Tightening income documentation in a means-tested program: who stays away?

Programs using means tests to identify low-income households face a trade-off between promoting access and ensuring program integrity. The authors use a comparison-district design to estimate the effects of a pilot program to improve the accuracy of the process of certifying students for free or reduced-price meals in the National School Lunch Program. This pilot program required households to provide income documentation with their applications for these benefits. Requiring income documentation did not reduce the proportion of ineligible households getting free or reduced-price meals. Furthermore, this requirement did reduce access to the program among eligible households.     

Standard Bearers: Qualitative Sociologists’ Experiences with IRB Regulation

In response to the system for regulating research with human subjects, researchers have raised two apparently contradictory concerns: that IRBs are excessively inconsistent (often raised by biomedical researchers), and that they are excessively standardizing (often raised by qualitative interview researchers). Why does standardization appear as the dominant theme in qualitative researchers’ experiences with their IRBs? And how do qualitative researchers experience standardization in their IRB encounters? We focus on IRBs role as regulatory bureaucracies, which typically rely heavily on standardized communication and decisions to process information and make large numbers of decisions in a timely manner. We explore the role of standardization in IRB regulation of qualitative research in an analysis of semi-structured interviews with 26 qualitative sociologists from six research universities and three liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States. In a regulatory regime oriented toward the norms of experimental research, these frictions resulted partly from a lack of appropriate standardized language and decision-templates, but also from the inherent difficulties of applying standardized decisions to work that is unpredictable, unique, and difficult to routinize.     

Welfare State and Social Enterprise in Transition: Evidence from Serbia

This paper analyses welfare regime changes in Serbia and their impact on social enterprise development in the last two decades. We cover the period of significant transition-related reforms within the welfare state, with important implications on the position of these enterprises. Using data gathered from the qualitative field research, our study shows that there are two broad groups of factors that are important for development of the new generation of social enterprises, those that emerged in the last decade with an idea to foster entrepreneurial spirit and expanded into new domains other than those providing assistance to the marginalized groups. First, their decision to enter the social economy sector still depends on the environment created by the state. Secondly, their sustainability is affected by the factors typically found in any other enterprise of comparable scale like business skills, capacity to form networks and partner with relevant stakeholders.     

The ‘new industrial man’ as unhero: Doing postfeminist masculinities in an Italian pharmacological research centre

Recent work has documented the need to engage with how men construct masculinities within postfeminist discourses in the workplace. Postfeminism has sparked debates concerning the changing ideals of masculinities, highlighting the tensions between traditional forms of patriarchy and ‘new’ ways of being a man (e.g., emotional, a ‘new father’, in crisis). Men have been depicted as being in search of a new identity, opposed to the ever‐growing confidence and empowerment of women. In mobilizing postfeminism as a discourse, this article illustrates how men working in an Italian pharmacological research centre (managed by men but dominated by women) assume subject positions that contradictorily fluctuate between tradition and fluid modernity, to reveal a masculinity which we identify with the ‘new industrial man’. The postfeminist masculinities exposed in the analysis mesh pro‐ and anti‐feminist ideas by appealing to un/heroic and romanticized subjectivities. The analysis also shows how un/heroic masculinities and men's appeal to biological differences to reinforce social ones and devalue the feminine obfuscate organizational gender inequalities. The article advances masculinity theory by offering a nuanced analysis of how masculinities and men are affected by paradoxical contemporary pressures for more egalitarian gender relations and a renewed emphasis on patriarchal traditions, which continue to support the gendering of the workplace.     

Asset or Liability: Transnational Links and Political Participation of Foreign‐Born Citizens in Taiwan

Viewed as outsiders clinging onto links with their country of origin, immigrants do not often feature positively in electoral politics in their host society. Challenging this conventional view, this article examines how immigrants make use of their transnational ties to foster their political participation in the host state. This exploration is conducted through our study of the political participation of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants in Taiwan. Our research finds that transnational ties are politicized by the mainstream political parties. However, such politicization does not necessarily restrict immigrants’ agency and their sociopolitical space for political participation. Their transnational ties constitute a dynamic sociopolitical field in which these maintained connections are acted upon and give rise to a variety of strategies for responding to issues affecting their interests.     

Remittances as an Insurance Mechanism in the Labor Market

The probability that Mexican households receive remittances increases in response to temporary loss of employment by household heads. Evidence indicates that the probability doubles in the short-term, with a stronger effect in the first quarter of unemployment. Taking into account inter-household transfers within Mexico, the increase in the probability of private transfers is similar in households with low and high access to migratory networks in the U. S. The effectiveness of private transfers as an insurance mechanism has been reduced in an environment of economic crisis.     

Risk aversion in expected intertemporal discounted utilities bandit problems

We consider a situation where an individual is facing an uncertain situation, but may costly alter his knowledge of the uncertainties. We study in this context how risk aversion may modify the individual search behavior. We consider a one-armed bandit problem (where one arm is safe and the other is risky) and study how the agent risk aversion can change the sequence of arms selected. The main result is that when the utility function is more concave, the agent has more chances to select the safe arm. We also discuss how search is affected by risk aversion.     

The Effect of Grandparental Support on Mothers’ Labour Market Participation: An Instrumental Variable Approach

Childcare arrangements are key in women’s ability to juggle motherhood and work outside the home. As such, the study of access to childcare and its use is of great policy relevance. We focus on a particular kind of informal childcare, the one provided by grandparents. Empirically, assessing the effect of grandparental childcare is not an easy task due to unobserved preferences. In light of the potential outcome framework, we interpret the biases resulting from unobserved preferences as arising from the non-compliance of mothers to the availability of grandparents and from preferences of grandparents for activities other than childcare. Using an instrumental variable approach on Italian data, we find that the effect of grandparental childcare on mothers’ labour supply is positive, statistically significant and economically relevant. The effect is stronger for less educated mothers, with young children and living in northern and central Italy.