Making welfare work: UK activation policies under New Labour

This paper describes and briefly evaluates the major "New Deal" activation policies introduced by the UK New Labour government since 1997. It outlines the ambitious project to modernize the UK economy and welfare state and, within this overall strategy, to end child poverty and to tackle social exclusion by encouraging movement from welfare benefits into work, and by making work pay. Three sets of New Deal programmes are discussed: those targeted on unemployed claimants, lone parents and people with disabilities. The paper concludes that real change has been achieved with measurable beneficial effects but that there are threats to the further elaboration and extension of the New Deal model.     

Adolescents' Prosocial Behavior Toward Family,Friends, and Strangers: A Person‐Centered Approach

This study examined longitudinal change in adolescents' prosocial behavior toward family, friends, and strangers. Participants included 491 mother–child dyads (average age of child at Time 1 = 11.5, 67% European American). Growth mixture modeling suggested that prosocial behavior toward family was generally stable or decreased over time, while prosocial behavior toward friends increased over time. However, findings highlighted unique developmental trajectories within subgroups of adolescents for prosocial behavior toward family and friends and found that maternal warmth and adolescent sympathy, self‐regulation, and gender consistently distinguished between groups. Discussion focuses on the need for a more multidimensional approach to prosocial development.     

Bayesian estimation of the Cox model under different hazard rate shape assumptions via slice sampling

In this paper, we provide a full Bayesian analysis for Cox's proportional hazards model under different hazard rate shape assumptions. To this end, we select the modified Weibull distribution family to model failure rates. A novel Markov chain Monte Carlo method allows one to tackle both exact and right-censored failure time data. Both simulated and real data are used to illustrate the methods.     

Climate change knowledge influences attitude to mitigation via efficacy beliefs

Theories proposing climate change apathy is explained by inadequate knowledge do not account for why many informed and concerned Americans fail to act. While correlations between knowledge, efficacy for climate change, and attitude to mitigation have been observed, few studies have examined efficacy for climate change as a mediator. This study aimed to investigate the influence of specific climate change knowledge on attitude to mitigation via efficacy beliefs. A cross-sectional survey of 205 US adults recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk assessed participants’ climate change knowledge, efficacy for climate change, and attitude to mitigation. Indirect effects of self-efficacy for climate change were observed in three mediation models, suggesting efficacy for climate change explains some of the relationship between specific climate change knowledge and attitude to mitigation. The findings suggest risk communication can motivate pro-environmental attitudes with interventions that deliver information about climate change and develop efficacy for mitigation behavior.     

Fiscal Foresight and Information Flows

News—or foresight—about future economic fundamentals can create rational expectations equilibria with non‐fundamental representations that pose substantial challenges to econometric efforts to recover the structural shocks to which economic agents react. Using tax policies as a leading example of foresight, simple theory makes transparent the economic behavior and information structures that generate non‐fundamental equilibria. Econometric analyses that fail to model foresight will obtain biased estimates of output multipliers for taxes; biases are quantitatively important when two canonical theoretical models are taken as data generating processes. Both the nature of equilibria and the inferences about the effects of anticipated tax changes hinge critically on hypothesized information flows. Different methods for extracting or hypothesizing the information flows are discussed and shown to be alternative techniques for resolving a non‐uniqueness problem endemic to moving average representations.     

Modeling the Audit Opinions Issued to Bankrupt Companies: A Two‐stage Empirical Analysis*

Many observers are dissatisfied with the accounting profession's ability to warn the public of upcoming bankruptcy filings. Since regulators and users tend to treat an unmodified audit opinion as a “clean bill of health,” they do not expect the business to fail in the near future. Research has shown that more often than not, auditors end up letting users down when it comes to predicting bankruptcy filings with audit opinions. Although auditors assert they are not responsible for predicting future events, it is very clear that their opinion decision is evaluated, at least in part, based on events that occur after the audit report date. The interesting and logical next step is to find out how companies exit bankruptcy. Do they liquidate or reorganize? Successful reorganization may, in the end, exonerate auditors and preserve their role as an early warning device. The opinion prediction model developed in the paper introduces a new bankruptcy resolution variable that proxies for the auditor's prognosis of the ultimate disposition of the soon‐to‐be‐bankrupt company. Using a sample of bankruptcy filings between 1982 and 1992, we find that auditors do not seem to be able to predict filings or resolution. Our tests of bankruptcy resolution support what auditors have been arguing for years: that they are not clairvoyant with respect to a client's future.