Debt to Society: Asset Poverty and Prisoner Reentry

Every year, millions of people exit American jails and prisons and attempt to reintegrate into society. Ex-offenders face many obstacles during the transition. Scholars contend that securing employment is central to a successful transition. A job that allows an ex-offender to earn an income above the poverty line is especially significant, recent studies have shown. Consequently, many prisoner reentry initiatives are focused on expanding employment opportunities for ex-offenders. However, the almost exclusive emphasis on employment as the measurement of economic well-being is short-sighted because it ignores the importance of financial education and asset ownership. Prisoner reentry programs should include an emphasis on financial education in addition to an emphasis on employment as a means of reducing recidivism rates and improving the economic well-being of the ex-offenders and receiving communities. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy implications.     

Public Housing in New Orleans Post Katrina: The Struggle for Housing as a Human Right

This article reflects on the post-Katrina demolition of public housing communities in New Orleans and associated loss of affordable apartments with a focus on the Columbia Parc redevelopment. Some key issues regarding displacement, race, gender, and public housing policies are referenced throughout. A concluding discussion of advocacy efforts to frame housing as a human right highlights a central, unmet movement demand: one for one replacement of all demolished public housing.     

Regulatory Constraints on Performance-Based Managerial Compensation,Bank Monitoring,and Aggregate Loan Quality

This paper evaluates the effects of binding regulatory restraints on the rate of performance-based management compensation within a banking framework in which a primary function of bank management teams is to monitor loans in order to eliminate deadweight default losses. Available management teams are endowed with heterogeneous levels of monitoring efficiencies, and obtaining services from more efficient monitoring teams requires payment of higher rates of performance-based compensation. In equilibrium, a fraction of banks choose to employ management teams that monitor. With or without binding capital requirements, imposing binding restraints on the allowed rate of performance-based compensation results either in lower bank efficiency or in a reduced fraction of monitoring banks and, hence, lower aggregate loan quality.     

Do Immigrant Groups Differ in Welfare Usage? Evidence from the U.S.

The study of welfare participation in the United States prior to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and afterward has primarily focused on comparing native and immigrant households. Analyses that have gone beyond this broad classification have focused on comparisons across race, with particular focus on Hispanic immigrants. This paper moves away from the existing literature by investigating whether there is a difference in welfare usage among immigrant based on their birthplace. Using a probit model, we investigate this potential difference by testing two related hypotheses. Our results suggest that the probability of welfare usage for immigrants with similar characteristic, differ for some immigrant groups. We also find that for some immigrant groups, citizen and noncitizens differ with respect to welfare usage.     

The Effect of Payment Methods on Risk Aversion

Risk aversion experiments such as those by Holt and Laury (2002, 2005) measure risk aversion by examining subjects’ responses to a series of probability-ordered choices. Subjects are paid real money rewards, using the random round payment method in which the amount is determined by one randomly selected decision. The findings reported here were obtained from 119 subjects who confronted the same choice set and payment amounts, but 60 of these subjects were paid using the random-round method while the remaining 59 were paid based on an average of all their choices, the accumulated value method. The accumulated value payment method simulates portfolio returns, as opposed to returns from stand alone investments. Results indicate that accumulated value subjects took more risk and made more inconsistent decisions.     

Are Bilateral Remittances Countercyclical?

By putting together a relatively large data set on bilateral remittances of emigrants, this paper is able to shed light on the important hypothesis of smoothing. The smoothing hypothesis is that remittances are countercyclical with respect to income in the worker’s country of origin (the recipient of the remittance), while procyclical with respect to income in the migrant’s host country (the sender of the remittance). The econometric results confirm the hypothesis. This affirmation of smoothing is important for two reasons. First, it suggests that remittances should be placed on the list of criteria for an optimum currency area. Second, it brings into doubt plans by governments in some developing countries to harness remittances for their own use, in that government spending in these countries generally fails the test of countercyclicality which remittances pass.     

Der Patient als Partner

Die Patientenedukation schlie?t eine umfassende Information und Beratung des Betroffenen hinsichtlich der verschiedenen Aspekte seiner Erkrankung ein. Gerade bei geriatrischen Patienten mit oft komplexen Krankheitsbildern ist sie oft die Voraussetzung für ein weiteres selbstst?ndiges Leben. Was geh?rt alles dazu?