Following a review of the American Experience with administrative reform in the federal government, concentrating on reforms since the 1960s, the American approach to public administration is compared to that of France. The two nations appear to have quite dissimilar administrative cultures if...

I begin with an economic environment familiar from welfare-and political-economic literatures and show how, with quantitatively reasonable distributions of labor productivity and tax-price-elasticities of taxable income, middle class consumers are (personally) worse off with any negative income...

This paper analyzes patterns of black and white mobility to determine the causes for the increase in the geographic concentration of black poverty during the 1970s. Using a special tabulation of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics that appended census tract information to individual records, we...

This paper examines the relative benefits of general education and vocational training in Romania, a country which experienced major technological and institutional change during its transition from Communism to a market economy. To avoid the bias caused by non-random selection, we exploit a...

In this paper, I first summarize how the U.S. Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) operates and describe the characteristics of recipients. I then discuss empirical work on the effects of the EITC on poverty and income distribution, and its effects on labor supply. Next, I discuss a few policy...

We study the self-employed decision and its relation to human and social capital. Human capital is necessary to acquire skills. Social capital dampens the effects of uncertainty about future income. Our data set consists of 1339 respondents from the same age group, who were interviewed three...

This paper highlights the shortcomings of key components of the employment and training system, showing that both school-to-work efforts and second chance employment and training programs suffer from systemic and programmatic problems. In American schools, work-oriented learning takes place...

Democrats and liberals are generally understood to be more caring and kind than Republicans and conservatives; for example, even conservative author and media personality Ben Wattenberg has acknowledged that "the word ‘conservative’ conjures up images of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, while...

Large and persistent differences in corruption across comparable countries is a challenging research issue. Even more intriguing are such differences across regions within the same country, because the typically considered socioeconomic and governance characteristics are generally more similar...

The National Children's Study, undertaken in 2000 by collaboration among several federal government agencies led by NICHD, CDC, and EPA, is one of the largest and boldest longitudinal study of children's health ever undertaken. One of the key design issues has been the nature of the NCS sample....