Most societies, rich and poor, seek to measure progress in reducing poverty and need, as indicated by material deprivation or social exclusion. The yardsticks used to assess progress and policy impact mainly include income-based poverty, but broader measures of poverty based on consumption, wealth, and material deprivation are also now coming into…

This paper examines the impact of living in ethnic enclaves in different parts of a metropolitan area on low-skilled Latino immigrants' employment accessibility. It does so by comparing the employment status and commuting times of Latinos living in and out of ethnic neighborhoods in central city, inner-ring suburbs, and outer-ring suburbs in…

Schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program receive a portion of their federal funding as commodity foods rather than cash payments. This research compared the product costs and estimated total procurement costs of commodity and commercial foods from the school district perspective using data from 579 Minnesota ordering sites in…

This article examines the political economy of preferences with respect to the environment using a new stated preference survey that presents the first benefit values for national water quality levels. The mean valuation greatly exceeds the median value, as the distribution of valuations is highly skewed. The study couples the survey valuations…

Environmental markets have several institutional features that provide a new context for the use of auctions and that have not been studied previously. This paper reports on laboratory experiments testing three auction forms--uniform and discriminatory price sealed-bid auctions and an ascending clock auction. We test the ability of subjects to…

The lax underwriting in non-prime mortgage markets is widely perceived as one cause of the recent difficulties in the housing market. Policymakers are currently considering moves such as enforcing more careful underwriting to provide additional discipline to mortgage markets. This research explores the possibility of another approach to supplement…

This study examines the short- and long-term impact of AmeriCorps participation on members' civic engagement, education, employment, and life skills. The analysis compares changes in the attitudes and behaviors of participants over time to those of individuals not enrolled in AmeriCorps, controlling for interest in national and community service,…

Nonprofit child care centers are frequently observed to produce child care which is, on average, of higher quality than care provided in commercial child care centers. In part, this nonprofit advantage is due to different input choices made by nonprofit centers--lower child--staff ratios, better-educated staff and directors, higher rates of…

Debt limits, interest coverage ratios, one-off balanced budget requirements, pay-as-you-go rules, and tax and expenditure limits are among the most important fiscal rules for constraining intertemporal transfers. There is considerable evidence that the least costly and most effective of such rules are those that focus directly on the rate of…

This cross-state empirical study focuses on the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) and examines its impact on the academic research and development (R&D) expenditures financed by state governments. Based on a panel of 50 states during 1979-2006, the empirical results indicate that…

Although it is well known that vaccines against many infectious diseases confer positive economic externalities via indirect protection, analysts have typically ignored possible herd protection effects in policy analyses of vaccination programs. Despite a growing literature on the economic theory of vaccine externalities and several innovative…

We describe trends in maternal employment and leave-taking after birth of a newborn and analyze the extent to which these behaviors are influenced by parental leave policies. Data are from the June Current Population Survey (CPS) Fertility Supplements, merged with other months of the CPS, and cover the period 1987 to 1994. This time span is one…

This paper examines the long-term effect of project-based housing assistance--public housing and private assisted housing--on work, earnings, and welfare receipt. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics-Assisted Housing Database to identify women ever living in project-based assisted housing and to create comparison groups using propensity…

This paper examines whether state governments perform systematically less environmental enforcement of facilities in communities with higher minority and low-income populations. Although this is an important claim made by environmental justice advocates, it has received little attention in the scholarly literature. Specifically, I analyze state…

Although there is considerable interest in the impact of diverse policies affecting the biophysical outcomes in forests, gaining a substantial sample over time of forests under different institutional arrangements has been difficult. This article analyzes data from 46 forests located in six countries over time. In forests where policies have been…