© L p Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between the magnitude of automatic stabilizers in the tax and transfer systems of 19 EU countries and the US, and discretionary fiscal stimulus packages passed by these countries during the recent economic crisis. In particular, we ask whether countries with larger automatic stabilizers have enacted smaller discretionary fiscal stimulus p...

The diagnosis-related groups (DRG's) have classically focused on resources consumed during a hospital stay. DRG's can also be considered categories for describing cases admitted to a hospital. In this article, we illustrate how consistent patterns of variations in admission rates can be used to classify DRG categories according to the Index of Discretionary Admissions. The consistency of variat...

Young African Americans have not participated as long as their white counterparts in the media culture industry (Nightingale 1993). In truth, it is difficult to discern a substantive relationship between black youth and the mass media prior to the 1960s. The initial exclusion of blacks from popular media culture is attributable to two main factors: 1) a lack of discretionary income on the part ...

Prior research has documented a ‘‘kink’’ in the earnings distribution: too few firms report small losses, too many firms report small profits. We investigate whether boosting of discretionary accruals to report a small profit is a reasonable explanation for this ‘‘kink.’’ Overall, we are unable to confirm that boosting of discretionary accruals is the key driver of the kink. We caution the use ...