WHY WAIT?: EXAMINING DELAYED WIC PARTICIPATION AMONG PREGNANT WOMEN

Despite the benefits of prenatal participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), many eligible women either do not participate or begin participation late in their pregnancies. Using recent nationally representative data, we find that more disadvantaged women are more likely to access WIC and, with some notable exceptions, to participate earlier in their pregnancies. Hispanic women, especially those with language difficulties, enroll in WIC later in their pregnancies. Early WIC participation, particularly among teenagers, is less likely among women experiencing a first birth and depends on the mother’s early recognition of her pregnancy. (JEL I18, I30)     

THE CHOICE BETWEEN LEGITIMATE AND ILLEGITIMATE WORK: MICRO STUDY OF INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR

This study postulates that youths remain in the labor force so long as the number of weeks they have employment exceeds the number they consider as minimally acceptable. Such a threshold level of weeks worked can be related to the notion of a reservation wage. Prior employment or experience raises expectations and should increase the threshold. Other factors, such as illegal opportunities to earn income, may also raise the threshold. If the actual fraction of weeks a youth works exceeds this threshold, then we expect that youth to be employed during the following period. We compare data for individuals of both sexes, age 16 or 17 years, from the Youth Cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey regarding the behavior of those who dropped out of school, those in the process of dropping out of school, and those remaining in school. Involvement in crime decreases the likelihood of future employment–most for dropouts and least for those remaining in school.     

TOWARDS A PARADIGM OF DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION: CITIZEN PARTICIPATION AND CO-PRODUCTION OF PERSONAL SOCIAL SERVICES IN SWEDEN

ABSTRACT:  Many countries in Europe are now searching for new ways to engage citizens and involve the third sector in the provision and governance of social services in order to meet major demographical, political and economic challenges facing the welfare state in the 21st Century. Co-production provides a model for the mix of both public service agents and citizens who contribute to the provision of a public service. Citizen participation involves several different dimensions: economic, social, political and service specific. The extent of citizen participation varies between different providers of welfare services, as too does user and staff influence. Empirical materials from a recent study of childcare in Sweden will be used to illustrate these points. However, the role of citizens and the third sector also varies between countries and social sectors. Third sector providers facilitate citizen participation, while a glass ceiling for participation exists in municipal and for-profit providers. Moreover, co-production takes place in a political context, and can be crowded-in or crowded-out by public policy. These findings can contribute to the development of a new paradigm of participative democracy.     

MARCH MADNESS: NCAA TOURNAMENT PARTICIPATION AND COLLEGE ALCOHOL USE

While athletic success may improve the visibility of a university to prospective students and thereby benefit the school, it may also increase risky behavior in the current student body. Using the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, we find that a school's participation in the NCAA Basketball Tournament is associated with a 47% increase in binge drinking by male students at that school. Additionally, we find evidence that drunk driving increases by 5% among all students during the tournament. (JEL I12, I23, Z28)     

SOCIAL INVESTMENT AND YOUTH LABOR MARKET PARTICIPATION

In this paper, we first rely on small area techniques to derive from EU statistics on income and living conditions (EU‐SILC) survey new indicators of compensatory and social‐investment policies at regional level. While compensatory policies have mainly the goal of protecting individuals from “old” risks (e.g., old‐age), investment‐related social policies tend to focus more on “new social risks” (e.g., skill deficits). We rely on these new indicators to perform a data‐driven structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) analysis to investigate the causal relationships between youth labor market outcomes and these two types of spending. Our results support the view that social‐investment policies are effective for tackling new social challenges. (JEL C18, C54, E02)     

VOLUNTARY WORK AND WAGES

The effects of voluntary work on earnings have recently been studied for some developed countries such as Canada, France and Austria. This paper extends this line of research to Italy, using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU‐SILC) dataset. A double methodological approach is used in order to control for unobserved heterogeneity: Heckman and IV methods are employed to account for unobserved worker heterogeneity and endogeneity bias. Empirical results show that, when the unobserved heterogeneity is taken into account, a wage premium of 2.7 percent emerges, quite small if compared to previous investigations on Canada and Austria. The investigation into the channels of influence of volunteering on wages gives support to the hypotheses that volunteering enables the access to fruitful informal networks, avoids the human capital deterioration and provides a signal for intrinsically motivated individuals.     

FISCAL EXPANSIONS,UNEMPLOYMENT, AND LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION: THEORY AND EVIDENCE*

Structural VARs indicate that for many OECD countries labor force participation, employment, and the unemployment rate significantly increase following increases in government expenditures under a variety of specifications and identification schemes. Fiscal expansions also tend to increase real wages. Existing models have difficulties in generating such responses. We show that the empirical regularities can be reproduced with two additions into a standard New Keynesian model with matching frictions: (a) a labor force participation choice and (b) workers’ heterogeneity.     

ENDOGENOUS CONSUMER PARTICIPATION AND THE RECYCLING PROBLEM*

We endogenise the extent of consumer participation in the recycling process, and analyse its effect on the ‘recycling problem’. When recycling requires consumers to undertake costly sorting activities to separate scrap from household waste, they will participate only if the net reward from sorting is positive. Consumers' sorting cost is subject to a network effect arising due to social norms. With heterogeneous consumers differing in terms of their sorting cost, the entire output of the recyclable product may not be subsequently available as scrap to the recycling firms. This increases the virgin producer's monopoly power, and may also lead to multiple equilibria if the network effect of sorting is sufficiently large. The latter result suggests a role for the government in influencing equilibrium selection to improve social welfare. Depending on the fraction of consumers that participate in recycling, increased societal pressure on consumers to recycle may decrease consumer participation and increase the virgin producer's market power.     

STATE DRUG CONTROL SPENDING AND ILLICIT DRUG PARTICIPATION

The purpose of this article is to estimate the effect of state criminal justice expenditures and state public health expenditures on deterring illicit drug use. The empirics are based on a demand-and-supply model of drug markets. The effect of a given expenditure on criminal justice or public health programs is dependent on the magnitude of the resulting shifts in the two functions and the demand price elasticity. A reduced form of the demand-and-supply model is also estimated. The data employed come from the 1990 and 1991 National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). Data on state and local spending for drug-related criminal justice and drug-related public health programs were merged with the NHSDA. The main findings from the regression results are that drug control spending reduces drug use. However, the results suggest that for marijuana users, the marginal cost of drug control exceeds the social benefits of drug control. This may not be the case for users of other illicit drugs. Spending for drug enforcement by police and drug treatment is found most effective in deterring drug use. However, spending for correctional facilities is never significant, which suggests that a more efficient method of reducing drug use might be to reduce correctional facilities spending and increase spending on treatment.     

WORK HISTORIES AND LIFETIME UNEMPLOYMENT

A long-standing question in economics is how important unobserved differences across workers are for explaining unemployment. I revisit this topic using variation in lifetime unemployment across workers in U.S. data. A comparison of workers often unemployed with the rest shows that although differences in job-finding rates increase over the course of a career, differences in job-separation rates are large right from the start. I develop a directed search model with symmetric unobserved heterogeneity, in which agents learn workers' types from their labor market histories, to rationalize these findings. The model cannot match the data if unobserved heterogeneity is neglected.     

PARTICIPATION IN PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND GOVERNMENT SPENDING ON PARKS AND RECREATION

Physical inactivity is considered a major public health problem. We analyze participation in physical activity using data from a nationally representative sample of individuals in 1998 and 2000 augmented with additional state-level data on government spending on parks and recreation. We find considerable variation in participation and time spent in physical activity across different groups of physical activity. Spending on parks and recreation increases participation in group sports but reduces participation, and time spent, in walking for exercise, suggesting that parks and recreation spending may not be an effective policy tool for increasing physical activity. ( JEL I200, I120, I180, L830)     

GLOBALIZATION AND WOMEN'S PAID WORK: EXPANDING FREEDOM?

In Development as Freedom , Amartya Sen takes expanding freedom to be the primary end and the principal means of development. I discuss his emphasis on women's agency as central to development theory and practice and the strategies he advocates for enhancing it. Recent work in feminist economics and postcolonial studies tests Sen's complex account of freedom. Further levels of complexity need to be added when we examine how global forces of power interact with local systems of oppression in ways that often limit women's freedom. This argument rests on an analysis of how globalization affects a domain of freedom that is a central concern for Sen, that of increasing women's freedom to work outside the home as a way of strengthening their agency. Attending to elements missing in Sen's account will enhance freedom in women's lives.     

SEARCH,LIMITED PARTICIPATION,AND MONETARY POLICY*

A model is developed that employs recent developments in the literature on search models of money to capture the distributional effects of monetary policy in a tractable way. Deterministic and stochastic versions of the model are studied. Money is not neutral, and these nonneutralities persist, whether or not the change in the money supply is anticipated or unanticipated. At the optimum, monetary policy is geared to correcting distortions in the search sector of the economy, while correcting for the persistent effects of past monetary policy actions.     

LABOUR‐MARKET ATTACHMENT AND TRAINING PARTICIPATION*

This paper examines how expected attachment to the labour market and expected tenure at a specific firm affect training participation. The results, based on cross‐sectional data from Japan, indicate that expected attachment to the labour market affects participation in both employer‐ and worker‐initiated training, while expected tenure at a specific firm mainly explains participation in employer‐initiated training. These two attachment indices explain more than two‐thirds of the sex gap in training participation. Employers in less‐competitive labour markets are more likely to offer employer‐initiated training to their workers.     

FEMALE LABOUR FORCE PARTICIPATION AND RELIGION: A CROSS‐COUNTRY ANALYSIS

This paper empirically examines whether female labour force participation (FLFP) in a cross‐section of countries between 1985 and 2005 varies depending upon the religion practised in these countries. Using a cross‐sectional empirical specification, we initially find that FLFP is lower in Muslim countries. However, the association between Islam and FLFP greatly diminishes once other controls are included in the regression, suggesting that Islam might not diminish FLFP as some have argued. Moreover, once these additional controls are included, the association between Islam and FLFP is similar to that between Catholicism and FLFP. Countries where Protestantism is prevalent or where no religion is practised have higher FLFP. Finally, we find some evidence that the association between FLFP and religion is weakening over time.