Employability,Poverty and the Spheres of Sociability – Evidence from the British Household Panel Survey

Policymakers in the UK and beyond have sought to promote interventions to encourage social capital‐building among disadvantaged groups. One specific concern is that those with limited access to social capital/social network relationships will be at greater risk of experiencing both unemployment and poverty. By analyzing longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we seek to identify significant relationships between poverty and the likelihood of entering employment, and different measures of ‘sociability’ and social isolation. Crucially, we discuss if and how measures of sociability/social isolation are associated with jobseekers' varying chances of exiting and re‐entering work and how this varies with their experience of poverty. These issues are important because if sociability impacts on the likelihood of entering employment from a state of worklessness, then policymakers need to understand how cycles of social and labour market exclusion are associated with the rates of entering employment in order to develop effective interventions to improve jobseekers' employability and combat poverty. Following an analysis of BHPS data, we identify lessons for policy for combating long‐term unemployment and promoting social inclusion.     

Effecting change in local government: local authority chief executives as emotional actors

Most change management initiatives fail. Here, we explore data which emerged from a larger research study of local authority chief executives’ subjective experiences of New Labour’s modernisation programme and argue that the route to change so often taken by central government is detrimental to the successful embedding of change within local government because it ignores fundamental human reactions to coercion and control. We demonstrate that the seeds of failure are sown in the processes adopted as much as in the content of any programme of change. A contributory factor to such failures is the apparent reliance on the part of legislators that their policies and procedures will receive a neutral reaction. We show that the reality is that legislation is responded to and enacted by people who react in ways designed to defend their own positions, irrespective of the worth of those positions. Whether seen as actors in the policy implementation process, or as agents of change, chief executives act and react emotionally. This contributes to our theoretical understanding of the policy process and the practical application of change programmes. This article will be of interest to those in central and local government who are promoting or responding to change.     

Efficient Estimation of Data Combination Models by the Method of Auxiliary-to-Study Tilting (AST)

We propose a locally efficient estimator for a class of semiparametric data combination problems. A leading estimand in this class is the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT). Data combination problems are related to, but distinct from, the class of missing data problems with data missing at random (of which the average treatment effect (ATE) estimand is a special case). Our estimator also possesses a double robustness property. Our procedure may be used to efficiently estimate, among other objects, the ATT, the two-sample instrumental variables model (TSIV), counterfactual distributions, poverty maps, and semiparametric difference-in-differences. In an empirical application, we use our procedure to characterize residual Black–White wage inequality after flexibly controlling for “premarket” differences in measured cognitive achievement. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

A Microeconometric Test of Alternative Stochastic Theories of Risky Choice

The random preference, Fechner (or white noise), and constant error (or tremble) models of stochastic choice under risk are compared. Various combinations of these approaches are used with expected utility and rank-dependent theory. The resulting models are estimated in a random effects framework using experimental data from two samples of 46 subjects who each faced 90 pairwise choice problems. The best fitting model uses the random preference approach with a tremble mechanism, in conjunction with rank-dependent theory. As subjects gain experience, trembles become less frequent and there is less deviation from behaviour consistent with expected utility theory.     

Imprecise preferences and the WTP-WTA disparity

This article reports the results of a study designed to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) values for changes in the risk of nonfatal road injuries. We examine the possibility that individuals' preferences over combinations of wealth, risk, and safety are imprecise, and that this imprecision might result in the observed disparity between WTP and WTA measures of value. The results confirm that individuals' preferences for safety are significantly imprecise, but that this alone is insufficient to explain more than part of the disparity. Indeed, respondents' estimates of the minimum that they would be prepared to accept for a risk increase frequently exceed the maximum that they would be prepared to pay for an equivalent risk reduction.     

Public Perceptions of Risk and Preference-Based Values of Safety

This article reports the results of two studies aimed at estimating preference-based values of safety in three contexts—namely rail, domestic fires and fires in public places—relative to the corresponding value for roads using matching (or equivalence) questions. In addition, both studies included a variety of questions intended to shed light on respondents' perceptions of risk and attitudes to safety in the various contexts. While the two studies were, to all intents and purposes, identical in the procedure that they employed, the essential difference between them was that the first study took place in late 1998, whereas the second study was carried out in early 2000 in the aftermath of a major rail accident at Ladbroke Grove near London's Paddington station which occurred in October 1999 and in which 29 passengers and 2 train drivers died. In addition, the second study sample was deliberately weighted to contain an above-average proportion of regular rail users. These studies demonstrated how certain factors which have been shown to affect people's perception of risk (see Slovic, P. (1992). In S. Krimsky and D. Golding (eds.), Social Theories of Risk, Westport, CT: Praeger, pp. 117–152) also affected our respondents' priorities over safety programs. The results also showed however, that the impact of these perceptions upon the trade-offs between preventing deaths in different hazard contexts was a good deal less pronounced than has been suggested by the value differentials that are currently implicit—and in some cases, explicit—in public policy making.