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After decades of debates and policy discussions, in early 2010, the Obama Administration, with the Democrat party controlling both the House and the Senate, passed a National Health Insurance Act. The Patient Protection and Affordability Act was immediately challenged in court. One district court in Florida declared it unconstitutional. Two other district courts and an appellate court declared it constitutional. This paper looks at the Act and those issues.

Abstract
In many communities, land-use and open-space preservation have become important concerns. Using a large dataset containing every home sale in the state of Massachusetts over 8 years, this paper simultaneously measures the impact of the mix of land-uses in the immediate neighborhood of a home on property values and the impact of a locally-implemented program, the Community Preservation Act (CPA), which provides funds for local open-space and historic preservation as well as affordable housing. I exploit the panel nature of the dataset to conduct a difference-in-differences analysis using local as well as house level fixed effects to overcome omitted variables bias. My results indicate that, on average, passage of the CPA reduces property values by about 1.5% in Massachusetts towns. However, when I allow the CPA effect to differ by county, I find some heterogeneity -- it increases property values in some communities and reduces them in others. Variation in local spending priorities appears to have little impact on property values or the effect of the CPA. Finally, I find that cropland and pasture, as well as low-density residential development, are the most preferred local land-uses, and that homes are more expensive as one increases distance to highways and active rail lines.

In this article, I analyse the acquisition of informational capital, i.e. academic capital, measured as student mobility and understood as transnational investments in prestigious foreign educational institutions. In the 1990s, educational `zones of prestige' were the United States, the United Kingdom and, to some extent, Germany and France. Official statistics from Sweden, Denmark and France regarding the outflow of students reflect increasing student mobility. In particular, the study reveals that students from the upper and upper-middle social classes (measured by parental occupation) are more likely than students from other social classes to pursue transnational investments, even though students from the middle and working classes have now entered the arena. This has also been found in a recent analysis of Danish academic emigrants. All in all, studies confirm the hypothesis that students from the upper classes are more likely than others to invest in specific informational capital in the field of education, in national environments and in international settings.

Colonial encounters within the Powhatan village of Werowocomoco in Tidewater Virginia have captured the public's imagination through romantic literature and popular films. Shifting the focus of inquiry away from English colonial narratives and toward a history of landscape provides an alternative understanding of Werowocomoco as a Native place. Archaeological investigation has identified evidence of earthworks and related social practices that altered Werowocomoco's built environment and subjective experiences of its spaces in ways that colonial chroniclers failed to appreciate. A landscape history combining built environments, cognitive maps, and spatial practices across the historic—precontact divide indicates that the settlement became a ritualized location for the production of political status and social personhood well before English colonization in the Chesapeake. Spatial practices rooted in Algonquian cosmology and centered on Werowocomoco shaped the origins of the Powhatan chiefdom and early colonial history through which Powhatans sought to incorporate Jamestown colonists into their world. A biography of Werowocomoco as a Native place illustrates how a deep historical anthropology may challenge notions of a "prehistoric" past comprised of homogenized societies lacking history.

Life chances and social mobility: different cohort conditions.

Social position still depends on social origin, gender and work experience. Cohorts born in the mid- 1960s are less advantaged than cohorts born in the mid- and late 1950s, when studied at the time the respective birth cohorts were 31 years old. Research indicates that younger cohorts have a lesser chance of obtaining social positions such as higher-grade professionals/managers than relatively older cohorts had, when education, gender and other background factors have been controlled for. In addition, the younger cohorts have an increased risk of ending up in unskilled occupational groups. This development can be explained in part by the change in labour market conditions, such as unemployment, and in part by educational inflation (educational expansion), which means that similar social positions will be increasingly over time occupied by individuals who have more education and credentials that are demanded by workplaces. Agents are positioned according to a state of distribution of the specific capital (e.g. educational capital). Generally, a highly educated population, under pressure, will influence strong families to invest more in their children's education, in order to defend their position (a "defensive expenditure"). This social process of differentiation can be characterised as an unequal achievement society.