The Impact of State Rainy Day Funds in Easing State Fiscal Crises During the 1990–1991 Recession

This article examines the degree to which rainy day funds eased the fiscal stress experienced by states during the 1990–1991 recession. In the first section, a state fiscal policy of neutrality over the business cycle is used as a benchmark for evaluating the use of budget stabilization funds. The next section looks at data from the last three recessions to see how recessions have affected the taxes and expenditures of states. A measure of degree of fiscal stress experienced by each state during the 1990–1991 recession is then calculated. These results are used to empirically investigate the impact of explicit state rainy day funds in easing state fiscal stress. Next, the article examines whether states that had rainy day funds in 1989 were more likely to have less fiscal stress, and whether the specific deposit and withdrawal provisions of these funds made a difference.     

Dimensions of publicness and performance in substance abuse treatment organizations.

Changes in funding, clientele, and treatment practices of public and privately owned substance abuse treatment programs, compelled in part by increased cost containment pressures, have prompted researchers' investigations of the implications of organizational form for treatment programs. These studies primarily probe associations between ownership status, patient characteristics, and services delivered and do not empirically link organizational form or structure to treatment outcomes. Data from the National Treatment Improvement Evaluation Study (NTIES) were used to study the relationship of ownership and other dimensions of publicness identified in the public management literature to patient outcomes, controlling for patient characteristics, treatment experiences, and other program characteristics. A few effects of organizational form and structure on substance abuse treatment outcomes are statistically significant (primarily improved social functioning), although the specific contributions of measures of ownership and publicness to explaining program-level variation are generally small.     

A recursive treatment of the hurdles to voting

In order to vote on a particular issue, voters first must leap the hurdles of registration, turnout, and roll-off. One way to think of these hurdles is along the lines of rational absention; at the time when a voter decides to register, they solve the forward looking problem of whether or not they expect to vote at all. In a sense, before they jump even one hurdle they will have decided that they will jump them all. But this formulation misses the complexity of the act itself. Voters do not even always know what issues will be on the ballot, how they will feel, and which of the ballot issues they may vote on at a later date. From this perspective, individuals start the “voting race” and drop out as dictated by their calculus en route to the final hurdle; registration, turnout, and roll-off are fraught with successive impediments consistent with a recursive empirical treatment of voting. The design and implementation of such a recursive treatment is the goal of this paper.     

大理市生活污水处理初探

本文测定了大理市生活污水中物质的含量并根据生活污水处理工艺的原理和特点,用传统的活性污泥法处理生活污水后,检测并分析生活污水中化学需氧量、生化需氧量、悬浮物的含量,选择出传统活性污泥法来处理大理市生活污水效果很好.     

Public wage differentials and the treatment of occupational differences

Past research demonstrates that the estimated size of the federal government earnings differential shrinks substantially with the addition of detailed occupational controls. Possible explanations for this reduction are: controlling for the differing sectoral distributions of common occupations, and controlling for detailed occupations unique to each sector. While occupational detail does not eliminate the federal differential, more than two‐thirds of the reduction in the federal differential comes from controlling for unique occupations and, moreover, this is equivalent to excluding all observations in unique occupations. This finding is contrasted with that for the local sector in which the differing distribution of common occupations largely explains the pattern of the differential. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.