SIDE EFFECTS OF CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM

Because campaign finance reform is usually motivated by the concern that existing legislation cannot effectively prevent campaign contributions to “buy favors,” this article assumes that contributions influence political decisions. But, given that it is also widely recognized that interest groups achieve influence by providing political decision makers with policy relevant information, we also assume that lobbies engage in non‐negligible informational lobbying. We focus on a single political decision to be taken and offer a simple model in which the optimal influence strategy is a mixture of both lobbying instruments. Our main result is to show that campaign finance reform may have important side effects: It may deter informational lobbying so that less policy relevant information is available and as a result political decisions become less efficient. (JEL: C72, D72)     

Supporting familial and community care for children: legislative reform and implementation challenges in South Africa

This article critically evaluates important legislative reforms in South Africa, which, at the height of the AIDS pandemic, are intended to reduce the need for removing children from their families or communities. In a textual analysis of the 2005 Children's Act and the 2006 Children's Act Amendment Bill, the shift in focus from individual interventions to a developmental approach incorporating prevention and early intervention is explained. New family service and alternative care orders such as partial care, shared care, cluster care and support for child-headed households are described. Although these creative solutions have considerable potential, there are gaps in the legislation that require supplementary wording. Drawing on the work of researchers and commentators, it is also shown that an inappropriate approach towards implementation has commenced, which harms rather than assists children. Recommendations are made for improving implementation that may be of relevance to other countries faced with similar challenges.     

Generalized Tukey-type distributions with application to financial and teletraffic data

Constructing skew and heavy-tailed distributions by transforming a standard normal variable goes back to Tukey (Exploratory data analysis. Addison-Wesley, Reading, 1977) and was extended and formalized by Hoaglin (In: Data analysis for tables, trends, and shapes. Wiley, New York, 1983) and Martinez and Iglewicz (Commun Statist Theory Methods 13(3):353–369, 1984). Applications of Tukey’s GH distribution family—which are composed by a skewness transformation G and a kurtosis transformation H—can be found, for instance, in financial, environmental or medical statistics. Recently, alternative transformations emerged in the literature. Rayner and MacGillivray (Statist Comput 12:57–75, 2002b) discuss the GK distributions, where Tukey’s H-transformation is replaced by another kurtosis transformation K. Similarly, Fischer and Klein (All Stat Arch, 88(1):35–50, 2004) advocate the J-transformation which also produces heavy tails but—in contrast to Tukey’s H-transformation—still guarantees the existence of all moments. Within this work we present a very general kurtosis transformation which nests H-, K-and an approximation to the J-transformation and, hence, permits to discriminate between them. Applications to financial and teletraffic data are given.     

Ensuring quality and sustainability in after-school programs

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education are engaged in a unique public-private partnership that strives to integrate the assets and flexibility of philanthropy with the breadth of a major federal program to support meaningful after-school programs and school-community partnerships for children, youth, families, and communities.     

Culturally Appropriate Career Counseling With Gay and Lesbian Clients

This article details the current knowledge regarding the provision of culturally appropriate career services to gay and lesbian clients. It is divided into 5 parts: history and context for the delivery of career counseling services to gay and lesbian clients, counselor self‐preparation for working with gay and lesbian clients, client‐focused interventions useful for counseling with gay and lesbian clients, program‐focused interventions useful for addressing the special issues that this group presents, and appropriate advocacy or social action interventions. Issues of multiple cultural identities and the intersection of lesbian and gay issues with race and ethnicity are also addressed.     

Career Coaching: Practice,Training, Professional,and Ethical Issues

The authors address the practice, training, professional, and ethical issues of career coaching and propose recommendations regarding the professional organization, training, certification, code of ethics, research, and multicultural issues related to the field.     

Power kurtosis transformations: Definition, properties and ordering

Summary Heavy tail distributions can be generated by applying specific non-linear transformations to a Gaussian random variable. Within this work we introduce power kurtosis transformations which are essentially determined by their generator function. Examples are theH-transformation of Tukey (1960), theK-transformation of MacGillivray and Cannon (1997) and theJ-transformation of Fischer and Klein (2004).Furthermore, we derive a general condition on the generator function which guarantees that the corresponding transformation is actually tail-increasing. In this case the exponent of the power kurtosis transformation can be interpreted as a kurtosis parameter. We also prove that the transformed distributions can be ordered with respect to the partial ordering of van Zwet (1964) for symmetric distributions.     

On-Line Scheduling Algorithms for a Batch Machine with Finite Capacity

We study the problem of on-line scheduling jobs with release dates on a batch machine of finite capacity with the objective of minimizing the makespan. We generalize several existing algorithms for the problem to a class of on-line algorithms that are 2-competitive for any arbitrary finite machine capacity. Then, we show that one of these generalized algorithms is in fact 7/4-competitive for machine capacity 2. This is the first on-line algorithm for a finite machine capacity with competitive ratio less than 2.This research is substantially supported by a grant from City Univ. of Hong Kong (Grant No. 7001119). The second author is supported by this grant and by the Natural Science Foundation of China.