Multiple Principals, Multiple Signals: A Signaling Approach to Principal-Agent Relations

This study suggests a key element of the principal-agent relationship involves communication between potential principals and their agents. We suggest communications often resemble a signaling process in which potential principals indicate their interest in policy matters through multiple venues. This study models changes in the levels of rulemaking activity by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as a function of increased salience in public, congressional and executive venues.     

Environmental Values and Water Policy

The emergence of water markets has heralded the prospect of increased efficiency in the use of the resource for extractive purposes. However, water markets have not encompassed all elements of demand for the resource. Notably, demands for the environmental public goods provided by river flows have not been revealed in markets. State Governments have instituted regulations requiring ‘environmental flows’ to be quarantined from the market allocation process. This policy has triggered negative responses from irrigators and conservationists. Lobby groups have found that the process of determining environmental flows is a prospective site for rent seeking. To avoid policy being driven by rent seeking, information on the costs and benefits of environmental flows is useful. Whereas the costs of environmental flows are readily assessed through reference to market data on irrigators’ surpluses foregone, the benefits must be estimated through the use of non‐market, stated preference valuation techniques. These techniques — including contingent valuation and choice modelling — remain controversial. Some argue that they should not be used on ethical grounds. Others argue that they cannot be used on technical grounds. These arguments are discussed in this paper, using the context of the water policy debate. The evidence is that stated preference techniques are being used, and applications have been performed in Australia in the context of riverine health. However their use remains restricted relative to the scale of the Australian natural resource management task. Some possible explanations for this limited up‐take are provided along with some suggested ways forward.     

Can Only Religion Save Us?

This paper will examine the loss of confidence in secular bases for the normative understanding of, and response to, the fundamental social and political problems. The recent arguments of Richard Falk in favour of a religious foundation for a humane globalization will be taken as paradigmatic. While the paper agrees that the normative core of major world religions supports Falk's particular conclusion that religion can provide the content for a universal critique of inhumane global governance, it will conclude that the universal claim that global human solidarity today can only be built on the basis of religious faith does not follow. The paper will contend that the required normative foundation for the positive project of constructing global human solidarity is neither religious nor secular, but synthetic, embracing both—in what I will call, following the work of John McMurtry—the “life-ground of value.”     

A Fisk patent metallic burial case from Western Missouri: an interdisciplinary and comprehensive effort to reconstruct the history of an early settler of Lexington,Missouri

In 2006 a cast-iron coffin was discovered in an unmarked burial plot in Lexington, Missouri. A multifaceted investigation was conducted to provide historical documentation and possible identification of the individual. The coffin is an early Fisk Patent Metallic Burial Case. Osteological analyses indicate that the skeletal remains belong to a 20 to 30 year old white female who consistently ate an omnivorous diet with significant amounts of C4 plants or seafood. Rib morphology and her burial garments suggest she frequently wore restrictive clothing. No gross skeletal pathological lesions or trauma were observed except for a patch of reactive bone and an atypical pattern of bone remodeling on the visceral surface of the sixth rib. Subsequent bacterial DNA analysis of the ribs and sternum indicate the presence of tuberculosis infection. Although not conclusive, multiple lines of evidence are consistent with the skeletal remains representing Elizabeth (Triplett) Stewart who died in 1854 of pulmonary tuberculosis. This multidisciplinary research significantly contributes to the local history of Lexington, Missouri and provides a likely identification of the deceased individual for the Stewart Family.     

Pet Sounds: Subsystems,Regimes, Policy Punctuations,and the Neglect of African American Farmers, 1935–2006

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) has reoriented the study of public policy and American politics in particular. In this study, we documented how a policy punctuation that appears to take hold at the macro level of the polity in the form of a policy regime has difficulty penetrating subsystem politics. We drew on subsystems theory, PET, and the latest work on policy regimes to document the resistance of the agriculture subsystem to efforts to add a civil rights dimension to agriculture policy between 1935 and 2006. We concluded that the issue evolution of agricultural support programs, and their insulation from civil rights policy, is a prime example of how subsystems use negative feedback to resist change.     

RECENT POPULATION TRENDS IN THE USSR

Pending the publication of new Soviet population data based on the 1979 census, to be hald next January, the author reviews population trends in the 1970's. After a steady decline through much of the Soviet period, birth rates and death rates have stabilized for the country as a whole, although marked regional differences continue. An unexplained rise in infant mortality and an apparent reduction of life expectancy have led to the suppression of data in these areas. No ready explanation is found for a recent increase in female fertility and age-specific death rates. Abnormalities in the age-sex structure, resulting from past population catastrophes, continue to persist and indicate future labor shortages. Geographical differences in population growth rates, resulting from differential rates of natural increase and migration, are analyzed. Urbanization, a typical phenomenon of the Soviet period, continues apace, with the biggest increases in large cities despite a policy designed to discourage big-city growth. A crucial question is the optimal disposition of the growing labor pool in the Central Asian region-whether to foster local employment or encourage migration from Central Asia to labor deficit areas elsewhere in the Soviet Union.