONOMICS AND DYNAMICS OF DEFORESTATION IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON REGION In the past decade policy makers have become increasingly concerned with the environmental and atmospheric consequences of the deforestation of the world's tropical forests. Unfortunately, high level decision-makers have had very little hard data with which to form their policies regarding the utilization of forest resources. This project intends to use a newly available economic and ecological dataset for the Amazon region in Brazil to analyze the long-run economic and environmental consequences of various forestry-related activities under a variety of regimes. By providing a better understanding of how many factors interact over time to affect both the environment and the economy, this study will provide policy makers with valuable information and will contribute to the effort to balance human economic needs with environmental concerns.
9410190 Edward Green U of Minnesota - Twin Cities Antonio Merlo $76,601 First-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $156,282. MICROECONOMICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND POLICY ANALYSIS Recent developments in economic theory make it possible to address a broad range of policy questions. Such developments include models of bargaining, optimal decisions and equilibrium under risk, and optimal provision of incentives to individuals who possess private information. This project applies such models to two issues: (1)how democratic institutions emerge through a focused analysis of the association between stable democratic governments and sustained economic growth. This work includes the evaluation of a new theory by the investigators on how parliamentary governments emerge. And, (2) the relationship between gender, fertility, education, and growth both at a theoretical and an empirical level through examination of the relationship between women's status and economic development, particularly on the role of fertility and education. This aspect of the project will result in a two-sex bargaining model of endogenous growth.
9222973 Gene Grossman U of Minnesota - Twin Cities Elhanan Helpman $110,294 Second-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $233,556. POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE RELATIONS This project studies the formation of policies that affect international trade and the global environment. A political economy model has been developed in which elected officials respond to political incentives. This model will be extended and applied to consider such problems as the equilibrium structure of protection, the government's choice of trade policy instruments, the interaction between trade and environmental policies, and the interaction between governments of different countries in both cooperative and non-cooperative settings.
9307474 R. Dale Guthrie Univ. of Alaska- Fairbanks $24,964 Second-year of a two year award. Total award - $49,928. THE CHRONOLOGY AND ECOLOGY OF POSTGLACIAL COLONIZATION OF THE AMERICAS Human colonization of the Americas has been an important and controversial issue. This is particularly true with regard to the Clovis expansion shortly before 11,000 years ago. New dates suggest that one large mammal, the moose, followed the same route as humans from Siberia into Alaska. Since human bones have never been found in either region from this time period, the presence of large numbers of moose bones offers an opportunity to analyze the timing and ecological limits of these co-travellers. Sixty radiocarbon dates from northeastern Siberia, Alaska and the Yukon will provide an indirect indicator of the extent of the woodland environments and human/moose co-expansion into the New World.
9224817 Robert Harriss U of New Hampshire $10,000 A 24 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program. DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: URBAN ENERGY USE AND GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS IN THE ASIAN-PACIFIC REGION Changes in energy use in rapidly growing cities of Asia may have strong impacts on future emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This doctoral dissertation research project will assess the ways that human activities alter chemical and energy flows to and from the landscape and atmosphere in Cebu City, a rapidly growing industrial center in the southern Philippines. A household energy-use study will be conducted in about 600 households, with particular attention on changing patterns of energy use that impact on biological and atmospheric systems. *** 9404722 Gillian Hart U of Cal Berkeley $3,950 A 12 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program. DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: INDIGENOUS AGROFORESTRY AND INDUSTRIAL TIMBER PLANTATIONS IN WEST KALIMANTAN, INDONESIA The Indonesian state and timber companies are responding to calls for a more sustainable forest use by superimposing timber plantations on landscapes that indigenous communities have long managed according to distinctive agroforestry traditions. This study will investigate the complex transformations taking place in the vicinity of expanding plantations, their effects on local populations' own uses of land and forest resources, and the changing ecological conditions of the land and forests themselves. This research will contribute to both theoretical and practical understandings of the tension between commercial interests, state policy, and indigenous populations over the preservation of biological sensitive regions.
9320845 Oliver Hart NBER $63,294 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $185,882. BANKRUPTCY REFORM AND FINANCIAL CONTRACTING This project continues research on the financial structure of firms and bankruptcy reform that were stimulated by and are relevant to the political and economic changes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. This project will study theoretical and practical questions raised by bankruptcy procedure. This study pursues a number of extensions and elaborations of a new bankruptcy procedure developed by the investigator. The investigator will also continue work on entrepreneurial debt contracts, corporate financial structure and the theory of the firm.
9309610 Geoffrey Heal NBER $65,638 First-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $133,247. INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL AGREEMENTS This research will further develop previous research on the incentives that countries have to join and to remain in international agreements on the abatement of global pollution. This research will identify and model ways in which the introduction of abatement policies by one country could reduce the abatement costs of another and provide reinforcement mechanisms. The research will then take two initial steps towards empirically implementing the ideas of critical coalitions and reinforcement mechanisms: 1) A preliminary attempt to identify alternative minimum critical coalitions for the avoidance of global climate change, and 2) a preliminary identification of reinforcement mechanisms.
9311881 J. Vernon Henderson NBER $97,615 A 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. URBAN AIR QUALITY The purpose of this research is to analyze the impact of air quality regulation between 1970 and 1987 on (1) urban location and productivity for a variety of manufacturing industries, and (2) air quality across metropolitan areas and between central cities and suburbs. Equations for 1987 concerning location, employment growth, and productivity will be estimated directly, based on current and historical industrial environments and regulation, accounting for issues of simultaneity, censoring, and selectivity. Hedonic wage functions capturing the link between air quality and wages will be estimated, accounting for issues of simultaneity and joint wage-land rent determination. This project will shed new light on the economic effects and impact on urban air quality of air pollution regulations.
9321471 Alan Heston U of Pennsylvania Robert Summers $111,597 First-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program and the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program. Award total - $226,093. CONTINUING RESEARCH ON INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS OF OUTPUTS AND PRICES This grant provides continued support for the development of a system of real national accounts that extends the national accounting system of each country to make possible comparisons across space as well as time. This research project will contribute to the value of benchmark studies in which prices of identically specified goods are collected in many countries by improving the comparability of the data, by expanding the data to 150 countries over a time span of 35 plus years, and through the estimation of important analytical variables not included in conventional national accounts data sets. The resulting very large, internationally comparable data set, termed the Penn World Table (PWT), contains less detailed information but provides a long time series with much more complete worldwide coverage.
9308334 Kenneth Hinkel U of Cincinnati $174,987 A 48 month award supported by SBER and the Office of Polar Programs. MONITORING HEAT TRANSFER ACROSS THE ACTIVE LAYER ABOVE PERMAFROST IN ALASKA The effects of global warming are expected to be amplified and observable first in high latitudes. Current models predict that rapid warming will combine with increases in summer rainfall and winter snowfall in northwestern North America, conditions that may result in rapid degradation of permafrost throughout large parts of Alaska and northwestern Canada. This project will continue research in areas of discontinuous permafrost and expand it into Arctic areas where permafrost is continuous. This research adds to general knowledge about the role of non-conductive processes within the buffering active layer above permafrost, especially as that layer responds to changes in temperature and precipitation. Expansion of this line of research into the upper layers of permafrost will increase understandings of processes in this zone and will provide tests of the feasibility for new monitoring procedures that might have utility in many similar locales.
9320044 Charles Holt University of Virginia $22,739 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $76,596. COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH ON LABORATORY MARKETS WITH POSTED PRICES: DISCOUNTS, SEARCH COSTS AND DEMAND SHOCKS The posted-offer trading institution is one in which sellers post prices on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Posted-offer results provide a basis of comparison with trading in less structured double-auction experiments. This project analyzes issues related to three stylized facts from posted-offer experiments: (1) explicit price-fixing conspiracies which can raise prices in laboratory posted-offer settings, (2) the poor response of posted-offer markets to demand shocks, and (3) the generally weak competitive tendencies of posted-offer markets which suggest that prices might be raised sharply by the addition of small imperfections.
9441329 Harold Jacobson U of Michigan Ann Arbor $25,334 Supplement to NSF award 9223158. Total support - $160,333. INTERNATIONAL LAW AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE International accords to advance the protection of the global environment are newly prominent in international relations. This study will gather basic data about how and why ten countries entered into five environmental accords, what they have done to implement them, and whether they are complying with the international obligations created by these accords. These findings will be related to a set of legal, social, political, and economic factors that are likely to affect implementation and compliance. The five accords to be considered address not only the familiar topics of conservation of natural resources and pollution but also the larger emerging topics of global environmental changes, such as ozone depletion and possible climate change.
9320973 Adam Jaffe NBER $114,999 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $284,998. THE SOURCES AND EFFECTS OF KNOWLEDGE SPILLOVERS Knowledge spillovers are key to understanding the process of technological progress, how it contributes to economic growth, and how policy levers can be used effectively to foster growth through innovation. The contribution of this project comes from assembling a comprehensive database on patents and citations made by those patents. The database is used to map the flows of knowledge across time and among sectors, geographic regions, and different institutions such as firms, universities and government labs, and to measure the "basicness" and appropriability of particular inventions or the portfolio of inventions held by particular firms, sectors or regions. These datasets will be used to explore a number of important questions at the heart of the economics of technological change and crucial to technology policy.
9411008 Piotr Jankowski University of Idaho $49,715 9411021 Timothy Nygeres U of Washington $126,462 A 36 month collaborative research award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program. COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH ON SPATIAL DECISION MAKING USING GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION TOOLS Locational conflicts arise when different people or groups give different weights to various factors when deciding where to locate facilities or resources. The development of spatial decision-support systems (SDSSs) for use within geographic information systems (GISs) has offered new approaches for solving spatial problems and making locational decisions. This collaborative research project will provide insights into the use of a SDSS for groups in order to understand how and why such a group system affects decision-making processes and outcomes. This project will contribute valuable new insights into the dynamics of collaborative decision making and the use of information technology by adding substantive knowledge about multi-phase group decision-making processes.
223473 L. Lewis Johnson Vassar College $57,062 Second-year of a four year award supported by the Arctic Science Program in the Office of Polar Programs. Award total - $124,006. THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURAL COMPLEXITY IN THE SHUMAGIN ISLANDS The prehistory of the Aleutian Islands is poorly known and there is little understanding of the development of cultural complexity in this region. This archaeological investigation involves the excavation and analysis of structures and middens in the Shumagin Islands. The project is designed to determine how many of the structures were occupied simultaneously and what variation exists in larger and smaller structures. In addition to determining the distributions of implements and prestige goods, the excavations will render food remains indicative of diet. Combined with this new information, overall patterns of site densities in the Aleutians will enable estimates of prehistoric Aleutian populations.
9223571 Derek Jones Hamilton College $21,571 Second-year increment of a 36 month collaborative research award suported by the Economics Program. Award total - $79,932 COLLBORATIVE RESEARCH: ORGANIZATIONAL ADAPTION AND SURVIVAL DURING REFORM: A PANEL STUDY OF BULARIAN ENTERPRISES. This is a study of manufacturing enterprises in Bulgaria, 500 of them state owned and 100 new private companies, that will examine factors associated with success and failure over a four-year time span. Data from the first wave of this longitudinal survey have already been collected, and subsequent waves will add data from surveys and official sources. The study will test sociological theories of organization ecology that predict success of enterprises is shaped by the age of the enterprise, its size, structural inertia, dynamics of population density, environmental imprinting, niche width, and r-versus-K strategies. The study will also apply theories from enoclassical economics and from several competing economic approaches.
9320904 Larry Jones NBER $58,664 9321325 Rodolfo Manuelli U of Wisconsin Madison $53,448 First-year increment of a 36 month collaborative research award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $175,992. COLLBORATIVE RESEARCH ON PUBLIC POLICY AND GROWTH This project consists of three topics all concerned with the relationship between public policy and economic growth. The first focuses on the effectiveness of collective choice mechanisms in implementing policies that determine pollution in a growth context. Analysis will include the relationship between rising income and environmental controls, the consequences of the irreversibility of pollution effects and the impact on intergenerational distribution of welfare. The investigator will also consider the effect of free trade on the overall level of pollution, as well as its allocation across countries. The second focus of inquiry concerns the effects of the design of systems to protect property rights such as patents, copyrights, and trade secret laws on the incentives to innovate and the consequences for the overall rate of development of the economy. The third topic analyzes the effect of instability on the growth rate of the economy.
9122469 Boyan Jovanovic New York University $67,997 Third-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $203,139. GROWTH AND LEVEL OF AGGREGATES There are three parts to this study of economic growth and the level of economic aggregates. The project develops a general theory of market participation based on two different strands of theoretical research: imperfectly coordinated trading and strategic complementarities in production. The theory is extended to allow people to improve their jobs over time, to permit organizations such as firms to play a coordinating role, and to reflect different sectoral locations within markets. The importance of this inefficiency will be quantified and measured empirically. The second part develops a growth theory in which learning is the engine of growth. Information theory is used to derive the properties of the relationship between learning, technology, and economic growth. The third part explores the idea that a society well-endowed with general skills will more easily take advantage of new technologies by learning them faster. Skilled labor will concentrate on new technologies, a result consistent with arguments in the old-product style cycle literature.
9307845 Susan Kaplan Bowdoin College $24,130 Second-year of a three year award supported by the Arctic System Science Program. Award total- $234,056. BOWDOIN COLLEGE LABRADOR ARCHAEOLOGY PROJECT 1993-1995 Archaeologists have constructed a broad overview of the culture history of the Labrador Inuit using archaeological and ethnohistorical data, and have identified environmental, historical, demographic, and socioeconomic factors that might have affected cultural developments during the past 600 years. Of particular interest has been the evolution of distinctive 18th century communities characterized by large centrally located settlements with communal houses, long- distance trade networks, explicit displays of wealth and strong leadership. Different hypotheses have been posed to explain this development including climate change, population growth, and socioeconomic changes growing out of contact with Europeans. This three-year excavation project is designed to test these hypotheses using settlement materials. The results will contribute to our knowledge of climate change and human adaptation in the Arctic and relate to global change issues.
9406722 Roger Kasperson Clark University $8,500 A 15 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program. DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: RECONFIGURATIONS OF THE COMMONS - EQUITY, PROPERTY REGIMES AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE IN THE LIANGSHAN MOUNTAINS OF CHINA, 1930-1990 This project will study how equity concerns enter into the structure and performance of an institutional format that has long been utilized for managing common-pool resources, namely common property resource management systems. The research will involve an historical and comparative study of two different ethnic groups, the Yi (the minority group) and the Han (the majority) in a poor agrarian region located in the environmentally-degraded Liangshan Mountains situated in Sichuan Province, China. This study will analyze how cultural differences in the conception of equity enter into and shape institutional rules, producing differential effects on the environmental and social outcomes within the same mountain landscape.
9320555 Roger Koenker U of Ill Urbana - Champaign $54,467 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $177,143. QUANTILE REGRESSION Quantile regression is gradually developing into a comprehensive approach to the statistical analysis of linear and non-linear response models. This research will include methods of inference for quantile regression, nonparametric quantile regression and smoothing, and economic applications. This comparative study of quantile regression methods will examine versions of different approaches currently available in econometric packages to assess the available methods for constructing confidence intervals and for linear hypothesis testing.
9320247 Robert Kohler U of Pennsylvania Helen Rozwadowski $10,000 A 6 month award supported by the Science and Technology Studies Program. DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: SCIENCE IN THE DEEP: AMERICAN AND BRITISH CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF OCEANOGRAPHY This study involves the examination of the origins of oceanography in the United States and Britain. By examining how the science of oceanography rose out of the these two countries, in different cultural and economic contexts, the investigator seeks to expand our understanding of how this science developed to become such an important field of study.
9412973 Sheldon Krimsky Tufts University Roger Wrubel $89,998 A 24 month award supported by the Ethics and Values Studies Program. THE GENESIS OF AN ENVIRONEMENTAL RISK OVER ESTROGENIC CHEMICALS: THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND PUBLIC POLICY This research project will examine scientific, ethical, and social factors in the evolution of policy responses to a controversial hypothesis linking environmental estrogenic chemicals to a variety of animal and human disorders and pathologies. The research involves collection and analysis of relevant scientific and popular literature and interviews of scientists, regulators, policy makers, and representatives of non-governmental organizations. The results of this study will contribute to the theoretical discussion of risk selection and communication by tracking and examining a potentially high-profile risk event.
9320825 Kala Krishna NBER $60,556 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $186,740. TRADE POLICY, IMPLEMENTATION, AND OUTCOMES This research will develop theoretical models of trade in an effort to understand the different effects of trade policy, especially when markets are imperfectly competitive. This study focuses on three main areas where the details of policy implementation are important: (1) an investigation of export quotas through the development of a simple model in order to ascertain whether transferability of licenses is welfare enhancing, (2) issues of market access and whether or not assurances of a minimum market share for U.S. products helps or hurts its competitiveness in the long-run, and (3) analysis of the rules of origin used in Free Trade Agreements to determine the effects of eligibility for preferential treatment of the Free Trade Area on different implementation procedures and its significance for the transferability of permits.
9414253 Per Krusell U of Pennsylvania $159,084 A 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. POLITICAL EQUILIBRIUM AND ECONOMIC GROWTH This project addresses four aspects of the political economy of growth: (1) how politico-economic institutions explain time series data on the income and wealth distributions, capital accumulation, and tax rates; (2) the political economy of the economic and political transition taking place in Eastern Europe; (3) the effects of political uncertainty on economic growth; and (4) the development of new conceptual and computational tools for politico-economic equilibrium theory. This project develops a dynamic model that formalizes the important properties of economic and political transitions with particular focus on the political economy of adoption of new production techniques and costly investment in human capital.
9412606 W. Henry Lambright Syracuse Research Corp. $74,592 An 18 month award supported by the Ethics and Values Studies Program. POLICYMAKING FOR GLOBAL CHANGE RESEARCH: THE ROLE OF CEES This project will prepare a case history of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The USGCRP is one of the largest and most extensive research efforts in the federal government with participation from eleven agencies and a budget of $1.5 billion. This study focuses on political and policy processes, examining the roles of key actors in governmental processes that require networking and strategies. A major issue in this effort is the negotiation of boundaries between science and policy -- and scientists and politicians. Understanding the forces that have shaped USGCRP will provide some lessons for national research policy for other endeavors.
9320695 David Levine U of CA Los Angeles $61,757 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $183,537. ASSESSING AND IMPROVING THEORETICAL PREDICTIONS OF THE STRENGTH OF ECONOMIC FORCES This project develops and experimentally tests a rigorous theory that makes quantitative predictions about the strength of economic forces. Such predictions can effectively direct attention to those types of problems and situations where policy can make an important difference. This project uses data from experimental economics to validate the theory and improves the predictive power of the theory in assessing situations where economic forces are extremely weak, such as the case with the changes unfolding in the former Soviet Union.
9320937 Edna Loehman Purdue Univ Research Fdn $50,000 A 12 month award supported by the Economics Program. DESIGN OF COST SHARING MECHANISMS This project is supported under the Career Advancement Award for Women Program (CAREER). The grant will enable the investigator to work with a leading scholar at the University of Arizona to learn the techniques of experimental economics. The goal of this research is to design and compare alternative cost sharing mechanisms for public goods. The tool of experimental economics will be used to compare alternative mechanisms in terms of social costs and equity for environments with varying group size, cost conditions, and initial endowments.
9412671 John Lofland U of Cal Davis $4,571 A 12 month award supported by the Sociology Program. DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: LAND CONSERVATION AS A STRATEGY FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT. THE NORTH-SOUTH ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICT This research will focus on the influence of developed countries on the establishment of land conservation areas and policies in developing countries. The research will be conducted through a combination of quantitative analysis of cross-national data on land conservation schemes and intensive analysis of three case study countries: Costa Rica, Kenya, and Brazil. By examining responses to land conservation appeals, this project will offer insight into what causes some countries to respond favorably to such proposals while others reject them.
9223220 Charles Manski U of Wisconsin Madison $68,950 Second-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program and the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program. Award total - $224,158. IDENTIFICATION PROBLEMS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES This research continues the investigator's program of work on identification problems in the social sciences. Four projects are planned: (1) continued research on the selection problem; (2) analysis of identification in the presence of errors in data; (3) the study of identification of endogenous social effects; and (4) investigation of the use of subjective data to identify personal expectations. The goal of this project is to develop methods that will permit economists to rethink their research conventions in order to allow for the collection and analysis of subjective data on expectations and preferences.
9321325 Rodolfo Manuelli Stanford University $53,448 First-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH ON PUBLIC POLICY AND GROWTH This project consists of three topics all concerned with the relationship between public policy and economic growth. The first focuses on the effectiveness of collective choice mechanisms in implementing policies that determine pollution in a growth context. At issue is whether or not the rising income associated with the process of development will result in more stringent environmental controls. In the process of analyzing this issue, the consequences of the irreversibility of pollution effects and the impact on the intergenerational distribution of welfare are analyzed. A related issue is the effect of free trade both on the overall level of pollution, as well as its allocation across countries. The second topic concerns the effects of the design of systems to protect property rights such as patents, copyrights, and trade secret laws on the incentives to innovate and the consequences for the overall rate of development of the economy. The third topic analyzes the effect of instability on the growth rate of the economy. Among the issues to be investigated is the impact of volatile tax and spending policies on the average level of growth through the effect on investment.
9222956 Thomas McGovern CUNY City Univ New York Thomas Amorosi $202,684 Second-year increment of a 60 month award suppported by the Anthropology program and the Office of Polar Programs. Award total - $695,429. NORTH ATLANTIC BIOCULTURAL COORDINATION AND RESEARCH PROJECT Scandinavian settlers colonized the islands of the North Atlantic 500 years before Columbus. They introduced European economies and culture into fragile Arctic terrestrial and marine ecosystems and over time suffered the consequences of ecological damage, human population decreases and extinctions. The Nordic archaeological, historical and ecological data on these human impacts is unique in the circumpolar world and highly relevant to our understanding of global change. This five year project seeks to coordinate, integrate and, through case studies, analyze the complex multi- disciplinary data from the North Atlantic region. This effort will greatly enhance the value of individual research projects in 10 countries, and is of direct relevance to applied studies of fisheries and agriculture in the north.
9311572 Robert McGuckin NBER Ariel Pakes Wayne Gray Russell Cooper Ricardo Caballero $171,411 A 12 month supplement supported by the Economics Program. EXPANDING ACCESS TO CENSUS DATA: THE BOSTON RESEARCH DATA CENTER (RDC) AND BEYOND This project greatly expands researchers' access to confidential longitudinal microeconomic data. Currently, these data are available only to researchers working at Center for Economic Studies (CES) offices at the headquarters of the U.S. Bureau of the Census near Washington, D.C. The project will establish a pilot Research Data Center (RDC) at the Boston regional office of the Census Bureau. The project will use the experience gained at the Boston pilot RDC to develop plans (including sources of funding) for establishing RDCs at other secure locations, possibly including universities, and preliminary evaluation methods to provide researchers with remote access to the data.
9210407 Gilbert Metcalf Moorhead State University Kevin Hassett $39,030 A 12 month award supported by the Economics Program. TAX POLICY, IRREVERSIBILITY, AND ENERGY CONSERVATION INVESTMENT The purpose of this research is to develop a model to analyze the determinants of household energy conservation decisions. Conservation investment decisions are modeled in the presence of energy price uncertainty, and the actual patterns of household investments during the 1970's and early 1980's are analyzed. The irreversibility of energy related investments creates an option value in postponing investment, given the possiblity that future energy prices could fall sufficiently to make the investment economically unattractive. Using the model developed in the project, investment simulations calibrated to aggregate data will be carried out to explore the pattern of energy conservation investment, and then to inestigate empirically the impact of tax incentives on investment behavior. In addition, different investment patterns by energy conservation category will be analyzed.
9408735 Michael Michlovic Moorhead State University $29,181 An 18 month award supported by the Archaeology Program. RUI: AN EARLY ARCHAIC OCCUPATION ON THE NORTHEASTERN PLAINS This project involves the conduct archaeological excavation at the Rustad Quarry Site which is located in southeastern North Dakota. The site is situated in an active soil quarry and much of it has been destroyed by quarrying work. Excavations have indicated that this site was occupied during the Altithermal period. A team of specialists will analyze the animal bones and lithic material to reconstruct the prehistoric landscape and environment. This research will increase our understanding of the prehistory of the United States through careful study of one of the few sites from the Antithermal period. Research will offer insight into how hunting and gathering societies at a simple level of technology adapted to environmental change.
9311303 Gifford Miller U of Colorado Boulder $96,628 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program and the Directorate for Geosciences. Award total - $307,251. COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: DROUGHT IN THE AUSTRALIAN OUTBACK: MILANKOVITH AND ANTHROPOGENIC FORCING OF THE AUSTRALIAN MONSOON The Lake Eyre Basin, an interior basin covering one sixth of the Australian continent, receives the vast majority of its precipitation from cyclonic disturbances associated with the summer monsoon. This award supports research designed (1) to improve understandings of the 'Milankovitch effect', the Asian winter monsoon, the intensity of which is controlled by changes in solar radiation, as a proxy for the intensity of the Australian monsoon; (2) to reconstruct past aridity and vegetation; and (3) to test the potential impact of vegetation change on climate with the high-resolution modeling.
9211260 Jonathan Morduch Harvard University Terry Sicular $111,526 Second-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $215,867. ECONOMICS OF DISASTER RELIEF: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM RURAL CHINA This study has three objectives related to disaster relief programs: (1) to set out the basic economic principles of disaster relief programs; (2) to apply the theoretical insights and analyze the disaster relief system in China; and (3) to build on the first two objectives through the extension of a collection of household data sets initiated in Shandong Province of China. The data set will allow the application of new econometric techniques to test hypotheses about the extent of consumption smoothing and risk taking in face of possible disasters.
9321367 William Nordhaus Yale University $77,385 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $224,807. MODELING THE ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE This research will continue work that will contribute to a better understanding of the underlying economic impacts and policies concerning global environmental problems. The investigators have already developed an aggregate, dynamic integrated climate and economic model to determine the efficient strategies for controlling greenhouse gases. A major objective of this project is to disaggregate the model and extend it to encompass a multi-regional framework. This will enable the authors to investigate efficient greenhouse-gases control strategies at the regional level and to analyze economic losses arising from non-cooperative behavior among regions. The second objective is to develop a better methodology for estimating the impact of global warming on U.S. agriculture using the results of general circulation climate models.
9409641 Maurice Obstfeld NBER Kenneth Rogoff $113,854 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $ 353,980. GLOBAL MACROECONOMIC INTERDEPENDENCE: NEW FOUNDATIONS The aggregative sticky-price model remains the dominant paradigm as the conceptual framework for international macroeconomic policy analysis, despite apparent shortcomings. Significant advances in the study of flexible-price international macro models merit some attention, but thus far these models have had virtually no policy impact. The goal of this project is to incorporate new models of price rigidities into an explicitly intertemporal framework that can adequately account for the long and short run effects of current account imbalances, government fiscal deficits, and their impacts on other macroeconomic variables.
9319835 Elinor Ostrom Indiana U Bloomington James Walker Roy Gardner $134,717 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Political Science Program. Award total - $306,163. THE COMMONS: INSTITUTIONS, HETEROGENEITIES, TIME DEPENDENCIES AND LOCAL/GLOBAL NESTING Individuals jointly using a Common Pool Resources (CPRs) are assumed to face a social dilemma, often called the tragedy of the commons, in which individually rational resource users ignore the external harm they impose on other users, leading to outcomes that are not rational from the perspective of the group. Using a theoretical and empirical approach with foundations in game theory, field studies, and experimental methods, the authors' previous research addressed numerous questions related to the allocation issues that surround CPRs. The current investigation extends this previous work by examining behavioral regularities in more complex (more realistic) laboratory and field environments. In particular, the proposed research begins the process of examining behavior in environments with the following attributes: time dependencies; multiple equilibria; heterogeneities; and, local/global nesting.
9409990 Christina Palmer U of Cal Irvine M. Spence $14,458 A 12 month award supported by the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program. RISK PERCEPTION, DECISIONS, AND CROSS-CULTURAL ISSUES This Research Planning Grant (RPG) addresses the complex relationships between ethnicity and risk perceptions. Cross-cultural research on models of risk perception is vital to the validity and generalizability of all research on risk perception and decision making. The research will involve analysis of the Simplified Conjoint Expected Risk (SCER) model across different ethnic and cultural groups.
9310921 Nancy Peluso Yale University Peter Vandergeest $154,996 Second-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Law and Social Science Program. Award total - $350,000. PROPERTY, RESOURCES, AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF LEGAL SYSTEMS This project will investigate the links between transformations in local and national property relations and the construction of nation states in Southeast Asia. The research will describe and explain the reasons for similarities in outcomes which conform to global models, the reasons for variation within these similarities across the study region, and the sources of conflict over property issues. The project will focus on sites in Thailand (never colonized), Malaysia (colonized by England), and Indonesia (formerly under Dutch law), to provide comparisons across three different legal traditions. The project will contribute to empirical and theoretical understanding of the relationship between local property law and practices and global legal and economic processes, and particularly how this relationship affects the allocation of forest and other land resources.
9402225 Patricia Peacock National Academy of Sciences $78,000 First-year increment of a 36 month award jointly supported by SBE and the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO). Award total - $ 234,000. U.S.-NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR SCOPE CORE SUPPORT This award will provide core support to the National Academy of Science (NAS) to manage U.S. scientific participation in the Scientific Committee on Problems in the Environment (SCOPE), a committee of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). This award will allow U.S. scientists who comprise the U.S. National Committee for SCOPE, and supporting staff at the NAS, to continue their involvement in international projects coordinated by SCOPE on sustainable development, biodiversity, and the effects of increased ultraviolet radiation on biological systems.
9309940 George Perry Brookings Institution William Brainard $75,000 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $225,000. BROOKINGS PANEL ON ECONOMIC ACTIVITY This grant provides continued support for a series of annual conferences on macroeconomics. Past conferences have made a significant contribution to the testing of empirical implications of new theories as well as the use of relevant theory to analyze policy issues of current interest. The conference series will continue to encourage the writing of empirically oriented papers by both established and promising young economists. In addition, the series will continue to serve as a forum for communication among economists from the different schools of macroeconomic thought.
9122142 Peter Phillips Yale University $74,550 Third-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $229,387. MODELLING ECONOMIC TIME SERIES UNDER A BAYESIAN FRAME OF REFERENCE New procedures for analyzing economic time series are developed using Bayesian methods of time series analysis and semiparametric specification testing in cointegrated systems. Empirical applications of these methods include analysis of data on macroeconomic time series for the United States economy, macroeconomic data for Korea, Australia and New Zealand, and some long stock price and dividend series. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the new procedures. The new estimation methods developed by this project shuld improve the quality of empirical economic research on a wide range of problems.
9319808 Robert Pindyck NBER $70,977 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $212,931. INVESTMENT DECISIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY This project consists of two parts. The purpose of the first is to extend the investigator's recent work on irreversible investment decisions under uncertainty. The second part involves applying the ideas and methods developed in the first part to the analysis and design of environmental policy in the presence of irreversibilities. Models will be developed that combine both economic uncertainty and ecological uncertainty with two kinds of irreversibilities that are often inherent in the adoption of an environmental policy: Sunk cost to society resulting from the environmental regulation and sunk benefit in the form of avoided environmental degradation.
9320926 Ellen Pint Rand Corporation $62,909 A 12 month award supported by the Economics Program. WATER DEMAND AND PRICE ELASTICITY DURING THE CALIFORNIA DROUGHT This research proposes to estimate water demand and price elasticities using residential billing data from Alameda County Water District in California over the period 1982 to 1992. The project is important because it promises to produce reliable estimates of price elasticities of water demand that would assist water agency managers in all parts of the United states in assessing the effectiveness of price as a conservation device, the effects of relatively large price increases on household water use and water agency revenues, and the potential consumer surplus losses due to droughts. Moreover, the findings from this study would become increasingly valuable if global climate change caused larger or more frequent water shortages to occur in the U.S.
9310787 Charles Plosser University of Rochester Allan Meltzer $75,000 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $225,000. CARNEGIE-ROCHESTER CONFERENCE ON PUBLIC POLICY The Carnegie-Rochester Conference on Public Policy is designed to foster research and discussion of major policy issues by economists from academia and policy making institutions. A central purpose of the conference is to promote the interaction between these groups in order to improve the economic analysis of policy issues and policy. The specific aims of the conference are to: (1) develop the implications of recent research for policy; (2) bring together economists with different approaches or conclusions to narrow the differences; and (3) to uncover the analysis used by institutions that set policies.
9209441 Charles Plott California Inst of Tech $109,900 Third-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics and Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences Programs. Award total - $329,700. A LABORATORY EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF INSTITUTIONAL INFLUENCES ON POLITICAL ECONOMIC PROCESSES This project continues the development and application of laboratory experimental methods in the broad field of political economy and on the principles that govern the behavior of complicated systems, and on new institutional arrangements that facilitate the efficient use of information and the reducation of uncertainty. This project will play a leadership role in using experimental methods as testbeds for the types of institutional changes currently under consideration as a response to the challenges posed by global environmental change.
9224003 Karen Polenske MIT $77,726 Second-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program. Award total - $154,117. FACTORS BEHIND THE FALL IN CHINA'S ENERGY INTENSITY Energy consumption usually increases at a faster rate than does economic output in developing nations, because almost all major changes associated with economic development (industrialization, increases in the capital-to-labor ratio, substitution of commercial energy for traditional energy, the construction of modern infrastructure, mechanization, and urbanization) require more intensive use of energy. Economic development in China in the 1980s did not follow this pattern, however, as energy intensity actually declined by almost 30 percent from 1980 to 1988. This project will explore this decline in China's energy intensity and will identify those factors that were responsible for the reduction. Improved understanding of the relationship between energy consumption and economic output will provide insight into other countries and will be of special utility to national and regional policy makers who might be able to foster energy conservation while simultaneously spurring economic development.
9320801 James Proctor U of Cal Santa Barbara $15,000 A 6 month award supported by the Ethics and Values Studies Program. THE ETHICS OF HUMAN INDUCED ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE: THE CASE OF PACIFIC NORTHWEST FORESTS This project addresses the ethics of recent human-induced environmental change, considering Pacific Northwest Forests as a case study. The research focuses on the underlying ethics informing public opinions on old-growth forest management in the Pacific Northwest. In this study, public attitudes regarding old-growth forest management will be viewed as surrogates for positions taken on recent and near-future environmental change in Pacific Northwest forests. These attitudes will be analyzed to determine their delineating ethical features, major forms of ethical justification, and resultant approach to moral judgment in terms of balancing ecological and socioeconomic concerns.
9321614 Laura Pulido U of Southern California $18,000 An 18 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program. RESEARCH PLANNING GRANT: THE ROLE OF RACE AND CLASS IN EXPOSURE TO ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS As geographers and other scientists become more aware of the spatial distribution of pollution and other environmental problems, the tendency of minority ethnic and racial groups to have disproportionate exposure to many risks has become more evident. With this Research Planning Grant (RPG), both micro- and macro-level analyses will be examined through a pilot study of the impacts of abandoned toxic-waste sites on African Americans and Latinos in Los Angeles.
9408310 D. Rasmussen Washington University $12,000 A 12 month award supported by the Physical Anthropology Program. DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: MAMMALIAN PALEONTOLOGY AT AN OLD WORLD MONKEY LOCALITY WADI MOGHAR, EGYPT This graduate research project involves the study and excavation of an important site, Wadi Moghar. Following the collision of the African-Arabian and Turkish tectonic plates, the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia allowed certain primates, carnivores, and hoofed animals to appear on the African continent for the first time. This project will result in the collection of more fossil mammals from this important site, an examination of all Moghara museum specimens and important comparative collections, a revision of the systematics of the Moghara mammals, and an investigation of the relationships between these mammals and other early Miocene faunas.
9308836 Mark Rosenzweig U of Pennsylvania Jere Behrman $104,257 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $ 297,915. THE EFFECTS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ON POPULATION GROWTH A major and long-standing issue in the study of the long-term evolution of the global economy is the relative importance of the contributions of economic development and specific human resource program interventions to changes in population growth. This question not only is relevant to the understanding of global change but has a major bearing on a fundamental policy question of how resources should be allocated between programs that directly affect demographic outcomes, such as family planning interventions, and broader development programs that increase overall resources. This project will provide quantitative evidence from the analysis of a unique source of household data from India on the relative importance of economic growth, technological change and increased investments in human resource programs in affecting population growth.
9222758 David Sappington U of Florida $47,524 Second-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $94,966. GLOBAL REGULATION WITH LIMITED INFORMATION Government officials commonly face the difficult problem of having to make important policy decisions in the absence of perfect information about the ultimate impact of their decisions. Often, those affected most directly by government policy have better information than the government about the likely impact of policy decisions. The purpose of this research is to examine the optimal design of public policy in settings where this information is withheld because of financial implications for the bearer of that information. This analysis will explore how government policy makers can best elicit and employ superior information held by individuals and firms who will be affected by government policy. Issues to be examined include protection of industry for global competitiveness, enhanced environmental quality (including use of tradable resource rights) and regulatory policy for public utilities.
9321091 Rakesh Sarin U of Cal Los Angeles $47,124 First-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program. Award total - $95,530. DYNAMIC CONSISTENCY USING NONEXPECTED UTILITY Expected utility (EU) models are the cornerstone of the economic approach to modeling decision making under uncertainty. These models perform poorly, however, in describing decision making under a number of real-world conditions. Non-expected utility models have been developed to address the shortcomings of the conventional approach. Modeling and empirical use of non-EU models are currently constrained because it is believed these models violate desirable behavioral properties. This research will analyze the validity of those beliefs. Non-EU models will be applied to dynamic choice situations. The investigators will explore families of non-EU models that maintain the property of dynamic consistency in these situations. The results are expected to broaden the application of non-EU models to a wide range of modeling environments.
9405356 Randall Schaetzl Michigan State University $8,000 A 12 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program. DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: HUMAN DISTURBANCE AND SITE FACTORS INFLUENCING SPATIAL PATTERNS OF FOREST REGENERATION Studies by geographers, ecologists, and other scientists of the complex dynamics of human-environmental interactions have tended to focus on the initial disturbance of natural systems, but increasing attention now is being given to understanding how the processes through which human activities and natural processes relate during subsequent periods. This doctoral dissertation research project will compare patterns of forest regeneration in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where dense forests were cleared by logging and fires in the late 19th Century. Some of these areas have experienced active regeneration, while others remain "stump prairies" that essentially are devoid of trees. The project will focus both on the factors that have influenced this differential regeneration and on the impacts of vegetative patterns on current soil- development processes. This project will provide valuable information about the importance of specific natural and human factors in the ongoing dynamics of change in forested regions, and it will address important questions regarding processes that alter the composition and quality of soils.
9309699 Jose Scheinkman University of Chicago $53,382 Second-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $160,147. CONTINUOUS TIME STOCHASTIC PROCESSES IN ECONOMICS AND FINANCE To improve understanding of determinants of securities prices and their volatility, this project will study problems with irreversibilities (such as environmental catastrophes), and the development of methods to evaluate and estimate nonlinear continuous time models using discrete time data from financial markets. The two parts of the project are related in that the methods used to study environmental irreversibilities are extensions and applications of the models developed for financial markets. This research should provide theoretical insights as well as numerical methods that could be helpful in evaluating the value of environmental preservation.
9212337 Amartya Sen Harvard University $72,038 Third-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics and Ethics and Values Studies Programs. Award total - $216,114. NORMATIVE ECONOMICS: THEORY AND PRACTICE Analyses of applied problems and the nature of public interest in them is used to motivate and strengthen the examination of the informational base of welfare economics and choice theory. Particular attention is paid to the neglect in traditional welfare economics of considerations other than utility, including freedoms, rights, and liberties, on the one hand, and also health and morbidity, in which the public takes a prominent and direct interest. Similarly, the concentration of traditional rational choice theory on intelligent pursuit of self-interest leads to the neglect of other norms and values, such as loyalty, commitment, and fairness, which figure more prominently in public understanding of actual motives for action. The result of theoretical investigations will be applied to the study of policy responses to global environmental change. Public discussions of environmental issues are often dominated by alleged violations of rights and entitlement, and also by fear of increased illness and death in addition to forecasts of economic disasters.
9321112 Glenn Sheehan Bryn Mawr College Reinhardt Jensen $107,447 First-year of a three year award supported by the Arctic Social Science Program in the Office of Polar Programs. Award total $304,029. ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE NORTH ALASKA COAST: A SETTLEMENT PATTERN STUDY FROM POINT FRANKLIN TO WAINWRIGHT This archaeological project will recover data on prehistoric and historic occupations at Pingasagruk, Point Franklin, once a whaling village on Alaska's Chukchi Sea coast. The rapidly eroding site will provide comparative data on differential access to trade and resources in the region, and provide a background for interpreting the well-documented aboriginal warfare of the past. In addition to analyzing settlement abandonment phases, and the hiatus between the historic and prehistoric settlement at Pingasagruk, poorly documented outlying sites will be recorded using spatial domain radar (SDR). Information on house pit reuse and the vertical and historical extents of middens can be used to refine population estimates and patterns of resource exploitation. The project will be carried out in cooperation with Wainwright village residents and the North Slope Borough. Both students and elders will participate.
9411168 Nanda Shrestha U of Wisconsin Whitewater $117,827 A 30 month award supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program. PEASANTS, POVERTY, AND LAND ENCROACHMENT IN AGRARIAN NEPAL: A POLITICAL ECOLOGY ANALYSIS This study will analyze land encroachment as an ecopolitical struggle over land access and control in agrarian Nepal using a political ecology framework. Nepal, like many developing countries, has arrived at a juncture where mounting peasant impoverishment has come face to face with growing ecological degradation. As in many other agrarian societies, there is a struggle between peasants' day-to-day survival, which includes land access, on one side and the state's dominant interests and environmental sustainability, which leads to land/resource control, on the other. This research will add new insights relevant to the formation of policies for dealing with the growing tension between the protection of critical environments and the social and economic survival of local populations who are dependent on those environments.
9321150 Linda Shitka Southern Ill U Edwards $50,000 A 12 month award supported by the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program. REACTIONS TO VICTIMS OF THE 1993 MISSISSIPPI FLOOD: THE POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF PROVIDING DISASTER RELIEF Should the government insure people who choose to live in high-risk areas such as in flood plains or near fault lines? When is government assistance perceived to be humanitarian versus foolhardy by the public who ultimately pays for it? Using the framework provided by the Contingency Model of Distributed Justice (Skitka & Tetlock, 1992), the author will explore willingness to provide help to victims of the Midwest floods of 1993 as a function of whether the affected communities or individuals took measures to protect themselves (e.g., used community tax dollars to build levees, or as individuals purchased flood insurance). Public attitudes about such assistance will be sampled from across the continental U.S. to evaluate willingness to provide immediate humanitarian assistance, willingness to help rebuild as a function of perceived health of the U.S. economy, attributions of responsibility, and political orientation of the respondent.
9321507 Timothy Smeeding Syracuse University $34,616 A 12 month award supported by the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program and the Economics Program. U. S. PARTICIPATION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF A TRANSNATIONAL DATABASE ON FAMILY INCOME The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) is an international consortium with a membership of 20 nations located in Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Australia. These countries, via their respective funding organizations, cooperatively support a research center in Luxembourg that standardizes and makes available household-based microdata on incomes for representative samples of member nations' populations. These data are used by over 260 researchers worldwide to analyze economic and social policy structure and its effect on such topics as income structure, poverty and income inequality, and wage and earnings differences. Researchers can access the data on-site, or via a computerized telecommunications network. Funds provided by the National Science Foundation constitute United States participation in the consortium.
9223267 Vernon Smith U of Arizona Stephen Rassenti $63,580 A 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. SMART COMPUTER COORDINATED MARKETS FOR PLANNING AND SUPPLY IN ELECTRONIC POWER NETWORKS The general trend in the world economy is to substitute markets and competition for economic regulation, and the heightened international consciousness for energy efficient resource utilization motivate this study of the technical and economic feasibility of deregulating electric power transmission networks. The project focuses on the development of computer coordinated market mechanisms for the generation and transmission of electrical energy and for the building and exchange of capacity rights in the power network.
9419349 Robert Sokal SUNY Stonybrook $78,065 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Physical Anthropology Program. Award total - $257,998. GENETIC CORRELATES OF EUROPEAN ETHNOHISTORY The investigator will use a unique database on European ethnohistory which records the location and movements of most known ethnic units from 2200 B.C. to present in order to test two contending hypotheses of the origin of Indo-European speakers. In earlier private projects, he has tested the utility of the database in making further predictions of patterns of genetic variation over the European continent. Both of these hypotheses should have very different consequences for the subsequent population relationships among European groups.
9311676 John Speth Univ. of Michigan Fitzhugh $9,699 Second-year of a two year award supported by the Arctic Systems Science Program of the Office of Polar Programs. Award total - $21,917. PREHISTORIC SETTLEMENT AN DLAND USE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPLEX SOCIAL SYSTEMS IN THE NORTH PACIFIC: A CASE STUDY FROM KODIAK ISLAND, ALASKA. The dissertation examines human responses to environmental risks reflected by prehistoric settlement and land-use patterns within the context of changing population densities on Kodiak Island, Alaska. Site features and locations will be examined in relation to each other and to projected resources. With the combined advantages of well preserved and highly visible archaeological sites, ongoing geomorphological and paleoenvironmental reconstruction and the use of Remote Sensing and GIS, this research promises to contribute to the anthropological understanding of culture change and the emergence of complex hunter-gatherer social systems in the north.
9311703 Robert Staiger NBER Frank Wolak $54,314 Second-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $163,014 THE TRADE EFFECTS OF ANTIDUMPING INVESTIGATIONS With the use and abuse of antidumping laws now a central concern of both multilateral and bilateral trade negotiations, it is especially important to gain as full an understanding as possible of the impact of existing antidumping laws on the free flow of trade. In this project, the determinants and the effects of antidumping investigations in the United States over the period 1980-1985 are examined. The project includes these broader aspects of antidumping law in an effort both to assess more accurately the determinants and the effects of antidumping petitions as well as to evaluate several hypotheses suggested by recent theoretical work on antidumping laws.
9415829 Paul Stern Nat Acad of Sciences $37,700 A 6 month award supported by SBE. WORKSHOP ON RESEARCH ON THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL CHANGE The U.S. Global Change Research Program (US/GCRP) has placed greater emphasis on research on the human dimensions of global change, including policy sciences and methods for integrated assessments. Agencies like NSF that collectively manage the US/GCRP traditionally have looked to the National Academy of Sciences and the component parts of the National Research Council to provide guidance and feedback regarding planning and conduct of the program. This award will support a National Research Committee Workshop in June of 1994 on two related issues: (1) research needs across the breadth of the human dimensions of global change and in specific areas, such as policy sciences and methods for integrated assessments; and (2) strengths and weaknesses of various modes of research support (ranging from support for individual investigators to support for centers), including consideration of the relative balance among different modes. The proceedings of the workshop will be published and made available to the public.
9409629 James Stock NBER Mark Watson $104,123 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $ 373,685. LARGE-MODEL AND ADAPTIVE FORECASTING IN ECONOMICS Recent advances in computing technology and data availability have sharply reduced the cost of real-time forecasting of the economy using large numbers of time series data. At the same time, there is considerable evidence that economic forecasting systems have had significant episodes of instability. The purpose of this research is to develop and analyze forecasting methodologies when predictive relationships are changing over time. Several large and rich data sets will be used to assess the performance of various adaptive forecasting systems. This research is important because it holds the promise of significantly improving economic forecasting. An important application would be in the area of improving long-term energy forecasting and assessing global environmental change.
9320557 Thomas Stoker MIT $75,273 First-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $227,450. IMPLEMENTATION OF SEMIPARAMETRIC ESTIMATORS This grant continues a research program on the implementation of semiparametric estimators. The overall thrust of the work is to study the operational characteristics of various semiparametric and nonparametric estimators to study what methods are most useful for application to economic problems and especially to problems in environmental economics. The proposed research will study many issues of implementation, from basic measurement issues for nonparametric techniques to specification tests for choosing an empirically adequate index model specification. The overall aim is to develop and communicate practical guidelines for empirical work to applied economists. The proposed research will be carried out in conjunction with a study of pollution and other environmental issues using survey data from families in Haifa, Israel.
9318952 Glenn Stone Columbia University $99,589 First-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Cultural Anthropology Program. Award total - $111,145. CONTROLLED COMPARISON OF LAND USE ON A NIGERIAN FRONTIER This project supports the historical ecological research of several anthropologists studying how two peasant farming populations exploited a previously unsettled land area of Nigeria. Using images from remote satellites to document changes in land use, maps, censuses, and detailed ethnographic studies of labor inputs to farming by peasant households, the project will compare the different historical effects of culturally distinctive patterns of land exploitation by two groups. This research is important because land degradation is a critical problem in many areas of the world, and we must understand local models of how people use land in order to understand why some groups maintain and conserve land resources and others exhaust them.
9410749 Michal Tamuz U of Texas HSC Houston $131,572 A 24 month award supported by the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program. MONITORING DANGERS IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD This project is a study of how organizations collect information about and learn from near accidents, events which under slightly different circumstances could have resulted in an accident. Organizations monitor these potential dangers to learn how to cope with dangers, i.e., low probability, high risk events. In this research, a comparison is made to how near accident monitoring systems operate in the medical device, nuclear power, space shuttle, and air transportation industries. The proposed research draws on and seeks to contribute to the study of risk management, information processing, and organizational learning. This research also has broader implications for organizational management of other areas of risky events, such as the extreme weather events that may become more frequent or unpredictable under global environmental change.
912770 Paul Thompson Texas A & M Harry Cralle D. Dickson $24,785 A 12 supplement supported by the Ethics and Values Studies Program. Award total - $112,823. SUSTAINABILITY AS A NORM This project will critically analyze how the concept of sustainability functions as a norm in three settings: within disciplines, as a social goal, and in setting agricultural development policy. The project is a multidisciplinary effort and will analyze the disciplinary orienations of agronomy and archaeology as contrasting scientific approaches to the study of sustainability.
9317844 Billlie Turner Clark University $15,000 Second-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the SBE. In FY 1993, an additional $65,000 was provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture; federal support for this project administered by NSF therefore totals $110,000. DEVELOPMENT OF A LAND-USE/LAND-COVER CHANGE SCIENCE PLAN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL GLOBAL CHANGE COMMUNITY Natural scientists involved in global change research need improved models of changing land cover because of the important role that land cover plays in dynamic natural processes across the globe. Land-cover change cannot be adequately modeled or projected, however, without an understanding of the land uses that affect land cover. In recognition of these interconnections and of the need for both natural and physical scientists to work together to address these important problems, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and the International Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Programme (HDP) have agreed to sponsor a focused scientific research program on global land-use and land-cover change. This award will provide support for a Core Planning Project Committee (CPPC), which is developing a formal science plan on behalf of IGBP and HDP.
9312139 Priscilla Weeks U of Houston Clear Lake $17,710 A 15 month award supported by the Ethics and Values Studies Program. RESEARCH PLANNING GRANT: GLOBAL PARTNERS? ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS IN INDIA AND IN THE U.S. This Research Planning Grant (RPG) will allow the investigator to refine the theory and methods with which to examine the effect of political and economic inequalities in the world system on the construction of a shared understanding of environmental problems. The study itself will use ethnographic interviews, analysis of written materials, and basic organizational analysis to make two sets of comparisons: between World Wildlife Fund India and World Wildlife Fund U.S.; and World Wildlife Fund India and Bhopal Gas Affected Working Women's Union. The research should provide new insights on the conditions under which a cross-culturally shared understanding of environmentalism arises, and alternately, the conditions under which it is thwarted.
9309927 Kenneth West U of Wisconsin Madison $44,887 Second-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $135,020. INFERENCE ABOUT PREDICTIVE ACCURACY; EXCHANGE RATE VOLATILITY: INVENTORY MODELS New procedures for econometric inference are developed and tested through case studies of the predictive capabilities of different exchange-rate models and alternative methods for estimating inventory models. Through these analyses, more effective means for quantitatively evaluating the predictive capabilities for models developed using data not drawn from samples will be developed and applied in a number of contexts, including models of socioeconomic impacts of global environmental change.
9318698 Tim White U of Cal Berkeley $129,036 First-year increment of a 24 month award supported by the Physical Anthropology Program. Award total - $295,159. PLIOCENE PALEONTOLOGY AND GEOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE AWASH VALLEY The Middle Awash in Ethiopia, with rocks spanning the Late Miocene through Late Pleistocene, is one of the African continent's most important natural laboratories for the study of human origins and evolution. Data from here bear on issues as wide-ranging as the tempo and mode of hominid evolution across the last five million years, the origins and evolution of stone tool technology and subsistence patterns, and the relationships between global climate change and events in hominid evolution. This grant will support the continuing field study of a team of researchers in this region. Specifically, work will continue on three sets of hominid-bearing Pliocene deposits, which have already yielded some very interesting early hominid fossils.
9021951 Jeffrey Williamson Harvard University $69,172 Second-year increment of a 36 month award supported by the Economics Program. Award total - $139,887. THE EVOLUTION OF GLOBAL LABOR MARKETS The purpose of this research is to analyze the role of immigration, commodity trade and capital markets on the evolution of an international labor market linking Europe and the New World over the century following 1870. The project will focus on wages and employment in sending and receiving regions, identifying episodes of labor market integration and disintegration as well as isolating the causes for these changes. Special attention will be given to the role of environmental factors leading to labor force migration such as the Irish potato famine and environmental decay experienced by urban centers during the industrial revolution.
9312318 Samuel Williamson Miami University $47,104 A 24 month award supported by the Economics Program. PROPOSAL TO CREATE A HISTORY OF GLOBAL CHANGE INFORMATION SERVER (HCGIS) This project funds the creation of an electronic information,management,and dissemination server, the History of Global Change Information Server (HGCIS), for the use of economic historians studying global change. The server will evolve into a primary communications channel between researchers of the economic history of global change and into a repository of critical knowledge, technical details, and general subject matter expertise on the economic history of global change. The proposed global change network server will assemble a membership registry database, bulletin boards, electronic conference rooms, research rooms, global change databases, and electronic libraries. RELATED AWARDS9315699 Ron Benioff Environmental Protection Agency $1,525,000 Support of USGCRP interagency activities. COUNTRY STUDIES TO ADDRESS CLIMATE CHANGE To assist developing countries and countries with economies in transition formulate their climate-change policies, the United States Government has committed $25 million over two years for the development of Country Studies to Address Climate Change. These studies will help establish an analytical and institutional foundation upon which recipient countries may construct their national climate action plans and help those countries fulfill their obligations under the Climate Change Convention.
9450140 Betty Daniel U of Pennsylvania $170,030 A 12 month award supported by SBE and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR). FISCAL POLICY AND THE VIABILITY OF FIXED EXCHANGE RATES SYSTEMS The research project constructs a two-country optimizing model to study the intertemporal constraints which fixed exchange rates impose on fiscal policy. Interactive activities include teaching a course in International Economics and conducting a seminar series with visiting speakers in the same field. Additional activities include presenting a research workshop, participating in ongoing workshops, counseling students on their research, and organizing brown bag lunches for graduates and undergraduates featuring outside speakers.
9204141 Michael Goodchild U of CA - Santa Barbara Waldo Tobler Terence Smith John Estes Luc Anselin $1,200,000 Renewal of a cooperative agreement supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program. First year of a three year agreement totalling $3,600,000. Additional support for related activities provided by other federal agencies. NATIONAL CENTER FOR GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION ANALYSIS (NCGIA) In order to narrow gaps between theory, analytical approaches, technology, and applications related to the use of GISs for geographical analyses, the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) has functioned for five years as a consortium including the University of California at Santa Barbara, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the University of Maine. Through this renewal, the NCGIA will be able to continue work related to its mission of advancing geographic research of lasting and fundamental significance. The center will continue to conduct fundamental research through initiatives and other forms of activity on a range of topics, including formalization of geographic knowledge, spatial and temporal reasoning in GISs, user interfaces for GISs, and geographical analyses relying on GISs.
9313563 John Perry National Academy of Sciences $535,150 A 12 month award supported by SBE and the Directorate for Geosciences (GEO). GLOBAL CHANGE ACTIVITIES OF THE NATURAL RESOURCE COUNCIL This award is a renewal of an award to the National Academy of Science to support the work of the National Research Council's Board on Global Change (NRC/BGC). These funds enable the NRC/BGC and other NRC committees and boards to continue to provide assistance to agencies participating with NSF in core functions of the NSTC Committee on Environment and Natural Resources (CENR) Subcommittee on Global Change Research (CENR/SGCR) in the development and evaluation of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (US/GCRP). These funds were contributed by participating agencies of the CENR/SGCR.
9317631 Steven Rosenstone University of Michigan - Ann Arbor Warren Miller Donald Kinder $1,303,199 First-year increment of a 48 month award supported by the Political Science Program. Award total - $5,199,521. THE EFFECTS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ON POPULATION GROWTH/ LONG-TERM SUPPORT FOR THE NATIONAL ELECTION STUDIES This award provides continued support of the Foundation's long-term commitment for the National Election Studies (NES). The National Science Foundation created the NES research program to sustain and enhance the diversified data base that supports basic research on voting, public opinion, and political participation in the United States. The current award provides support for the 1994 and 1996 elections. With this continued support, the scientific integrity of the time-series data collections set over a decade and a half ago for NES will be preserved. This research constitutes the most important data base for the study of American politics and American political behavior. Opportunities exist for the diverse national social science community to participate directly in the design and execution of NES studies.
9022891 Frank Stafford University of Michigan - Ann Arbor Sandra Hofferth Martha Hill James Lepkowski $1,260,764 Third-year increment of a 60 month award supported by SBE. Award total - $10,912,364. THE PANEL STUDY OF INCOME DYNAMICS -- WAVES 25-29 The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) collects information annually from a representative national sample of some 7,000 families, about 20,000 individuals, and processes it for dissemination to a broad segment of the social science community. This grant will extend the PSID for five additional years, covering interviewing waves 25 (1992) through 29 (1996). The additional waves of data will add substantial value to the data set's research potential. The added waves will vastly increase the amount and quality of intergenerational data for the numberous parent-child and sibling pairs in adult ages; facilitate refinements in business-cycle studies; improve analyses or rare life events and long-term effects of life events by providing more than a quarter century of life-cycle information on workers and families; expand the issues that spells analysis can address; make possible international comparisons with similar income- dynamics panel studies that hav ebeen launched in a number of European countries; ensure that social scientists will continue to be able to monitor the effects of changing economic and social conditions and policies; and enhance the research potential of recent additions to the study by extending their measurement period. |
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