Safety, efficacy, and legal concerns surrounded the Department of Defense (DoD) Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program (AVIP) in the early and mid-2000s. Production capacity, patient refusals, and legal injunctions limited vaccine delivery during this time period. Since 2007, the Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed (AVA) has been administered to all service members deploying to high-risk areas except those medically or administratively exempt. This book evaluates the current AVIP in terms of associated risks and benefits. Aggregate data from long-term studies and review by multiple scientific...

On 6 February 2000, 60 Minutes aired an interview of an active duty Air Force major who had refused to receive the vaccine for anthrax. Viewers learned that he faced the potential of a court-martial for refusing to obey orders. The major's refusal is just one aspect of a complex controversy surrounding the Department of Defense's Anthrax Vaccination Immunization Program. Adding to the confusion are a myriad of press releases, communications and opinions from concerned individuals on the internet, Congressional testimony, issues raised by those in the Reserve Components regarding any potential...

We develop a theoretically-based statistical technique to identify a conservative lower bound for house prices. Leveraging a model based upon consumer and investor incentives, we are able to explain the depth of housing market downturns at both the national and state level over a variety of market environments. This approach performs well in several historical back tests and has strong out-of-sample predictive ability. When back-tested, our estimation approach does not understate house price declines in any state over the 1987 to 2001 housing cycle and only understates declines in three...

Trends in residential house values can be expressed by changes in House Price Indexes (HPIs). HPIs are based on observed prices and help guide real estate activities. Since the recent housing crash, distressed sales have increased in numbers and have led to concerns about their effects on market valuations. This book explores the extent to which distressed sales can be identified in transactions data and how they affect HPIs. The book is broken into three parts. First, FHFA's standard metropolitan HPIs are compared to HPIs constructed without distressed sales. The analysis reveals that...

This report presents data on the early care and education arrangements and selected family activities of children in the United States from birth through the age of 5 who were not yet enrolled in kindergarten in the spring of 2012. The report also presents data on parents' satisfaction with various aspects of these care arrangements and on their participation in various learning activities with their children. For each category of information included in the report, the results are broken down by child, parent, and family characteristics. The data in this report are from the 2012 National...

The regulatory compliance costs of manufacturing firms often take the form of fixed costs of production, and they may reduce the firms' competitiveness, including their competitiveness in export markets. Yet most models of the impact of regulatory policy on trade flows are based on economic models with constant returns to scale and perfect competition that are not structured to allow for fixed costs of production. If, to make due, policy modelers represent regulatory costs as purely variable costs, then this assumption will dictate the prediction of the economic analysis: an increase in...

Often when we discuss the effects of taxes, we focus on the effects on the mean of firm value and de-emphasize the effects on the variance of the distribution. The existing literature on dividend taxation has analyzed the effect on firm stock price (Auerbach and Hassett (2005) and Amromin, Harrison and Sharpe (2008)). However, there are two important moments for the stock: the level of the stock price and the volatility of the stock. In a world where executives are more risk averse than most shareholders (since they are unable to diversify away firm-speciffc risk), we want to focus on both...

Analyses of general acute care hospital mergers have traditionally defined the relevant product market as inpatient medical and surgical acute care and have generally assumed that economies of scale exist at least up to 100 beds. However, an examination of recent entry into California suggests that antitrust authorities should reconsider these two positions. First, twenty-one of the thirty-five general acute care hospitals that have recently opened or plan to open soon have fewer than 100 beds. Some of these hospitals are entering urban and suburban areas in which they must compete with...

Industrial organization issues that are relevant to antitrust have been studied in the laboratory for over three decades, and the results of this research offer useful insights for applied work in antitrust. Experimental methods provide a means for enhancing our understanding of markets. Those who advocate the relevance (or policy application) of a particular theory bear the burden of showing why the theory is appropriate. When a theory fails to predict well in a simple laboratory setting under conditions the theory itself suggests, it is difficult to believe that it would predict better in a...

This book models the reaction of firms to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) decisions to seek to block proposed horizontal mergers. Finns' responses to the FTC are shown to depend on a number of factors, including the structural merits of the FTC challenge, the efficiencies potentially arising from the transaction, and the cost to the firms of fighting the FTC in court. For a large number of the FTC's merger challenges, we find that firms have strong incentives to settle with the Commission, regardless of the cases' competitive merits. Therefore, in these matters the Commission appears to have...