The Decline of Barriers to Immigrant Economic and Political Rights in the American States: 1977–20011

State governments exercise significant powers to regulate the economic and social activities of resident aliens. We review the laws of the six leading states of immigrant settlement regulating access of noncitizens to 23 occupations, updating existing studies from 1946–77. Citizenship requirements for these occupations have plummeted, a change we attribute to federal court decisions, advisory opinions of state attorneys general, and state legislative and administrative action. There are numerous additional citizenship requirements in the statutes of the six states, although these appear to be poorly enforced. The authority of states to regulate their political communities is the most important remaining constitutionally valid basis of citizenship requirements. States define their political community broadly, leading to questionable exclusions of noncitizens from important activities.     

Valuation of childhood risk reduction: the importance of age, risk preferences, and perspective.

This article explores two problems analysts face in determining how to estimate values for children's health and safety risk reductions. The first addresses the question: Do willingness‐to‐pay estimates for health risk changes differ across children and adults and, if so, how? To answer this question, the article first examines the potential effects of age and risk preferences on willingness to pay. A summary of the literature reporting empirical evidence of differences between willingness to pay for adult health and safety risk reductions and willingness to pay for health and safety risk reductions in children is also provided. The second dimension of the problem is a more fundamental issue: Whose perspective is relevant when valuing children's health effects—society's, children's, adults‐as‐children, or parents'? Each perspective is considered, followed ultimately by the conclusion that adopting a parental perspective through an intrahousehold allocation model seems closest to meeting the needs of the estimation problem at hand. A policy example in which the choice of perspective affects the outcome of a regulatory benefit‐cost analysis rounds out the article and emphasizes the importance of perspective.     

二级教学管理中几个问题的研究

该文结合北京林业大学信息学院本科教学管理的实际情况,就教学管理体制和二级教学管理中所面临的教学管理体制、教务规范化管理、研究生助教(TA)等问题进行了探讨。指出教学管理中的学校(教务处)、学院、系(专业)三级要明确责权利,相互配合完成专业人才培养工作。在教学资源紧张时期,实施TA制和教务管理规范化与信息化,是提高教学质量的有效途径。     

A New Approach to Social Assistance: Latin America's Experience with Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes

Conditional cash transfers are a departure from more traditional approaches to social assistance that represents an innovative and increasingly popular channel for the delivery of social services. Conditional cash transfers provide money to poor families contingent upon certain behaviour, usually investments in human capital such as sending children to school or bringing them to health centres on a regular basis. They seek both to address traditional short-term income support objectives and promote the longer-term accumulation of human capital by serving as a demand-side complement to the supply of health and education services. Evaluation results reveal that this innovative design has been quite successful in addressing many of the failures in delivering social assistance such as poor poverty targeting, disincentive effects and limited welfare impacts. There is clear evidence of success from the first generation of programmes in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Nicaragua in increasing enrolment rates, improving preventive healthcare and raising household consumption. Despite this promising evidence, many questions remain unanswered about conditional cash transfer programmes, including the replicability of their success under different     

解码理论在日语听力理解中的运用

在日语学习中,因受语言环境和学习方法的限制,听力被认为是提高日语水平和成绩的一大难关。作者遵循听觉系统中听力的解码理论,以一年一度的国际日本语能力测试题为例,提出并具体分析了提高日语听力的三种模式———预测法、捕捉法和贯穿法,并指出运用这些技巧时应注意的几个问题。期望学习者能克服心理障碍,讲究科学的方法,把这些模式积极运用到平时的训练和测试中去,以此来提高日语听力水平和成绩。     

Testing How Management Matters in an Era of Government by Performance Management

Public administration finds itself in an era of government byperformance management, which is reflected in the widespreadassumption that management is a key determinant of performance,and that it is reasonable to expect managers to measurably improveorganizational effectiveness. This article joins a growing literaturein seeking to conceptualize and empirically test how externalenvironmental influences and internal management factors combineto create performance, relying on data from the 2002–2003National Administrative Studies Project (NASP-II) survey ofstate government health and human services officials. We categorizemanagerial efforts to facilitate organizational performanceas determined either through their interactions with the organizationalenvironment, or through employing workable levers to changeinternal organizational culture, structure, and technology.Among the external environmental variables we find that thesupport of elected officials and the influence of the publicand media have a positive impact on effectiveness. Among internalmanagement choices, the ability to create a developmental organizationalculture, establish a focus on results through goal clarity,and decentralize decision-making authority are all positivelyassociated with organizational effectiveness.     

Asymptotic bias in the linear mixed effects model under non-ignorable missing data mechanisms

Summary.  In longitudinal studies, missingness of data is often an unavoidable problem. Estimators from the linear mixed effects model assume that missing data are missing at random. However, estimators are biased when this assumption is not met. In the paper, theoretical results for the asymptotic bias are established under non-ignorable drop-out, drop-in and other missing data patterns. The asymptotic bias is large when the drop-out subjects have only one or no observation, especially for slope-related parameters of the linear mixed effects model. In the drop-in case, intercept-related parameter estimators show substantial asymptotic bias when subjects enter late in the study. Eight other missing data patterns are considered and these produce asymptotic biases of a variety of magnitudes.