THE CHICAGO SCHOOL REFORMS:

The Chicago school reforms have received significant national attention due to their sweeping, radical nature. Growing out of state legislation in 1988 and 1995, the reforms encompass a powerful bottom-up/top-down strategy that provides multiple avenues for initiating building-level changes in teaching and learning. We offer a provisional answer concerning the effects of these reforms by comparing the 1993–1998 performance of Chicago's grammar schools with all other grade-equivalent schools in the State of Illinois. We find city schools making major gains over the last three years. Regression residuals show that Chicago's schools now significantly outperform Cook County suburban schools and schools in the rest of the state after controlling for rates of poverty and student mobility. While schools placed on probation have predominantly African American and low-income student bodies, rates of improvement among schools as a whole appear to be equitably distributed across the city neighborhoods. We close with several policy recommendations, one of which focuses on the potential for major goal displacement as a result of the reform board's criterion for determining the probationary status of schools.     

Falling Short of Highest Life Expectancy: How Many Americans Might Have Been Alive in the Twentieth Century?

Life expectancy at birth in the United States during the twentieth century was lower than in many other highly developed countries. We investigate how this mortality disadvantage in the last 100 years translates into the number of hypothetical lives lost and their sex and age structure. We estimate the hypothetical US population if it had experienced in each decade since 1900 the mortality level of the country with the then highest life expectancy and compare the results to the actual figures in 2000. By 2000, the number of additional people who could have been alive had the mortality levels in the United States been as low as those in countries with the highest life expectancy was 66 million. This number is distributed equally between males and females. Suboptimal mortality at reproductive ages is crucial for the cumulative effect of potential lives lost, resulting from premature deaths of women who could still become first‐time mothers or bear additional children. Out of the 66 million additional persons who could have been alive in 2000, 45 million are attributable to those indirect deaths. Although the differences in the composition of the population by sex and age under the two mortality regimes are minor, the majority of people who might have been alive—54 million—were of working age or younger.     

The association between blood pressure and work stress: The importance of measuring isolated systolic hypertension

The objective was to study whether the relationships between elevated blood pressure and (a) work stress as related to the stressor overtime, and (b) unwinding after work, depend on what kind of criteria are used for the diagnosis of hypertension. A total of 126 healthy men (aged 20-66 years) employed in white-collar jobs were tested over 24 hours by means of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring on a regular working day. Four groups were defined according to their blood pressure status: normotensives (NT), hypertensives (HT), isolated systolic hypertensives (ISH), and isolated diastolic hypertensives (IDH). No differences of age, body mass index, overtime work, and disturbed unwinding were found between the normotensives and the hypertensives. ISH was found to be related to working overtime and to disturbed unwinding but not to biological risk factors; IDH, however, was related exclusively to the biological risk factor high body mass index. Thus, significant differences associated with overtime were found between ISH and both NT and IDH, with the isolated systolic hypertensives carrying out more than twice as much overtime as the normotensives or isolated diastolic hypertensives. More men with a disturbed ability to relax and vital exhaustion were found in the ISH group than in the NT group. It seems that, in addition to the usual diagnosis of hypertension, the classification of ISH and IDH adds new information about the relationship between blood pressure elevation and both work stress and disturbed unwinding.     

Business as unusual: Coaching in Echtzeit

Business as unusual: Coaching in real time Using the concrete example of a newly founded company, the authors demonstrate how executives and employees can keep themselves, their teams and organizational unity effective and capable of action in an increasingly dynamic, complex and changing world. These managers do not ?muddle through“, they seek functioning action-coalitions where they can act as individuals in interplay with others for the good of the commonly defined whole. Increasing the effectiveness of individual managers, their units and entire businesses, decisively depends on the promotion of trust co-operation, the development of common goals and reference frameworks, and potent jointly produced diagnoses. In successful cases this leads to coherence and sense emerging for individuals, their organizational units, overlapping working teams and, in the best case, for the whole business. The authors describe their supporting function in this process and call it real time-coaching.     

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN MOTIVATIONAL CROWDING OUT OF WORK PERFORMANCE

This paper shows that prior financial incentives induce a crowding‐out effect when incentives are discontinued. In our real‐effort experiment workers receive a piece rate before monetary incentives are substituted by a one‐time payment. In this case, workers' performance significantly drops when receiving the one‐time payment. The effect is driven by a fraction of men who reduce effort substantially, whereas women constantly perform well. We find that this motivational crowding‐out effect disappears when men do not have prior experience of a piece rate. In a series of control treatments, we discard several alternative explanations besides motivational crowding out. (JEL C91, J16, M54)     

Shared journeys,linked lives: a relational-biographical approach to mobility practices

This paper innovatively extends existing practice-theoretical mobility research by examining biographical aspects of people’s everyday mobility that capture and reflect their social relations. Drawing on nine qualitative interviews with couples who live in/near Vienna without a private car, the paper demonstrates the promising potential of retrospective forms of social research for uncovering the dynamics of mobility practices across the life course. It conceptualises individuals as inherently social and mutually interconnected mobility practitioners whose complex and dynamic interactions with others make up more or less mobile households and families. The paper thus treats social relations as a major connector between the constitutive social and material elements of (mobility) practices, making an explicitly relational contribution to current practice-theoretical debates in mobility research.     

Beyond chronological age. Examining perceived future time and subjective health as age-related mediators in relation to work-related motivations and well-being

Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore whether the association between depression and work characteristics (demands and control) is free from the subjective bias of employees. This study examined the relation between psychosocial work characteristics (job demands and job control) and major depression in 343 participants employed in three occupational sectors in Germany. Participants were divided into a case group and a mentally healthy control group. Since depression itself may bias the reporting of work characteristics were assessed twice: (a) objectively, by job analysis experts and (b) by employees' self-reports. Major depression was assessed according to DSM-IV criteria using an international standard clinical interview. The results showed that objective demand but not control was significantly associated with major depression. Employees who had suffered an incidence of depression had higher objective job demands than those in the control group. Self-rated job demands partially mediated the relationship between objective demands and depression. Additionally, employees in the case group perceived significantly less job control than those classed as mentally healthy. The results indicate that high job demands were associated with major depression, a finding that cannot be better explained by distorted response behaviour due to the depression. However, objectively assessed job control was not found to be related to depression.     

Improving the Measurement of the Relationship between Opportunities and Income: Evidence from Longitudinal Data from Chile

The relationship between exogenous circumstances faced in early childhood (opportunities) and earnings has been increasingly studied in the past decade. In this article we assess the sensitivity of this relationship to different income measures. Typically the empirical evidence is based on short‐term income measures that suffer from variability and measurement error. Using longitudinal data from Chile, we find that when four‐ and seven‐year earnings are used, the relationship between inequality of opportunity and income inequality is significantly higher than that obtained with yearly measures. Monte Carlo simulations with several data‐generating processes confirm this result. This supports policies targeted to reduce long‐term income inequality via providing equal opportunity to individuals at early stages in life.