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Many jurisdictions fine illegal cartels using penalty guidelines that presume an arbitrary 10% overcharge. This article surveys more than 700 published economic studies and judicial decisions that contain 2,041 quantitative estimates of overcharges of hard-core cartels. The primary findings are: (1) the median average long-run overcharge for all types of cartels over all time periods is 23.0%; (2) the mean average is at least 49%; (3) overcharges reached their zenith in 1891–1945 and have trended downward ever since; (4) 6% of the cartel episodes are zero; (5) median overcharges of international-membership cartels are 38% higher than those of domestic cartels; (6) convicted cartels are on average 19% more effective at raising prices as unpunished cartels; (7) bid-rigging conduct displays 25% lower markups than price-fixing cartels; (8) contemporary cartels targeted by class actions have higher overcharges; and (9) when cartels operate at peak effectiveness, price changes are 60–80% higher than the whole episode. Historical penalty guidelines aimed at optimally deterring cartels are likely to be too low.

From one angle, abortion law appears to confirm the regime politics account of the Supreme Court; after all, the Reagan/Bush coalition succeeded in significantly curtailing the constitutional protection of abortion rights. From another angle, however, it is puzzling that the Reagan/Bush Court repeatedly refused to overturn Roe v. Wade. We argue that time and again electoral considerations led Republican elites to back away from a forceful assertion of their agenda for constitutional change. As a result, the justices generally acted within the range of possibilities acceptable to the governing regime but still typically had multiple doctrinal options from which to choose.

Retail sales usually exhibit strong trend and seasonal patterns. Practitioners have typically used seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models to predict retail sales exhibiting these patterns. Due to economic instability, recent retail sales time-series data show a higher degree of variability and nonlinearity, which makes the ARIMA model less accurate. This chapter demonstrates the feasibility and potential of applying empirical mode decomposition (EMD) in forecasting aggregate retail sales. The hybrid forecasting method of integrating EMD and neural network (EMD-NN) models was applied to two real data sets from two different time periods. The one-period ahead forecasts for both time periods show that EMD-NN outperforms the classical NN model and seasonal ARIMA. In addition, the findings also indicate that EMD-NN can significantly improve forecasting performance during the periods in which macroeconomic conditions are more volatile.

The United States has always been an outlier in its approach to social welfare and safety net provision compared to other industrial and postindustrial nations. A large literature has emerged to explain U.S. exceptionalism. Much of this theory and research centers on U.S. race relations and, more recently, on gender ideologies embedded in state policies that have fostered “poverty knowledge” and policies that emphasize individual responsibility and dependency rather than structural factors and processes that create social stigma and exclusion (O'Connor, 2001). Relatively unrecognized is the way spatial inequality shapes U.S. welfare policies. The restructuring of the welfare state by the enactment in 1996 of PRWORA, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, more familiarly known as welfare reform, highlighted the significance of spatial inequality through one of its key provisions: devolution of authority for program formation and administration to state and local jurisdictions. Devolution, a major element of neoliberal policies designed to diminish state redistributive power, places responsibility for welfare reform in local jurisdictions and agencies with varying capacities and resources for this task. Rural areas are particularly subject to disadvantage from devolution as they often lack the means to successfully implement welfare to work policies. Studies of the impacts of welfare reform using national data and crude proxies for spatial differences obscure differences in outcomes for individuals and communities that emerge when more attention is paid to spatial variation. The result is a form of extreme spatial inequality that marginalizes rural regions, communities, and their impoverished residents. This chapter examines the relationship between spatial inequality, devolution, and social exclusion for rural peoples and places in the era of welfare reform and shows how these form key elements of U.S. welfare provision. Illustrations are drawn from primary research on the impacts of welfare reform in rural Appalachia.

This chapter discusses the significance of Sally Tomlinson’s article, The Irresistible Rise of Special Education and of her sociological thinking more generally. The paradox highlighted in the Tomlinson’s article, that is, the constantly evolving expansion, globally, of special education, alongside a simultaneous growth in support for the idea of inclusive education, is discussed in this chapter. Tomlinson’s influence on the sociological direction of Julie Allan’s work is traced and exemplified, and the continuing tensions in inclusive education are explored.

Country and cultural heritage are inextricably linked for First Nations peoples. This chapter explores those relationships in the context of repatriating cultural heritage materials back to Country and conceptualising a place for its ‘awakening’ for the Ngadjuri community of Mid-North South Australia. These materials in the context of this book ‘interpreted’ as a form of data curation, requiring potentially unique information systems designs to achieve accessibility, recoverability, and durability in remote communities with limited internet and mobile phone coverage. On the other hand, it is critically important to note, that the processes, challenges and repatriation of culturally sensitive materials and remains, are dependant here on the limitations of language. The reference to the notion of ‘data’ as a descriptor, and an inadequate term on some level, does not, and is not intended to, diminish any of their cultural significance and gravity. These are challenges that are worth the intellectual and technological investment to realise a return to Country for generationally displaced peoples and their cultural property that also needs to make it home.