Academics and Advocates: Using Participatory Action Research to Influence Welfare Policy

University students on welfare, working with academic researchers, successfully lobbied for a state policy in Wyoming to define postsecondary education as work under the 1996 welfare reform law. This article describes the researchers’ use of participatory action research (PAR) in the policy arena. Consumer researchers are encouraged to consider using PAR to help make postsecondary education more available to low‐income parents. New PAR studies could assist low‐income consumers in analyzing the use of surplus welfare funds and new federal regulations, which now make postsecondary education a more viable option for state welfare reform policies.     

Young People Are the Front Lines of Financial Inclusion: A Review of 45 Years of Research

Amidst concerns about percentages of households that remain unbanked or underbanked, policy endeavors have emerged to promote financial inclusion by making financial products such as savings accounts readily available. While these endeavors have primarily concentrated on households, young people may be the front lines of financial inclusion because they may be more likely to be banked in young adulthood and beyond when they start off with savings accounts earlier in life. This article addresses young people's financial inclusion by comprehensively reviewing 60 research studies on young people's savings, discussing the role of the family in young people's financial inclusion, discussing financial inclusion from an institutional perspective, presenting policy implications, and identifying gaps in knowledge and opportunities for research. Policies that open savings accounts for young people early in life may be a promising strategy for extending financial inclusion and preventing unbanked or underbanked status later in life.     

The Effect of Mentorship and Sex-Role Style on Male-Female Earnings

The women in management literature contend that mentorship and sex-role style affect women's career success and ultimately earnings. We use data from the public accounting profession (N = 833) and a human capital wage decomposition model to examine the effect of mentorship and sex-role style on male-female wages and wage differentials. The results suggest that career mentorship modestly increases only women's earnings. However, sex-role style was found to significantly interact with gender to affect earnings and earnings differentials.     

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives on Consumer Response to Electricity information

Extensive analysis of consumers’ responses to electricity information and feedback programs has yielded a consensus that such programs have little or no effect on consumers’ electricity use. We argue that these results may be misleading because offsetting usage effects are likely to occur both within and among households. Conventional experimental designs capture only net interhousehold usage effects. We propose alternative experimental designs better suited to answering important policy questions. An experiment involving continuous-display electricity-use monitors supports our prediction of dissimilar and offsetting behavioral responses among treatment households.