The effect of marital status at first birth on marital dissolution among adolescent mothers

The sequencing of marriage and first birth was expected to play an important role in the stability of marriage among adolescent mothers. We hypothesized that adolescent women who married prior to conception would have the lowest rates of marital disruption, followed by those who married between conception and birth. Adolescent women who gave birth prior to marriage were expected to suffer the highest rates of marital dissolution. The results provide partial support for our hypotheses. There is little difference in the probability of separation between adolescent mothers who had a postmarital conception and those who had a premarital conception but married before the birth. Having a premarital birth, however, significantly increases the probability of marital dissolution. We also hypothesized that marital status at first birth would have less effect on the probability of marital dissolution for blacks than for whites. This, too, is generally supported by our findings. Among black females, those with a premarital birth are the first to suffer a marital disruption, but by the end of ten years there is little difference in the probability of separation among the three marital status groups. In contrast, among white females, those with a premarital birth are the first to experience a disruption, and this differential persists over all subsequent marriage duration intervals. Thus, the sequencing of marriage relative to birth has similar short term effects for whites and blacks, but the effect for blacks is evident only in the short term. Ten years after the marriage, black adolescent mothers have similar rates of marital stability regardless of the sequencing of marriage. This is consistent with the findings of previous research and with our hypothesis; with the black family pattern of lower rates of marriage, higher rates of illegitimacy and higher divorce rates, the sequencing of marriage has no long lasting consequences on marital stability. Finally, our predicted decline in the effect of marital status at first birth over historical time also finds partial support. For white females there has been a change in the effect of marriage-first birth sequencing on separation over time. In the period encompassed by the women in our study, white adolescent mothers who married subsequent to the birth have been the most likely to experience a separation at all marriage duration intervals, but this differential narrows as age at interview declines. Among black females there has been no change in the effect of a premarital birth over time.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Preemptive Policy Experimentation

We develop a model of experimentation and learning in policymaking when control of power is temporary. We demonstrate how an early office holder who would otherwise not experiment is nonetheless induced to experiment when his hold on power is temporary. This preemptive policy experiment is profitable for the early office holder as it reveals information about the policy mapping to his successor, information that shapes future policy choices. Thus policy choices today can cast a long shadow over future choices purely through information transmission and absent any formal institutional constraints or real state variables. The model we develop utilizes a recent innovation that represents the policy mapping as the realized path of a Brownian motion. We provide a precise characterization of when preemptive experimentation emerges in equilibrium and the form it takes. We apply the model to several well known episodes of policymaking, reinterpreting the policy choices as preemptive experiments.     

Deducing simple majorities from approval voting ballot data

An approval voting election allows each voter to vote for as many candidates as he wishes. The winner of such an election is the candidate with the most approval votes. Ballot data aggregated for individual voters tell how many voters voted for each subset of candidates. Given reasonable assumptions about what voters' ballots reveal about their preferences, this report shows what must be true of the ballot data in order to conclude that the electorate has a majority preference for one candidate over another. A simple corollary tells what must be true of the ballot data to conclude that the winner is preferred by a majority of voters to every other candidate. Both hypothetical and reconstructed ballot data from a mayoral election in Boston are used to illustrate the results. It is also shown that the likelihood of being able to draw conclusions about majority candidates tends to increase as voters tend to vote for fewer candidates.     

Inclusive Financial Markets: Is Transformation Under Way in Kenya?

Policy emphasis on financial‐sector development has shifted away from microfinance and towards the development of ‘inclusive financial markets’. But, for inclusion to take place, policy must address barriers to access. This article analyses the socio‐economic, demographic and geographical factors associated with financial‐service use across formal, semi‐formal and informal financial services in Kenya between 2006 and 2009, including the new and rapidly growing mobile‐phone‐based payments service – M‐PESA. It finds that, despite an expansion of services, evidence of access barriers is now clearer than it was in 2006. However, there is some evidence that M‐PESA is reversing age as a barrier to inclusion, but, as yet, it is more of a complement than a substitute for formal services.     

Data augmentation,frequentist estimation,and the Bayesian analysis of multinomial logit models

This article describes a convenient method of selecting Metropolis– Hastings proposal distributions for multinomial logit models. There are two key ideas involved. The first is that multinomial logit models have a latent variable representation similar to that exploited by Albert and Chib (J Am Stat Assoc 88:669–679, 1993) for probit regression. Augmenting the latent variables replaces the multinomial logit likelihood function with the complete data likelihood for a linear model with extreme value errors. While no conjugate prior is available for this model, a least squares estimate of the parameters is easily obtained. The asymptotic sampling distribution of the least squares estimate is Gaussian with known variance. The second key idea in this paper is to generate a Metropolis–Hastings proposal distribution by conditioning on the estimator instead of the full data set. The resulting sampler has many of the benefits of so-called tailored or approximation Metropolis–Hastings samplers. However, because the proposal distributions are available in closed form they can be implemented without numerical methods for exploring the posterior distribution. The algorithm converges geometrically ergodically, its computational burden is minor, and it requires minimal user input. Improvements to the sampler’s mixing rate are investigated. The algorithm is also applied to partial credit models describing ordinal item response data from the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Its application to hierarchical models and Poisson regression are briefly discussed.     

A Standard of Care for the Prevention of Sexual Misconduct by School Employees

ABSTRACT

This article describes the development of a standard of care for the prevention of adult to student sexual abuse in pre K-12 schools. Standard of care is not a phrase often used in educational practice, and yet, it is a legal concept that may be useful for school administrators. A sample of administrators, child sexual abuse specialists, and attorneys with experience in school employee sexual misconduct responded to 101 items that the literature indicates should be included in a standard of care. There was agreement on 94 of these items by sample participants. Categories of the standard of care were policies, hiring process, hiring screening, hiring interview, training, and reporting. Where there was disagreement by role of respondent, attorneys, child sexual abuse specialists, or both rated the item as more important for inclusion than did administrators.     

INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM ON CONTEMPORARY BANKING RESEARCH: THE USE OF FIXED EFFECTS TO DISENTANGLE LOAN DEMAND FROM LOAN SUPPLY

With the onset of the financial crisis, disentangling the effects of loan demand and supply in contemporary banking research has become vital for a proper assessment of supply-related banking shocks. These shocks may negatively affect the real economy through many channels, such as the lending channel of monetary policy transmission, the bank risk-taking channel or the evaluation of macroprudential policy efficiency. All these rely on separating the two lending components. Empirical identification has largely relied on the use of demand-related fixed effects, which has also been applied in several analyses within this symposium. (JEL G21)     

Strain,ethnic competition,and power devaluation: white supremacist protest in the U.S., 1948–1997

Many Western democracies have seen an increase in extreme right mobilization over the past several decades but extreme right mobilization is not a new phenomenon when we look historically. In this paper, we examine fifty years of white supremacist protest in the United States to help shed light on the factors that explain variation in levels of right-wing mobilization. Using annual time-series analysis, we find that traditional strain explanations do not explain these protests but that threats to the traditional economic, political, and social power of whites were critical. Ethnic competition associated with black population growth and political threats stemming from the political power of northern Democrats, a divided federal government, and civil rights protest stimulated this mobilization. These findings support a broadened ethnic competition/power devaluation model of right-wing mobilization that emphasizes the mobilizing effects of economic and political threats to a relatively advantaged group.