Welfare Program Reentry among Postreform Leavers

The dramatic welfare reforms of 1996 affected public assistance usage patterns, possibly leading to more cycling on and off welfare as opposed to long-term continuous participation. We examine 128,775 Tennessee families that left welfare between October 1996 and April 2001. Of these, about one-third returned to the program at least once during this period. We provide statistical portraits of these families and compare reentrants with those who remained off public assistance. We conclude with a multivariate analysis of the determinants of reentry, Results suggest that families with younger, female, or black caretakers and those with more children are more likely to return. Those less likely to return include families whose caretakers were married or who had more education or were not working as of case closure. Families who left because of a time limit or who accumulated more months of program participation were also more likely to return.     

Information,capital, and organization

Summary This paper examines on of the roles that information plays in the production process by looking at the information that firms collect about their workers. This information, concerning the worker's abilities, is used to improve the quality of job matches within the firm and reduce future production costs. This paper models this information as a capital good and shows how the existence of this capital good can be used to explain some of the residual firm value observed in equity markets as well as the rigidities observed when firms expand their scale.I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Edward Prescott, Hugo Hopenhayn, Herbert Mohring and Jim Schmitz who provided many insights and comments concerning this work. This paper has benefited from the comments and suggestions of seminar participants at Minnesota, Western Ontario and Caltech. This research was supported in part by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.     

Now Read This: Book Reviews The Protestant Work Ethic. What Was It? Is its Ghost Still Around?

Adrian Furnham, The Protestant Work Ethic. The Psychology of Work-related Beliefs and Behaviour , Routledge, Chapman & Hall, London and New York, 1990, pp. xv + 305, pb, £13.99, ISBN 0-425-01705-X.
Carl-Henric Grenholm, Protestant Work Ethics: A Study of Work Ethical Theories in Contemporary Protestant Theology , Uppsala Studies in Social Ethics 15, Uppsala, 1993, pp. 350, np.     

The taxman cometh: Some observations on the interrelationship between accounting and inland revenue practice

Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (1977a) portrays the operation of society as an exercise of disciplinary technologies. Adopting this position, the author seeks to explore the British Inland Revenue's use of techniques of registration, categorization and surveillance which have the effect of subjecting organizations and their accounting practice to a compulsory visibility. The application of this disciplinary technology is seen to influence, intentionally or otherwise, the adoption and development of particular forms of accounting practice in the organization under study. The accounting process is seen to be inextricably involved in the Revenue's powers and practices, both as the focus of the Revenue's interest and as a facilitative technology which renders the financial transactions visible to the Revenue's gaze.     

WAGES AND EMPLOYMENT IN THE U.S. APPAREL INDUSTRY

This article uses individual-level data from the U.S. Census, Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), to examine wages and employment in the U.S. apparel industry. Total employment in this sector has been falling since 1970, and its overall average wage is the lowest of 25 industry aggregates. But disaggregation by gender, education, and nativity reveals that groups of highly educated male native workers earn higher average wages in apparel than in other industries. Moreover, after adjusting for observed individual differences in human capital (in addition to the three characteristics used to form worker subsets), highly educated male natives earn positive wage premiums in this sector. In contrast, most categories of immigrants and female natives earn relatively low average wages and experience negative wage premiums in apparel. This variation in the adjusted industry wage premiums across worker groups may be related to apparel's relative exposure to imports and immigrant workers.     

Merton H. Miller: His Contribution to Financial Economics

Merton Miller's status as a father of finance reflects the academic depth, breadth, and rigor of his writings and two important facets of his character. Merton was a man of great warmth and humor. He communicated his often challenging views via memorable phrases and anecdotes that have become part of the everyday language of the profession. Merton was also a man of great dedication. The whole profession has benefited from his devotion to his doctoral students, to his colleagues, and to his coauthors. This essay demonstrates how Merton's admiration for markets provided the foundation for all his research.     

Born Again? The Ethics and Efficacy of the Conversion Experience in Contemporary Management Development

This article notes how a religious tone has seeped into the discourse of contemporary management development. This religious analogy is explored through the evangelical Christian notion of ‘conversion’ and radical personal change. The expansion of such a mind-set into contemporary management thinking is related to the revival of the charismatic form of authority, in the writing of popular management gurus, such as Tom Peters. The search for new forms of ethical and social cohesion is considered. Next, this framework is applied to management development, with particular reference to one fairly mainstream, if intensive, programme. Through quotes from the managers involved, we illustrate how this programme employed emotional experience to remould individual personality and hence corporate culture in a way that mimics the religious conversion process. Finally, we question both whether a largely involuntary business organization has an ethical right to claim the ‘souls’ of its managers, and whether this is likely to be a realizable goal, in any case.