The uneven patterning of welfare benefits at the twilight of AFDC: assessing the influence of institutions, race, and citizen preferences

Scholars have been slow to test welfare state theories on the extensive subnational variation in the United States during the recent period of retrenchment. We assess institutional politics theories, literature on race and social policy, and public opinion arguments relative to levels of support in states' Aid to Families Dependent Children programs from 1982 until its elimination in 1996. Pooled time-series results demonstrate that the determinants of spending during retrenchment are mostly similar to those driving development and expansion. Pro-spending actors and professionalized state institutions limit benefit curtailment, while jurisdictions with larger African- American populations have lower benefits. Additionally, liberal citizens positively impact support and strengthen the effects of state institutions, but this effect is attenuated in states with larger African-American populations.     

Exposure to Violence and Achievement Motivation Beliefs: Moderating Roles of Cultural-Ecological Factors

This study conceptualized individual-level cultural-ecological factors (racial identity and religious coping) as adolescent assets that would promote achievement motivation and reduce negative associations between community violence exposure and motivation. Our examination of African American adolescents (N = 380) from urban contexts indicated a negative association between community violence exposure and motivation beliefs (academic self-efficacy and academic importance). Accounting for socioeconomic factors and parental support, higher racial pride (private regard), and higher use of religion to cope with difficult times predicted higher motivation beliefs. Religious coping reduced the negative association of violence exposure with motivation beliefs. Among boys, however, there was a stronger, negative relationship between community violence and academic self-efficacy for those higher in private regard. Boys reporting higher private regard had more positive motivation beliefs when experiencing lower community violence. Results suggest cultural-ecological factors can support academic motivation but also may not fully protect youth exposed to high ecological risk.     

The use of costless inspection in enforcement

The process whereby a reluctant decisionmaker may be induced to behave in accordance with a rule, regulation, or law, is examined in a general context. It is assumed that an enforcement agency can make use of a costless inspection process, which would provide a free, but possibly inaccurate, assessment of the subject's behavior. The agency also has some power of punishment. When should evidence be collected by the agency, and how should it be used? How can an enforcement system be structured so as to maximize the level of compliance? How does compliance depend on the subject's private gain for violation, the level of punishment, the risk of errors (of both kinds) in the inspection report, and other parameters? These questions and others are addressed using non-cooperative game models. Answers give new insights into real-world enforcement problems in areas as diverse as environmental regulation and arms control.     

Trajectories of Institutional Disintegration in Late-Soviet Russia and Contemporary Iraq

How might revolutions and other processes of institutional disintegration inform political processes preceding them? By mapping paths of agency through processes of institutional disintegration, the trajectory improvisation model of institutional breakdown overcomes "action-structure" binaries by framing political revolutions as possible outcomes of such disintegrative processes. The trajectory improvisation approach expands the trajectory adjustment model of social change developed by Gil Eyal, Iván Szelényi, and Eleanor Townsley. An overview of political revolution in Soviet Russia between 1989 and 1991 illustrates trajectory improvisation. The recent American invasion and occupation of Iraq shows alternative routes to institutional disintegration, indicating the independence of models of institutional breakdown from those of social movements. These cases illustrate both the diversity of situations the trajectory improvisation model speaks to, and the limitation of models of trajectory adjustment, improvisation, social movements, and invasions, illustrating why such models at best enable what are called "explanatory narratives" of actual historical processes.     

Simulation-based inference for simultaneous processes on regular lattices

The article proposes a simulation-based inferential method for simultaneous processes defined on a regular lattice. The focus is on spatio-temporal processes with a simultaneous component, that is such that contemporaneous spatial neighbors are potential explanatory variables in the model. The new method has the advantage of being simpler to implement than maximum likelihood and allows us to propose a robust estimator. We give asymptotic properties, present a Monte Carlo study and an illustrative example.     

DOING WELL BY DOING GOOD:

The popular assumption that volunteer work helps people get good jobs is tested using panel data from the Young Women's Module of the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience. Volunteering while a young adult has no effect on whether women will be working for pay eighteen years later, but it has a positive effect on the occupational status of those who are. Length of time spent in the labor force between early adulthood and middle age suppresses the positive effect of volunteering on occupational status. A separate analysis of women who display more commitment to working for pay by being in the labor force in both 1973 and 1991 shows the same positive effect of volunteer work on occupational status.     

On the discretization of nonparametric isotropic covariogram estimators

In this article, we describe the discretization of nonparametric covariogram estimators for isotropic stationary stochastic processes. The use of nonparametric estimators is important to avoid the difficulties in selecting a parametric model. The key property the isotropic covariogram must satisfy is to be positive definite and thus have the form characterized by Yaglom's representation of Bochner's theorem. We present an optimal discretization of the latter in the sense that the resulting nonparametric covariogram estimators are guaranteed to be smooth and positive definite in the continuum. This provides an answer to an issue raised by Hall, Fisher and Hoffmann (1994). Furthermore, from a practical viewpoint, our result is important because a nonlinear constrained algorithm can sometimes be avoided and the solution can be found by least squares. Some numerical results are presented for illustration.     

Prenatal Cardiac Function and Postnatal Cognitive Development: An Exploratory Study

Fetal cardiac function was measured at 24, 30, and 36 weeks gestation and quantified in terms of heart rate, variability, and episodic accelerations. Children's representational capacity was evaluated at 27 months in terms of language and play. Thirty‐ and 36‐wcek‐old fetuses that displayed greater heart‐rate variability and more episodic accelerations, and fetuses that exhibited a more precipitous increase in heart‐rate variability and acceleration over gestation achieved higher levels of language competence. Thirty‐six‐week‐old fetuses with higher heart‐rate variability and accelerations, and steeper growth trajectories over gestation, achieved higher levels of symbolic play. Cardiac patterning during gestation may reflect an underlying neural substrate that persists through early childhood: Individual variation in rate of development could be stable, or efficient cardiac function could positively influence the underlying neural substrate to enhance cognitive performance.