This paper empirically examines the role of social networks in welfare participation. Social theorists from across the political spectrum have argued that network effects have given rise to a culture of poverty. Empirical work, however, has found it difficult to distinguish the effect of...

This paper assesses the quality of various micro level measures of social capital. It begins by examining a simple model of social capital accumulation in which households acquire social capital by devoting resources to forming relationships with other households. Through these relationships...

There is an extensive literature on the extent to which public health insurance coverage through Medicaid induces less private health insurance coverage. However, little is known about the effect of other components of the health care safety net in crowding out private coverage. We examine the...

This paper discusses the definition and identification of external treatment effects and experimental designs capable of detecting these effects. External effects occur when the outcome of a given individual is affected by the treatment assignments of other individuals. The paper argues that...

This paper investigates the patterns and determinants of how families care for their pre-school age children. In contrast to all existing studies, we analyze the child care decisions of households with non-working mothers as well as those with working mothers or mothers in job training or...

This paper describes a portion of a larger research project to develop a heuristic and set of psychometric scales to carefully and broadly consider and measure beliefs in environmental knowledge, values, ethics, and support for environmental protection. The project was intended to help answer...

This is an invited comment on a forthcoming target article (Rachlin, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in press) which provides a further entry in the long list of proposals for reducing what might be seen as social motivation to some roundabout form of self-interest. But his argument exhibits the...

For a decade, public administration and management literature has featured a riveting story: the transformation of the field's orientation from an old paradigm to a new one. While many doubt claims concerning a new paradigm–a "new public management"–no one questions that there was an old...

This draft material gives an account of the "S-diagram", which uses Schelling's social choice diagram in the context of my NSNX ("neither selfish nor exploited") model of individual choice to provide an account of social equilibrium in situations in which social outcomes are contested. Examples...

This paper examines the tradeoff between early and late specialization in the context of higher education. While some educational systems require students to specialize early by choosing a major field of study prior to entering university, others allow students to postpone this choice. I develop...