iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my labmates, advisor, and other members of the EAS faculty for providing me with direction and encouragement. Special thanks go to the wonderful people at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography the crew members of the R/V Savannah for the support and fun times.

The 1996 welfare reform legislation expanded the use of sanctions under the assumption that welfare recipients can comply with work requirements and that they can calculate the costs and benefits of compliance. This research tests the validity of these assumptions through a recordand survey-based study of California welfare recipients. The article questions the validity of the assumptions, find...

Various tax policies provide consumers with forms of insurance. Social security has the payoff characteristics of an annuity. The income tax provides consumers with a degree of Income insurance because the government shares part of the individual's income risk. Redistributive taxes can be used to spread aggregate income risks across different generations The effects of these and other tax polic...

Currently, the increasing number of article submissions to scientific journals forces editors to be more selective in their acceptance of papers. Consequently, editors have increased the frequency of their use of scientific referee mechanisms. For many researchers, the publication of a scientific article in a high impact factor journal is a gradual and difficult process. After preparation and s...