Arthur Laffer While he was teaching at the USC Marshall School of Business, Laffer played a key role in writing California Proposition 13, the property-tax-cap initiative that inspired a tax revolt across the nation. In the mid-1980s, Laffer left to teach at Pepperdine University in nearby Malibu. Laffer remained on the faculty for several years. In 1986, Laffer was a candidate for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate—which he lost in the California primary to U.S. Congressman Ed Zschau who lost in the general election to the incumbent, Democrat Alan Cranston. Laffer identifies himself as a staunch fiscal conservative and libertarian.
Yerkes–Dodson law Yerkes–Dodson law The Yerkes–Dodson law is an empirical relationship between arousal and performance, originally developed by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson in 1908. The law dictates that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases. The process is often illustrated graphically as a bell-shaped curve which increases and then decreases with higher levels of arousal. Research has found that different tasks require different levels of arousal for optimal performance. For example, difficult or intellectually demanding tasks may require a lower level of arousal