Jacob Mincer,Experience and the Distribution of Earnings

This paper reviews Jacob Mincer's contributions to the analyses of earnings and the distribution of earnings through his pioneering focus on labor market experience or on-the-job training. It begins with a brief discussion of the theoretical literature on the distribution of earnings in the pre-Mincer period, and then discusses his analysis of human capital and earnings developed in his 1957 doctoral dissertation and 1958 Journal of Political Economy (JPE) article. Further analyses of on-the-job training, and in particular estimates of the rate of return from on-the-job training, are presented in his 1962 JPE paper. The synergy between Mincer and Becker during the 1960s is discussed, as is the development of the schooling-earnings function by Gary S. Becker and Barry R. Chiswick (1966). Jacob Mincer extended this relationship by incorporating experience to form the human capital earnings function in his Schooling, Experience and Earnings (1974). Subsequent modifications, extensions, tests of robustness and the wide applicability of the human capital earnings function are presented.     

Accounting for unsafe sex: Interviews with men who have sex with men

Semi‐structured one‐on‐one interviews with 102 gay and bisexual men were conducted to examine the reasoning processes men use to exempt themselves from practicing safe sex. Qualitative analysis of the interviews revealed the following recurring themes: (a) Many men who were in couple relationships avoided condom use for reasons involving intimacy or trust, or because both partners were HIV‐negative; (b) unsafe sex sometimes occurred inadvertently or involuntarily; (c) negative moods and self‐images were associated with unsafe sex; (d) by “intuiting” that their partner was HIV‐negative, participants exempted themselves from the need for safe sex; and (e) when the boundary between safe and unsafe was unclear, participants used a combination of unofficial and official guidelines to determine what is safe.     

Police Complaints Procedure: An Overview

The article reviews the system of enquiries into complaints about the police, after the 1964 and 1976 Police Acts. It concludes that there are still many unsatisfactory areas despite recent reviews and reforms.     

Evaluating a project on Roma education

This research note is based on the evaluation of the Comenius project Teacher‐IN‐SErvice‐Training‐for‐Roma‐inclusion (INSETRom). The project represented an international effort that was undertaken to bridge the gap between Roma and non‐Roma communities and to improve the educational attainment of Roma children in the mainstream educational system. The evaluation of the project showed that such projects can impact a teacher's confidence and attitudes, but that implementing new insights poses many challenges.     

The Gandhi Secondary School: an experiment in Roma education

The Gandhi Secondary School, located in Pécs, Hungary, was, until recently, the only secondary school in Europe devoted to preparing young Roma for higher education. This article discusses the school's origins and philosophy, its curriculum, and its teaching models. There is also a discussion of the reality of life at the school and the various challenges faced by teachers and students.     

Early intervention and identification: finding the family

Following the growth of early intervention programmes for very young children with special educational needs and their families in the 1960s and 1970s, there came a reflective period during which the efficacy of early intervention was questioned (Marfo and Kysela, 1985). This was followed in the 1990s by a challenge to narrow interpretations of effectiveness in favour of a more holistic analysis of the benefits of intervention programmes for the whole family (Buckley, 1994). It was suggested that more attention should be given to the quality of relationships being established between the child and family members and the context in which early intervention programmes are delivered. Families themselves have begun to assert this (Fitton, 1994; Hebden, 1985) and recent legislation, both in the UK and abroad, has underlined the need for strong interdisciplinary approaches to meet the diversity of special educational needs that exist in our child population. This multidisciplinary approach necessitates a change of focus. It recognises the parent, with their child, as central, implicit and fundamental to the early intervention team, and endorses their right to request appropriate access to services. The model also gives parents the freedom to expand the concept of the family to include extended family and friends (for example, Ballard, 1994). Other parent-empowering initiatives include parent-to-parent schemes (Hornby, 1989 and 1995) which increase the capacity of families to provide resources to other families. The days of professionals as experts have passed. This change in approach to families of children with special educational needs will challenge some professionals and demand a radical reappraisal of the structure of their role and their style of delivery of early intervention, but, if we want quality early intervention, such a review is fundamental to re-establishing its place as a valid and valuable resource to families.     

Domain specificity of fairness judgments in economic transactions

Two studies eliciting fairness judgments about hypothetical economic transactions examined whether fairness judgments were influenced by who was being judged. The first study replicated the results of Kahneman et al. (Am. Econom. Rev. 76 (1986a) 728–741; J. Business 59 (1986b) S285–S300) that people judge certain actions by firms as unfair, but it also demonstrated that people judge parallel actions by individuals as fair. The second study suggested that people apply different standards to individuals and firms because of presumed differences between them in wealth, power, and size. When firms were portrayed as no more powerful or wealthy than individuals, differences in fairness judgments were eliminated. Further, respondents were less inclined to judge the behavior of a firm harshly as perpetrator of an unfair act when the firm was identified with an individual than when it was large and anonymous, and they were more inclined to judge the behavior of an individual harshly as perpetrator of an unfair act when the action injured a firm with a clearly identified individual than when the firm was large and anonymous.     

Social Movement,Action and Change: The Influence of Women's Movements on City Government in Mumbai and London

This article reports on a research investigation into gender and local government in Mumbai in India and London in England. In both these cities female representation at the political level stands at around one third, achieved in London slowly in recent years and in Mumbai more rapidly through the adoption of a quota, or seat reservation system, implemented in 1992. In considering the experience of the women concerned it is argued that their presence and aspirations have been influenced through the networks of their respective women's movements, operating through civil society and the local state. In considering the ways in which they organize and manage the duties of office and their gendered identities, as well as in their focus on the most disadvantaged in their communities and in their dealings with others, the part played by social movements in influencing change is examined.     

Reconsidering union wage effects: Surveying new evidence on an old topic

I examine evidence on private sector union wage gaps in the United States. The consensus opinion among labor economists of an average union premium of roughly 15 percent is called into question. Two forms of measurement error bias downward standard wage gap estimates. Match bias results from Census earnings imputation procedures that do not include union status as a match criterion. Downward bias is roughly equal to the proportion of workers with imputed earnings, currently about 30 percent. Misclassification of union status causes additional attenuation in union gap measures. This bias has worsened as private sector density has declined, since an increasing proportion of workers designated as union are instead nonunion workers. Corrections for misclassification and match bias lead to estimated union gaps substantially higher than standard estimates, but with less of a downward trend since the mid 1980s. Private sector union gaps corrected for these biases are estimated from the CPS for 1973–2001. The uncorrected estimate for 2001 is .13 log points. Correction for match bias increases the gap to .18 log points; further correction for misclassification bias, based on an assumed 2 percent error rate, increases the gap to .24. Reexamination of the skill-upgrading hypothesis leads to the conclusion that higher union gap estimates are plausible. The conventional wisdom of a 15 percent union wage premium warrants reexamination.