Child center closures: Does nonprofit status provide a comparative advantage?

Reliable access to dependable, high quality childcare services is a vital concern for large numbers of American families. The childcare industry consists of private nonprofit, private for-profit, and governmental providers that differ along many dimensions, including quality, clientele served, and organizational stability. Nonprofit providers are theorized to provide higher quality services given comparative tax advantages, higher levels of consumer trust, and management by mission driven entrepreneurs. This study examines the influence of ownership structure, defined as nonprofit, for-profit sole proprietors, for-profit companies, and governmental centers, on organizational instability, defined as childcare center closures. Using a cross sectional data set of 15724 childcare licenses in California for 2007, we model the predicted closures of childcare centers as a function of ownership structure as well as center age and capacity. Findings indicate that for small centers (capacity of 30 or less) nonprofits are more likely to close, but for larger centers (capacity 30 +) nonprofits are less likely to close. This suggests that the comparative advantages available for nonprofit organizations may be better utilized by larger centers than by small centers. We consider the implications of our findings for parents, practitioners, and social policy.     

Community worker perceptions of the Income Management regime in Shepparton

This paper focuses on how community workers in Shepparton viewed the impact of the Place Based Income Management (PBIM) trial on the lives of their clients, their clients' families, and the broader community. The paper responds to criticism that there has been a lack of community voices in the development of PBIM or of their inclusion in the formal evaluation framework, raised in Philip Mendes's 2013 study of this trial site. A key policy goal underlying Income Management is that the tool assists low income people to become better money managers. Our study found that Shepparton community workers also used the parlance of ‘tool’ to describe the programmatic value of the BasicsCard in their interactions with clients. However, the BasicsCard appeared marginal to their discussions. Three clear themes emerged from the interviews: Shepparton's focus on voluntary clients, and ascertaining why participation in the local trial had dropped; that support for IM centred on the voluntary measure and the extra resources available to assist clients; and pragmatically locating the program in the middle of a welfare continuum that stretched from the voluntary Centrepay at one end to the highly coercive and restrictive paternalism of State Trustees at the other.     

Additive representation of separable preferences over infinite products

Let \(\mathcal{X }\) be a set of outcomes, and let \(\mathcal{I }\) be an infinite indexing set. This paper shows that any separable, permutation-invariant preference order \((\succcurlyeq )\) on \(\mathcal{X }^\mathcal{I }\) admits an additive representation. That is: there exists a linearly ordered abelian group \(\mathcal{R }\) and a ‘utility function’ \(u:\mathcal{X }{{\longrightarrow }}\mathcal{R }\) such that, for any \(\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y}\in \mathcal{X }^\mathcal{I }\) which differ in only finitely many coordinates, we have \(\mathbf{x}\succcurlyeq \mathbf{y}\) if and only if \(\sum _{i\in \mathcal{I }} \left[u(x_i)-u(y_i)\right]\ge 0\) . Importantly, and unlike almost all previous work on additive representations, this result does not require any Archimedean or continuity condition. If \((\succcurlyeq )\) also satisfies a weak continuity condition, then the paper shows that, for any \(\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y}\in \mathcal{X }^\mathcal{I }\) , we have \(\mathbf{x}\succcurlyeq \mathbf{y}\) if and only if \({}^*\!\sum _{i\in \mathcal{I }} u(x_i)\ge {}^*\!\sum _{i\in \mathcal{I }}u(y_i)\) . Here, \({}^*\!\sum _{i\in \mathcal{I }} u(x_i)\) represents a nonstandard sum, taking values in a linearly ordered abelian group \({}^*\!\mathcal{R }\) , which is an ultrapower extension of \(\mathcal{R }\) . The paper also discusses several applications of these results, including infinite-horizon intertemporal choice, choice under uncertainty, variable-population social choice and games with infinite strategy spaces.     

农户的非农参与和农业劳动供给研究——来自中国西部山区的证据

对不完全市场下的农业劳动供给研究,普遍采用不可分性或禀赋依赖假设,即农户的生产决策受消费相关因素的影响,而不是基于利润最大化目标。这种假设只对缺乏非农兼业或市场参与机会的农户成立,故应在决策研究中考虑农户受市场约束的异质性。利用内生选择的切换模型和陕西周至山区的农户调查数据,对农户的非农参与及农业劳动供给决策进行的实证研究表明：金融可及性和人力资本的分布特征决定了农户非农活动的参与及类型,反映了不完全市场对农户的约束状况,进而决定了农业劳动供给决策的影响机制。纯农户的农业劳动供给行为,除了受农户的生计资本影响外,还受其家庭结构等相关因素的影响。     

‘In a perfect world it would be great if they didn't exist’: How Australians experience payday loans

In the last few decades, payday lending has mushroomed in many developed countries. The arguments for and against an industry which provides small, short‐term loans at very high interest rates have also blossomed. This article presents findings from an Australian study to contribute to the international policy and practice debate about a sector which orients to those on a low income. At the heart of this debate lies a conundrum: Borrowing from payday lenders exacerbates poverty, yet many low‐income households rely on these loans. We argue that the key problem is the restricted framework within which the debate currently oscillates. Key Practitioner Message: ● Framing payday borrowing as a problem of market failure leads to one‐sided and ineffective regulatory responses; ● Until governments instigate real alternatives for cheap and readily available credit, and broader anti‐poverty measures, curbing access to payday lenders can have the perverse effect of increasing privation; ● For practitioners seeking to abolish payday lending, campaigns for higher wages and a liveable social welfare income are central.     

Net migration and migration effectiveness: A comparison between Australia and the United Kingdom, 1976–96 Part 1: Total migration patterns

A nation’s population is redistributed through migration flows and counterflows between its constituent subnational areas, resulting in a geographical pattern of net migration gains or losses which may change from one time period to another. Migration effectiveness is the indicator commonly used to measure net migration as a proportion of gross migration turnover for any territorial unit. This paper explores the effect of net migration in two different countries, Australia and the United Kingdom, using measures of migration effectiveness computed from period-age migration data sets for a system of city regions assembled for four consecutive five-year periods in each country. While the evidence suggests that the overall effectiveness of net migration has declined over the 20-year period in both countries, marked similarities and contrasts are apparent in the spatial patterning of migration that together provide useful analytical insights into the changing space economies of the two countries.     

Quantitative output of the criminal justice system

Time series trends in the processing of the seven major Index Offenses are assessed over the years 1953–76. Five types of offense-standardized criminal justice processing indicators are defined (arrest, clearance, formal charge, guilty-as-charged, and guilty-but-reduced rates or ratios) and calculated. Comparing patterns over time to evaluate overall processing trends, these data indicate generally positive correlations of processing indicators over the period studied and confirm the hypothesized decline in processing input-output rates and ratios since about 1960. The hypothesized impact of crime rates and juvenile arrest percentage upon these trends is supported generally by structural equation and difference equation analysis. Our analysis indicates that much of the processing trend indeed can be explained in terms of caseload pressures and the proportion of juvenile arrests which drive down the ‘performance’ of the examined processing indicators.     

Culture And The Court: The Judiciary As An Arbiter Of Cultural Disputes In The USA

The law has enormous cultural significance; it creates many of the roles and statuses that structure people's lives, represents a society's values, establishes rights of cultural expression, and places restrictions on these rights. The cultural dimensions of the law are especially important for marginalized groups, as the law can act as a barrier to political and social inclusion or offer protection from discrimination. This essay argues that cultural studies of the law have overlooked the significance of the different sources of law. In the USA, culturally significant laws and legal interpretations can come from the judiciary or the legislature. Laws that are recognized by the judiciary or established by it through common law have a much different cultural significance from laws that are passed by legislatures. Judicial decisions are more symbolically meaningful, but may have a more limited power to produce deep cultural changes. Some major judicial decisions on minority rights, such as that in Brown vs. Board of Education, have even incited backlash. Legislative decisions tend to be seen as more legitimate and more reflective of the popular will, yet it may be more difficult for minority groups with limited resources to act through the legislature. Moreover, the legislature can also be used to by larger groups to block minority groups' attempts to gain rights. This essay illustrates the differences between these two sources of law and their comparative power to influence culture with key examples drawn from the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement.