For too long, research on retrospective voting has fixated on how economic trends affect incumbents' electoral prospects in national and state elections. Hundreds of thousands of elections in the United States occur at the local level and have little to do with unemployment or inflation rates....

Recent empirical studies from across the social and behavioral sciences find that social capital is associated with various measures of well-being, including economic growth (Stephen Knack and Phillip Keefer 1997) and mortality (Ichiro Kawachi, Bruce P. Kennedy and Kimberly Lochner 1997). These...

The prevailing account of expert vs. lay conflicts of risk intuition on such matters as nuclear waste and pesticides is that experts focus on a very narrow range of consequences, but ordinary people have a much richer sense of what is involved in choices about risk. Experts may feel comfortable...

The 1996 welfare reform legislation has spawned a multitude of studies of the experiences of welfare recipients and their families since the reforms have been implemented (e.g. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2000; Cancian, Haveman, Kaplan, Meyer and Wolfe, 1999; Harris, 1996; Coulton et al.,...

Previous contributions to the literature have used data on agricultural production activities in West Africa to show that plots of land managed by women are less productive (on average) than the ones farmed by their husbands. This would seem to indicate a rejection of the intrahousehold...

This paper extends the recent work of Hotz and Miller (1991) on the use of conditional choice probabilities to represent the valuation functions in the estimation of dynamic, discrete choice models. They derive a N1/2 consistent and asymptotically normal estimator of the structural parameters of...

In this paper, we examine the effects of existing state-level child care regulations on the cost, or price, of non-parental child care, the demand for (non-parental) child care by parents, and the mother's decision to enter the labor force. We distinguish between the indirect effects of...

A prominent branch of stated preference estimation is known as contingent valuation methodology (CVM). Essentially, contingent valuation methodology involves asking a sample of individuals how much they would be willing to pay for a marginal change in the quantity of a public good provided. This...

Many welfare-reliant and working poor families experience difficulties making ends meet and thus must develop strategies to cope with competing demands for limited resources. Needs, resources, and the strategies low-income families use to negotiate competing priorities change as family...

Policy analysis was conceived in controversy. Beginning in the 1960s, critics such as Lawrence Tribe, Edward Banfield, Charles Lindblom, Richard Nelson, and Martin Rein have attacked the way policy analysis skills are conceived, taught, and applied in practice. Within the field, policy analysts...