Social policy and embedded evaluation: Assessing the impact of a food insecurity project in the United Kingdom

Social policy making needs to involve robust evaluation to assess its impact. In this article, a social policy intervention focused on tackling food insecurity amongst vulnerable people is examined and the benefits and challenges of using an embedded approach to evaluation are considered. Food insecurity is defined as not always having the economic, social, and physical resources to ensure a sufficient supply of nutritionally appropriate food. Evidence suggests that food insecurity in the United Kingdom is increasing in the context of long-term poverty, austerity, insecure employment, rising living costs, low pay, and cuts to welfare and public services. An embedded evaluation was conducted involving interviews with the intervention participants and observations of a series of cooking and food budgeting classes. The findings suggest that the classes had a positive impact on many of the participants, who felt more confident about cooking and valued the shared experience. However, given the acute problems facing many of the participants including long-term poverty, policies aimed at tackling food insecurity need to go beyond cooking and food budgeting skills. The embedded evaluation approach contributed towards the overall impact of the intervention by providing insights that led to changes as part of an iterative process during the intervention rather than in the form of a final report after its completion. An embedded evaluation-based approach can be resource intensive, and the role of the evaluators can present challenges, but it can help to bridge the gap between intervention design, delivery, and social change.     

The moral hazard of conditionality: Restoring the integrity of social security law

This article examines the extent to which the Australian and UK social security systems meet their legal obligations to provide basic relief to citizens in need. Conditionality and “mutual obligation” are at the core of both the UK and Australian social security systems and are based on the concept of moral hazard, the goal being to ensure that claimants do not consider living on benefits to be preferable to engaging in paid work. Yet, we argue that the element of “mutuality” is missing in both systems; welfare claimants are subject to myriad conditions and obligations, whilst the state operates free of any legal responsibility to provide even basic relief to those in need, to prevent or alleviate extreme poverty and destitution. We outline the extent to which Australian and UK social security laws require governments to relieve destitution, examining both domestic and human rights law. We conclude that legal protections are weak and that both systems fail to meet the basic conditions of humanity toward their citizens. On this basis, we argue that such failings demonstrate a lack of integrity which undermines the standing of both the UK and Australia to invoke a claim of moral hazard to defend claimant conditionality.     

凌纯声先生的赫哲族田野调查--从现代中国实地调查研究的学术背景谈起

凌纯声先生1930年的赫哲族田野调查是中国民族学和人类学界一次科学的实地调查,具有开创性意义.本文从现代中国提倡和注重实地调查研究的学术背景来审视这次田野调查.上世纪20年代后,中国人文社会科学逐渐从吸收传播"西学"向研究中国历史、社会、民族文化转变,朝着"本土化"的方向努力,从而形成了提倡实地调查研究的学术风气,而且中国学者进行了多次学术实践.这次田野调查与那个时代的学术背景密切相关,并且体现出其学术背景.本文还论述了蔡元培先生与这次田野调查的密切关系.     

基于社会福利视角的青藏高原公共服务问题初探

文章在对现存关涉青藏高原公共服务问题研究进行思考和整合的基础上,试图从社会福利的角度,对具有浓厚区域文化特色的藏区农牧民公共服务,提出一些新的思考维度。具体分析青藏高原公共服务所面临的机遇和挑战,涉及了人口增长、环境恶化与老龄化、国际政治影响、藏传佛教文化的影响、农牧区社会保障制度的空白、家庭保障和社会互助的补充性等问题。文章建议通过构建非缴费型农牧区养老保险模式、构建覆盖所有农牧民健康保障制度、建立农牧区救助机制三个层面来构建新型的青藏高原福利体系。     

Decision Making for Animal Health and Welfare: Integrating Risk‐Benefit Analysis with Prospect Theory

This study integrated risk‐benefit analysis with prospect theory with the overall objective of identifying the type of management behavior represented by farmers’ choices of mastitis control options (MCOs). Two exploratory factor analyses, based on 163 and 175 Swedish farmers, respectively, highlighted attitudes to MCOs related to: (1) grouping cows and applying milking order to prevent spread of existing infection and (2) working in a precautionary way to prevent mastitis occurring. This was interpreted as being based on (1) reactive management behavior on detection of udder‐health problems in individual cows and (2) proactive management behavior to prevent mastitis developing. Farmers’ assessments of these MCOs were found to be based on asymmetrical evaluations of risks and benefits, suggesting that farmers’ management behavior depends on their individual reference point. In particular, attitudes to MCOs related to grouping cows and applying milking order to prevent the spread of mastitis once infected cows were detected were stronger in the risk domain than in the benefit domain, in accordance with loss aversion. In contrast, attitudes to MCOs related to working in a precautionary way to prevent cows from becoming infected in the first place were stronger in the benefit domain than in the risk domain, in accordance with reverse loss aversion. These findings are of practical importance for farmers and agribusiness and in public health protection work to reduce the current extensive use of antibiotics in dairy herds.     

Understanding Mechanisms Underlying Peer Effects: Evidence From a Field Experiment on Financial Decisions

Using a high‐stakes field experiment conducted with a financial brokerage, we implement a novel design to separately identify two channels of social influence in financial decisions, both widely studied theoretically. When someone purchases an asset, his peers may also want to purchase it, both because they learn from his choice (“social learning”) and because his possession of the asset directly affects others' utility of owning the same asset (“social utility”). We randomize whether one member of a peer pair who chose to purchase an asset has that choice implemented, thus randomizing his ability to possess the asset. Then, we randomize whether the second member of the pair: (i) receives no information about the first member, or (ii) is informed of the first member's desire to purchase the asset and the result of the randomization that determined possession. This allows us to estimate the effects of learning plus possession, and learning alone, relative to a (no information) control group. We find that both social learning and social utility channels have statistically and economically significant effects on investment decisions. Evidence from a follow‐up survey reveals that social learning effects are greatest when the first (second) investor is financially sophisticated (financially unsophisticated); investors report updating their beliefs about asset quality after learning about their peer's revealed preference; and, they report motivations consistent with “keeping up with the Joneses” when learning about their peer's possession of the asset. These results can help shed light on the mechanisms underlying herding behavior in financial markets and peer effects in consumption and investment decisions.     

First‐Price Auctions With General Information Structures: Implications for Bidding and Revenue

We explore the impact of private information in sealed‐bid first‐price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over values, we characterize the lowest winning‐bid distribution that can arise across all information structures and equilibria. The information and equilibrium attaining this minimum leave bidders indifferent between their equilibrium bids and all higher bids. Our results provide lower bounds for bids and revenue with asymmetric distributions over values. We also report further characterizations of revenue and bidder surplus including upper bounds on revenue. Our work has implications for the identification of value distributions from data on winning bids and for the informationally robust comparison of alternative auction mechanisms.     

双边市场中平台企业搭售行为分析

搭售是现实中双边平台企业常用的促销策略之一。通过构建一个两阶段完全信息动态博弈模型,将买方分为搭售喜好型和搭售无差异型,从垄断和竞争两种情形研究了双边平台企业采取搭售策略时,具有不同搭售偏好的买方对最优均衡解的影响以及相应的社会福利变化。研究发现:不论是垄断情形还是竞争情形,搭售对买卖双方均衡进入价格的影响都不确定,而搭售产品的定价则按照传统单边市场的定价方式制定;垄断情形下,搭售能增加买方数量、卖方数量及双边平台企业的利润,而竞争情形下,搭售产品成本较小的双边平台企业将获得较大买方数量、卖方数量及利润。在两种情形下的买方总效用、卖方总效用以及社会总福利均随搭售喜好型买方数量的增加而增加。     

Relevance of Risk Predictions Derived from a Chronic Species Sensitivity Distribution with Cadmium to Aquatic Populations and Ecosystems

Criteria to protect aquatic life are intended to protect diverse ecosystems, but in practice are usually developed from compilations of single‐species toxicity tests using standard test organisms that were tested in laboratory environments. Species sensitivity distributions (SSDs) developed from these compilations are extrapolated to set aquatic ecosystem criteria. The protectiveness of the approach was critically reviewed with a chronic SSD for cadmium comprising 27 species within 21 genera. Within the data set, one genus had lower cadmium effects concentrations than the SSD fifth percentile‐based criterion, so in theory this genus, the amphipod Hyalella, could be lost or at least allowed some level of harm by this criteria approach. However, population matrix modeling projected only slightly increased extinction risks for a temperate Hyalella population under scenarios similar to the SSD fifth percentile criterion. The criterion value was further compared to cadmium effects concentrations in ecosystem experiments and field studies. Generally, few adverse effects were inferred from ecosystem experiments at concentrations less than the SSD fifth percentile criterion. Exceptions were behavioral impairments in simplified food web studies. No adverse effects were apparent in field studies under conditions that seldom exceeded the criterion. At concentrations greater than the SSD fifth percentile, the magnitudes of adverse effects in the field studies were roughly proportional to the laboratory‐based fraction of species with adverse effects in the SSD. Overall, the modeling and field validation comparisons of the chronic criterion values generally supported the relevance and protectiveness of the SSD fifth percentile approach with cadmium.     

The product cycle model of foreign direct investment and developing country welfare

Raymond Vernon's product-cycle model predicts two distinctive kinds of foreign direct investment in developing countries: fist, subsidiaries whose operations are tightly integrated into the parent's strategy to advance its competitive position in international markets; second, subsidiaries toward the host market whose profits help fund the needs of the parent but whose output is not an integral part of the parent's global sourcing network. In practice, the latter are frequently subject to domestic content, joint venture, and technology-sharing requirements; the former almost never are. How do the two kinds of foreign direct investment differ in their impact on host country development? Somewhat surprisingly, to those who may be wary of what Vernon himself reffered to as “captive” plants, foreign investor operations intimately linked into the parent's global sourcing network make a systematically larger and more dynamic contribution to the host economy via the activities of the affiliates themselves, via backward linkages to local suppliers, and via spillovers and externalities. Foreign investor operations impeded from close integration via domestic content, joint venture, and technology-sharing requirement provide a much less positive and sometimes genuinely negative impact, especially if they are protected by trade barriers or other forms of market exclusivity.