Showing papers on "Natural experiment published in 1985"

Rationing by Waiting and the Value of Time: Results from a Natural Experiment

Abstract: The authors analyze data from a natural experiment with rationing by waiting. In the situation, motorists were confronted with a choice between waiting in line for low-priced gasoline or purchasing at a higher price without waiting. They view this as a revealed preference experiment and use their choices to estimate the value of time spent waiting as a function of individual characteristics. In most cases the estimates of the value of time are quite similar to individuals' after-tax wages. 13 references, 7 tables.

Natural experiments and the educational context: the environment and effects of an alternative inner-city public school on adolescents.

Abstract: The 1-year impact of attending a public alternative high school on two cohorts of adolescents who gained entrance to the school through a lottery was studied. Adolescents who had applied to the school but were not selected in the lottery served as a control group. The nature of the alternative high school environment is described, and the outcome of this natural experiment defined in terms of reactions to school, attitude change, and student achievement. In general, the alternative school positively affected student satisfaction with a variety of aspects of school life and induced some positive change in interracial attitudes while not harming student achievement. Race effects were found in the areas of achievement and interracial attitudes. Implications for the study of natural experiments in general and the specific data in particular are drawn. Language: en

Pathological Behavior of Managed Populations when Production Relationships are Assessed from Natural Experiments

Abstract: The assessment of fish production rates as a function of stock size is central to fisheries management, and this assessment obviously requires observations from a range of stock sizes. When stock size variation is due mainly to natural, random disturbances that are treated as “natural experiments”, the resulting sample may give a very distorted (biased) picture of the average production relationship. The bias will be especially bad when the natural disturbances occur in autocorrelated sequences over time. These results suggest that there is no safe substitute for deliberate, controlled experimentation with stock size.