What congressmen knew and when they knew it: Further evidence on the origins of U.S. broadcasting regulation

This paper presents richer contemporaneous evidence of Congress's role in the passage of the Radio Act of 1927, the act which established the basic statutory framework that still governs federal regulation of broadcasting in the United States. Recent analysis finding the court's decision in Tribune Co. v. Oak Leaves Broadcasting Station to have been the cause of Congress's action on the radio bill is shown to rest on an inaccurate chronology of congressional decisionmaking. More closely examining the actions of legislators upon whose votes passage of the radio act depended, this paper contributes new evidence of strategic orchestration surrounding the perceived “chaos of the airwaves” that stimulated broadcasting regulation. Original congressional documents show that, in a political context characterized by costly information, intra-congressional manipulation of information costs was an important factor in the adoption of the Radio Act of 1927. Personal ties between executive branch officials are shown to have spawned a key legal opinion that prompted passage of the radio bill.     

Does it pay to move from welfare to work?

The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act requires welfare recipients to look for work and has made it more difficult for nonworking recipients to remain on the welfare rolls. In addition, the economic boom of the 1990s and changes in federal and state policies have raised the net income gain associated with moving from welfare to work. This paper analyzes data from a panel survey of single mothers, all of whom received welfare in February 1997. In 1999, those who left welfare and were working had a higher household income and lower poverty rate, experienced a similar level of material hardship, engaged in fewer activities to make ends meet, and had lower expectations of experiencing hardship in the near future than did nonworking welfare recipients. Estimations of fixed‐effect regressions of income that control for both observable and unobservable time‐invariant characteristics show that monthly net income increases by $2.63 for every additional hour of work effort. About 60 percent of the observed monthly income difference between wage‐reliant and welfare‐reliant mothers can be attributed to differences in their work effort. Thus, after welfare reform, it does pay to move from welfare to work. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Public management: What do we know? what should we know? and how will we know it?

The field of public management draws on a rich and varied trove of intellectual resources. Applying scholarship and imagination, its students can recognize, interpret, and predict the reality of managing governmental organizations with considerable acuity. If the field is to advance, however, researchers must do more than reverently assemble and digest practice wisdom. More emphasis must be placed on disciplined, theory-based inquiry.     

Discrimination in urban credit markets: What we don't know and why we don't know it

Abstract

Research on discrimination in housing credit has focused primarily on the outcomes of a complex process in which many parties play a role. The lender— or prospective lender—is only one party in the process that results in decisions by individuals and households to buy homes and finance their purchases. To focus solely on lenders would make it difficult to measure the nature and extent of discrimination and its effects on housing outcomes.

After discussing limitations of housing credit discrimination research, the author suggests two relatively underexplored areas: studying housing search behavior and auditing lenders to assess their treatment of prospective borrowers before the stage at which written loan applications are submitted. Both suggested avenues of research might better address three public policy questions for which our knowledge is incomplete: Is there discrimination? Where does it occur in the home‐buying process? What are the effects of discrimination on household behavior?     

1956 in Hungary: as I saw it then and as I see it now

Public Choice - Many scholars and commentators have discussed the events of 1956 in Hungary, revealing the identities of the participating groups they claim to represent in those events, for which...     

Do welfare benefits cause the welfare caseload?

Analyses of the welfare system generally examine one of five competing models: (1) The work disincentive model; (2) the human capital model; (3) the macroeconomic model; (4) the public choice model; or (5) the cost-of-job-loss model. This paper employs the Granger causality concept and the multiple-rank F statistic to test the implications of all five of these models simultaneously. The results offer modest support to all but the macroeconomic model. The relationships among welfare benefits, caseloads, and labor market conditions appear to be too complex to be fully captured by a single model.     

Social welfare as small-scale help: evolutionary psychology and the deservingness heuristic

Public opinion concerning social welfare is largely driven by perceptions of recipient deservingness. Extant research has argued that this heuristic is learned from a variety of cultural, institutional, and ideological sources. The present article provides evidence supporting a different view: that the deservingness heuristic is rooted in psychological categories that evolved over the course of human evolution to regulate small-scale exchanges of help. To test predictions made on the basis of this view, a method designed to measure social categorization is embedded in nationally representative surveys conducted in different countries. Across the national- and individual-level differences that extant research has used to explain the heuristic, people categorize welfare recipients on the basis of whether they are lazy or unlucky. This mode of categorization furthermore induces people to think about large-scale welfare politics as its presumed ancestral equivalent: small-scale help giving. The general implications for research on heuristics are discussed.