Powerful learning with public purpose

Boredom and failure combine in a toxic brew that propels too many young people off the graduation path. Research shows that engaged students are more likely to perform well academically, that students who are challenged are less likely to be bored and disengaged, and that high-quality instruction and meaningful activities are key factors in promoting a culture of engagement and achievement in and outside the classroom. With data and real-world examples, the author shows how students and their communities are benefiting from collaborative student-led projects. These projects stem from What Kids Can Do, a program that advocates for learning that engages students as knowledge creators and that promotes young people as valued resources and critical voices in policy debates about school, society, and world affairs.     

With friends like these. . .the role of prejudice and situational norms on discriminatory helping behavior

An experiment was conducted to examine the impact of homophobic attitudes and situational norms for helping on discriminatory behavior against a gay male. In a partial replication of Frey and Gaertner (1986), participants were asked to provide help to a confederate portrayed to be either gay or heterosexual who either requested help for himself (ambiguous situational norm) or for whom a third party requested help (unambiguous situational norm). Participants' levels of homophobia were assessed either before or after the main helping task. The results indicated that when norms for helping were ambiguous those participants higher in homophobia discriminated against the gay male, but only on subtle indicators of discrimination. In the unambiguous norm condition, participants higher in homophobia discriminated against the heterosexual male. Those lower in homophobia did not discriminate under either norm condition. The results show that it may be sufficient for those with prejudiced attitudes just to believe that it is not "the wrong thing to do" for their attitudes to be translated into some form of discriminatory behavior.     

Regional mismatch and unemployment: theory and evidence from Italy, 1977–1998

We describe the functioning of a two-region economy characterized by asymmetric wage setting. Labour market tightness in the leading-region affects wages in the whole economy. In equilibrium, net labour demand shifts towards the leading region raise unemployment elsewhere and leave regional wages unchanged, causing an increase in aggregate unemployment. Based on SHIW micro-data on earnings, we find strong evidence that wages in Italy only respond to Northern unemployment. We estimate that around 33% of the increase in Italian unemployment during 1977–1998 can be explained by regional mismatch, mainly due to an excess labour supply growth in the South.

Population dynamics and monetary policy

This paper shows that in a general equilibrium model with interest-rate feedback rules of the Taylor-type population dynamics give rise to multiple steady states. Under an active monetary policy, real determinacy occurs only around the steady state with zero net financial wealth, where aggregate consumption is equally distributed among agents of different generations. By contrast, in a neighborhood of the steady state displaying a positive stock of financial wealth and intergenerational inequality, real determinacy requires monetary policy to be passive. Changes in the demographic profile of the economy are shown to have relevant implications for the aggregate accumulation of wealth.

CAREER JOBS, SURVIVAL JOBS, AND EMPLOYEE DEVIANCE: A Social Investment Model of Workplace Misconduct

We examine the relationship between career stakes, or the fit between workers' current jobs and their long-term career plans, and employee deviance. Most prior research has focused on the link between job satisfaction and deviance, but career stakes may be a more salient and theoretically relevant measure of workers' investments in their present positions, particularly in young adulthood. We hypothesize that people whose current jobs match their long-term career goals have made a social investment with their employers that inhibits deviant behavior. We analyze data from the Youth Development Study (YDS), a longitudinal community sample of individuals now in their mid-twenties. Our results show that career stakes and job satisfaction exert independent effects on worker misconduct even when prior levels of general deviance and workplace deviance are statistically controlled.     

The Effects of Parenting on the Development of Adolescent Alcohol Misuse: A Six‐Wave Latent Growth Model

Alcohol use increases throughout adolescence. Based on family socialization theory, it was hypothesized that family factors, particularly parental support and monitoring, would influence individual trajectories in the development of alcohol misuse. Six waves of data were analyzed, based on interviews with 506 adolescents in the general population of a northeastern metropolitan area. Using growth‐curve longitudinal analysis, results show that parenting significantly predicts adolescents' initial drinking levels (intercepts) as well as their rates of increase in alcohol misuse (slope). This study provides evidence that effective parenting is an important factor in preventing alcohol misuse.     

Driving Forces Behind Informal Sanctions

This paper investigates the driving forces behind informal sanctions in cooperation games and the extent to which theories of fairness and reciprocity capture these forces. We find that cooperators' punishment is almost exclusively targeted toward the defectors, but the latter also impose a considerable amount of spiteful punishment on the cooperators. However, spiteful punishment vanishes if the punishers can no longer affect the payoff differences between themselves and the punished individual, whereas the cooperators even increase the resources devoted to punishment in this case. Our data also discriminate between different fairness principles. Fairness theories that are based on the assumption that players compare their own payoff to the group's average or the group's total payoff cannot explain the fact that cooperators target their punishment at the defectors. Fairness theories that assume that players aim to minimize payoff inequalities cannot explain the fact that cooperators punish defectors even if payoff inequalities cannot be reduced. Therefore, retaliation, i.e., the desire to harm those who committed unfair acts, seems to be the most important motive behind fairness‐driven informal sanctions.     

Advancing Hospice and Palliative Care Social Work Leadership in Interprofessional Education and Practice

The importance of interprofessional collaboration in achieving high quality outcomes, improving patient quality of life, and decreasing costs has been growing significantly in health care. Palliative care has been viewed as an exemplary model of interprofessional care delivery, yet best practices in both interprofessional education (IPE) and interprofessional practice (IPP) in the field are still developing. So, too, is the leadership of hospice and palliative care social workers within IPE and IPP. Generating evidence regarding best practices that can prepare social work professionals for collaborative practice is essential. Lessons learned from practice experiences of social workers working in hospice and palliative care can inform educational efforts of all professionals. The emergence of interprofessional education and competencies is a development that is relevant to social work practice in this field. Opportunities for hospice and palliative social workers to demonstrate leadership in IPE and IPP are presented in this article.