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Does an increase in naval power increase the likelihood of interstate disputes? While volumes have been written on the importance of naval power, we are left with little more than intuition and anecdotal evidence to provide potential answers to this question. Endogeneity issues in particular make it difficult to untangle the links between developing naval power and interstate conflict. Here I present a new instrument for naval power. Utilizing a new dataset of naval power and employing an instrumental variable analysis, I present one of the first large cross-national studies showing a significant link between naval power and a specific type of interstate conflict - non-contiguous disputes. The findings have implications for the future actions of states whose naval strength is growing.

By joining ideas from the spatial interaction and excess commuting literatures, we integrate and organize three related aspects of commuting statistics: trip length, distance decay, and entropy. We use concepts and calculations from the excess commuting literature to improve interpretation of trip length parameters in a doubly constrained trip distribution model. We derive a direct mathematical relationship between trip length and entropy, thereby providing an analytical model to calculate the ease with which trip lengths might be reduced. The new analysis not only ties these statistics together in a mathematically useful way, but also allows for a new entropy metric—relative entropy—that determines the organization (or lack thereof) of aggregate work trips. As a result, we disentangle the entropy component from the distance component and offer new perspectives on aggregate commuting in a comparative framework. Twenty-five cities are classified in an interesting and useful way that includes the average trip length and the degree of organization in each city.

"In diesem Beitrag wird untersucht, ob die in den letzten Jahren in ländlichen Gebieten Englands eingetroffenen Immigranten längere Strecken zu ihrem Arbeitsplatz zurücklegen als Personen, die seit längerem an diesen Orten ansässig sind, und ob die Entfernung zum Arbeitsplatz je nach der Art der Umsiedelung und des geografischen Kontexts der Heimat unterschiedlich ausfällt. Die Studie basiert auf Daten des Individual Controlled Access Microdata Sample (CAMS) aus der Volkszählung von 2001. Wir stellen fest, dass die in den letzten Jahren eingetroffenen Immigranten viel häufiger Strecken von mindestens 20 km zum Arbeitsplatz zurücklegen als seit längerem ansässige Personen. Zur Berücksichtigung der soziodemografischen Unterschiede zwischen den Personen wenden wir eine binäre logistische Regression an und weisen nach, dass die Wahrscheinlichkeit längerer Anfahrten zum Arbeitsplatz unter Personen, die von ihrer Heimat aus an einen zwischen 15 und 99 km entfernten Ort umgezogen sind, sowie unter Personen, die aus den größten Städten umgezogen sind, am höchsten ausfällt." (Autorenreferat, IAB-Doku)

The primary importance of long-distance telephone service to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in the first two decades of the twentieth century was not commercial but organizational and political. The so-called Bell System was not a single firm before 1910 but was, rather, an association of regional companies with considerable autonomy. As AT&T's leaders worked both to overcome independent competitors and to curtail the autonomy of their own local affiliates, long-distance service offered them a powerful technological justification for the consolidation of control. Outside the Bell System, long distance also served as a vivid symbol of interconnection and integration. Long distance proved central to AT&T's campaign to convince Americans of its own legitimacy and that of nation-spanning corporations in general.