State minimum wage laws: Youth coverage and impact

Federal minimum wage statutes cover only 70 percent of the work force and 30 percent of all employers. State laws are designed to close some of these coverage gaps and in some cases to set higher wage floors. Hence, differences in state wage floors and coverage should affect employment rates and wage distributions, particularly among low-skilled workers. Evidence from the National Longitudinal Ssurveys of Youth is mixed, however: State wage floors appear to have no impact on youth employment or entry wages, but coverage exemptions appear to increase both employment and wages. These observations underscore the need to include state provisions in models of minimum wage impacts, particularly for later periods (e.g., 1988–1991) when state wage floors were relatively higher.     

Contract design and insurance fraud: an experimental investigation

This paper experimentally examines the impact of contract design on insurance fraud. We test how fraud behavior varies for insurance contracts with full coverage, a straight deductible or claim-dependent premiums (bonus-malus contracts), in a setup where rational and selfish individuals have an incentive to always claim the maximum possible indemnity. We find a substantial impact of contractual arrangements: Deductible contracts lead to a greater extent to claim build-up than full coverage contracts. In contrast, bonus-malus contracts that entail the same net gains from fraud as deductible contracts do not increase claim build-up. Thus, our results indicate that bonus-malus contracts may be superior to deductible contracts for behavioral reasons.     

Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society1

This article explores the social theory and consequent methodology that underpins studies of transnational migration. First, we propose a social field approach to the study of migration and distinguish between ways of being and ways of belonging in that field. Second, we argue that assimilation and enduring transnational ties are neither incompatible nor binary opposites. Third, we highlight social processes and institutions that are routinely obscured by traditional migration scholarship but that become clear when we use a transnational lens. Finally, we locate our approach to migration research within a larger intellectual project, taken up by scholars of transnational processes in many fields, to rethink and reformulate the concept of society such that it is no longer automatically equated with the boundaries of a single nation‐state.     

Authenticity or skill-oriented individualism,neutrality or managerialism: diversity officers as modern public officials

ABSTRACT

Diversity has become a new buzzword in European cities. Newly introduced diversity policies have replaced previous multicultural policies with an approach that acknowledges difference in a more general sense. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork in diversity departments in Amsterdam, Antwerp and Leeds, this article investigates how the introduction of diversity policy impacted on the recruitment and the self-representations of public officials in newly created diversity departments. Despite a proclaimed move away from recognising minority-group specificities, many officials conceive their immigrant origin as a central element of their profiles. This continuation of a multicultural logic is interpreted as misunderstanding or resistance on the part of those meant to implement these policies, indicating agency of contemporary bureaucrats as well as creative space within bureaucracies. In order to place the shift from multicultural to diversity policy in the context of welfare state transformation and neoliberalism, I assess whether diversity officers endorse diversity policies in conjunction with New Public Management policies. However, I do not find an unequivocal promotion of both policies and my study thus does not confirm the common association of diversity policies with neoliberalism.     

Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe

Mobility studies emerged from a postmodern moment in which global ‘flows’ of capital, people and objects were increasingly noted and celebrated. Within this new scholarship, categories of migrancy are all seen through the same analytical lens. This article and Regimes of Mobility: Imaginaries and Relationalities of Power, the special issue of JEMS it introduces, build on, as well as critique, past and present studies of mobility. In so doing, this issue challenges conceptual orientations built on binaries of difference that have impeded analyses of the interrelationship between mobility and stasis. These include methodological nationalism, which counterpoises concepts of internal and international movement and native and foreigner, and consequently normalises stasis. Instead, the issue offers a regimes of mobility framework that addresses the relationships between mobility and immobility, localisation and transnational connection, experiences and imaginaries of migration, and rootedness and cosmopolitan openness. The introduction highlights how, within this framework and its emphasis on social fields of differential power, the contributors to this collection ethnographically explore the disparities, inequalities, racialised representations and national mythscapes that facilitate and legitimate differential mobility and fixity. Although the authors examine nation-state building processes, their analysis is not confined by national boundaries.     

Wildlife conservation in urban greenways of the mid-southeastern United States

Goals related to wildlife conservation are stated or implied in many urban greenway plans, but the actual wildlife conservation value of urban greenways is unclear. We surveyed 72 km. of greenway consisting of 38 different greenway segments in six cities in the mid-southeastern United States to determine the presence or absence of red fox (Vulpes vulpes), grey fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus), and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), and to assess characteristics of the greenways and adjacent lands that might promote or limit the presence of these species in each greenway. We focused on fox and deer because these mammals, while habitat generalists, require diverse habitats within close proximity, and are more sensitive to human disturbance and have larger territories than the majority of urban wildlife in this region. Thus, they can serve as indicator species for these habitat values in urban greenways in the southeastern United States. Field observations and scent station inventories revealed that only 18 of the 38 greenway segments had either fox or deer, 12 had only fox, 6 had fox and deer, and none had deer alone. Greenway segments with more forest cover, wider corridors, greater amounts of adjacent natural or seminatural habitat, and forest connectivity between greenways and nonadjacent natural areas were more likely to have fox or deer present. Characteristics associated with fox and deer presence were not independent of each other. Because greenways with such characteristics tend to be surrounded by less urban areas, adjacent land use is a good predictor of fox and deer presence in the surveyed greenways. Whether greenways that are beneficial to fox and deer can be developed in urban settings is strongly site specific, because the greenway variables that appear most essential to these species are often dictated by the preexisting urban form and the vegetation in the vicinity of the greenway. Because the wildlife conservation value of urban greenways depends greatly on factors external to the greenway, greenways that have fox and deer present today may be particularly vulnerable to future changes in surrounding land use.     

Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation–state building,migration and the social sciences

Methodological nationalism is understood as the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world. We distinguish three modes of methodological nationalism that have characterized mainstream social science, and then show how these have influenced research on migration. We discover parallels between nationalist thinking and the conceptualization of migration in postwar social sciences. In a historical tour d’horizon, we show that this mainstream concept has developed in close interaction with nation–state building processes in the West and the role that immigration and integration policies have played within them. The shift towards a study of ‘transnational communities’— the last phase in this process — was more a consequence of an epistemic move away from methodological nationalism than of the appearance of new objects of observation. The article concludes by recommending new concepts for analysis that, on the one hand, are not coloured by methodological nationalism and, on the other hand, go beyond the fluidism of much contemporary social theory.