The determination of criteria for the selection of students for the pssc physics course

This study was done to determine criteria for selecting for the PSSC physics course and in the context, to determine the predictive ability of three creativity measures relative to more conventional predictors.     

The high-school dropout decision and its wage consequences

The purpose of this study is to investigate the wage consequences of leaving high school prior to graduation. The dropout process is modeled as interdependent events involving the dropout decision itself and expected wage offers. Since selectivity biases may occur in such models, our empirical analysis permits adjustment for any such biases. Our empirical results provide support for the existence of a self-selection bias in the initial work experiences following high school. We also find that wages for dropouts progressively decline in subsequent years relative to high-school graduates.     

Uncertainty in the Movie Industry: Does Star Power Reduce the Terror of the Box Office?

Everyone knows that the movie business is risky. But how risky is it? Do strategies exist that reduce risk? We investigate these questions using a sample of over 2000 motion pictures. We discover that box-office revenues are asymptotically Pareto-distributed and have infinite variance. The mean is dominated by rare blockbuster movies that are located in the far right tail. There is no typical movie because box-office revenue outcomes do not converge to an average: revenues diverge over all scales. The studio model of risk management lacks a foundation in theory or evidence, and revenue forecasts have zero precision. Movies are complex products and the cascade of information among film-goers during the course of a film's run can evolve along so many paths that it is impossible to attribute the success of a movie to individual causal factors. The audience makes a movie a hit and no amount of “star power” or marketing can alter that. The real star is the movie.     

The Battle of the Downs

The first newspaper publishers of the seventeenth century faced a momentous challenge. How could they compete in a highly competitive news market with their periodical invention? The newspaper was generally a cautious medium, offering an assortment of short international news reports without overarching editorial opinion. The newspaper rarely displayed the wit and polemic present in other news media of the early modern period, and operated with a rigid schedule of publication. This article portrays how such standards could be cast off in the face of military victory and defeat. The naval battle of the Downs in 1639 engaged two rival newspaper markets in Amsterdam and Antwerp. By analysing the simultaneous reporting of the battle in the Dutch Republic and the Habsburg Netherlands it becomes clear that newspaper publishers employed numerous tactics in order to shape the coverage of the battle—and to strive for the relevance of their newspapers.