Product market comparisons that focus on labor costs are likely to deserve greater weight when:

The following data pertains to activity and costs for two months: june july activity level in 10,000 12,000 direct materials $16,000 $ ? fixed factory rent 12,000 ? manufacturing overhead 10,000 ? total cost $38,000 $42,900 assuming that these activity levels are within the relevant range, the manufacturing overhead for july was: a) $10,000 b) $11,700 c) $19,000 d) $9,300

Aproduction line has three machines a, b, and c, with reliabilities of .96, .86, and .85, respectively. the machines are arranged so that if one breaks down, the others must shut down. engineers are weighing two alternative designs for increasing the line’s reliability. plan 1 involves adding an identical backup line, and plan 2 involves providing a backup for each machine. in either case, three machines (a, b, and c) would be used with reliabilities equal to the original three. a. compute overall system reliability under plan 1. (round your intermediate calculations and final answer to 4 decimal places.) reliability b. compute overall system reliability under plan 2. (round your intermediate calculations and final answer to 4 decimal places.) reliability c. which plan will provide the higher reliability? plan2plan1

Label each of the following statements true, false, or uncertain. explain your choice carefully. a. workers benefit equally from the process of creative destruction. b. in the past two decades, the real wages of low-skill u.s. workers have declined relative to the real wages of high-skill workers. c. technological progress leads to a decrease in employment if, and only if, the increase in output is smaller than the increase in productivity. d. the apparent decrease in the natural rate of unemployment in the united states in the second-half of the 1990s can be explained by the fact that productivity growth was unexpectedly high during that period.