Do Employers Prefer Workers Who Attend For‐Profit Colleges? Evidence from a Field Experiment

This paper reports results from a resume‐based field experiment designed to examine employer preferences for job applicants who attended for‐profit colleges. For‐profit colleges have seen sharp increases in enrollment in recent years despite alternatives, such as public community colleges, being much cheaper. We sent almost 9,000 fictitious resumes of young job applicants who recently completed their schooling to online job postings in six occupational categories and tracked employer callback rates. We find no evidence that employers prefer applicants with resumes listing a for‐profit college relative to those whose resumes list either a community college or no college at all.     

The road to economic self‐sufficiency: Job quality and job transition patterns after welfare reform

This paper analyzes the relationships of schooling, the skill content of work experience, and different types of employment patterns with less‐skilled women's job quality outcomes. Survey data from employers and longitudinal data from former and current welfare recipients are used for the period 1997 to early 2002. The analysis of job quality is broadened beyond employment rates and wages measured at a point in time by including non‐wage attributes of compensation and aspects of jobs that affect future earnings potential. This study shows the extent to which lack of employment stability, job skills, and occupation‐specific experience impedes welfare recipients' abilities to obtain a “good job” or to transition into one from a “bad job.” The business cycle downturn has significantly negatively affected the job quality and job transition patterns of former and current recipients. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Does Good Performance Reduce Bad Behavior? Antecedents of Ethnic Employment Discrimination in Public Organizations

Equal treatment is a key feature of modern bureaucracy. However, several studies have shown that public organizations discriminate against ethnic and racial minorities to different degrees. Which organizational features explain differences in discrimination is largely unknown. This article proposes that organizational performance relates to an organization's likelihood of engaging in employment discrimination and argues that poor‐performing organizations tend to be less open to new ideas and that decision makers in such organizations are more prone to stereotyping behavior. The study combines a field experiment in which applications were sent to real job vacancies in 71 Danish public schools with administrative data on the schools. Bayesian analyses show that minority applicants generally faced discrimination but that they experienced a higher callback rate from better‐performing schools than from poorer‐performing schools. Implications for practice and research are discussed.     

Will employers hire welfare recipients? Recent survey evidence from Michigan

In this paper we present data from a survey of 900 employers in Michigan during 1997. The survey was designed to gauge employer demand for welfare recipients. The results show that, given the tightness of labor markets there, the prospective demand for recipients is quite high—employers report that 3 percent of all jobs currently, and almost 9 percent over the following year, might be available to unskilled recipients. On the other hand, prospective employment is quite highly correlated with measures of unmet labor demand, implying that much of it could disappear during the next recession. Many of the prospective jobs are also found in establishments to which innercity minorities might have limited access, such as small or suburban establishments that receive few black applicants or that recruit informally. Absenteeism and basic skill readiness are potential problems, based on jobs filled by recipients to date or those that are potentially available. The effects of a variety of potential policy responses targeted at private employers (such as job placement efforts and tax credits for employment or training) are considered as well. © 1999 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Political Branding: Political Candidates Positioning Based on Inter-Object Associative Affinity Index

The article presents the conception of positioning politicians based on a three-stage approach to political branding. The main assumption is that a political brand—and politician's image as its crucial component—is conceptualized as consisting of a node in memory to which a variety of associations are linked. These associations—positive, negative, or neutral—must be shared with other rival candidates as well as with an prototypical ideal candidate, understood as a model and standard of comparison while developing detailed marketing strategies. One of the most valuable methods that has been used to measure these associations is associative overlap technique developed by Szalay. This measure is based on free verbal associations and it expresses the degree of similarity among objects (words, persons, groups) based on the number of similar responses (associations) they elicit in common. The first stage of branding, candidates’ positioning in various segments of voters, focuses on such affinity between politicians and is based on multidimensional scaling techniques. At the second stage, mutual relationships between particular elements (positive and negative, common and distinctive), of which a politician's image consists, are defined. The third level of political branding links the results of positioning to voters’ decisions. This framework of branding political candidates is presented on the basis of empirical research focused on Polish presidential candidates’ perception and evaluation in the 2005 presidential election. The results of the performed research show that it is not only the strengthening of politicians’ positive features but also neutralizing the negative ones that contributes to his higher expected quality.     

Variation in state education policies and effects on student performance

There have been few systematic studies of the effects that education policies adopted at the state level have on the quality of schooling within the state. This article, building on a framework developed by Eric Hanushek and Lori Taylor, measures the effects of state policies—in particular, the effects of state teacher certification requirements on SAT performance across states. In an examination of SAT data from 1972 to 1990, the results suggest that students in states with a master's degree requirement for teacher certification had lower SAT scores than students in states without a master's requirement. The empirical model accounts for inputs such as family background and other school factors typically used in education production functions.     

Gendered Perceptions and Political Candidacies: A Central Barrier to Women's Equality in Electoral Politics

Based on the second wave of the Citizen Political Ambition Panel Study, we provide the first thorough analysis of how gender affects women and men's efficacy to run for office. Our findings reveal that, despite comparable credentials, backgrounds, and experiences, accomplished women are substantially less likely than similarly situated men to perceive themselves as qualified to seek office. Importantly, women and men rely on the same factors when evaluating themselves as candidates, but women are less likely than men to believe they meet these criteria. Not only are women more likely than men to doubt that they have skills and traits necessary for electoral politics, but they are also more likely to doubt their abilities to engage in campaign mechanics. These findings are critical because the perceptual differences we uncover account for much of the gender gap in potential candidates’ self‐efficacy and ultimately hinder women's prospects for political equality.     

Reported reasons retired workers left their last job: findings from the New Beneficiary Survey

About a third of all new retired-worker beneficiaries who had stopped work reported that the main reason they left their last job was a desire to retire. The existence of health problems was the next most frequently given reason, and it was reported by about a fourth of the group. These responses were made to questions in the 1982 New Beneficiary Survey, conducted by the Social Security Administration (SSA) in October-December 1982. Recently retired workers not only said they wished to retire, but more of them began receiving benefits at age 62 than at older ages; by age 65 most were beneficiaries. Forty-five percent of the men and almost 54 percent of the women had already left their last job at the time they received their first benefit. Married women in particular had not only stopped work but frequently had left their last job more than 3 years before they received their first benefit check.     

Selling the self: career portfolios and the new common-sense of immaterial capitalism

This article presents a discourse analysis of a popular guide to composing career portfolios. Comprised of documents from work, school, and personal life, career portfolios chart workers’ personal trajectories from past to present to future. Job applicants use these texts to sell themselves to potential employers. In explaining how to compose portfolios, it is argued, the guide examined in this article (re)produces and circulates common-sense ideas about work in our current era. Central to these common-sense notions are: personal investment in work; deterritorialization of socio-cultural resources (e.g. ways of thinking, speaking, and interacting developed in non-work domains); and reterritorialization of these same resources in the domain of work. To explore these common-sense ideas, I engage Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's arguments about immaterial capitalism and the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of labor.     

Moving Up,Moving Out,or Going Nowhere? A Study of the Employment Patterns of Young Women and the Implications for Welfare Mothers

Conventional wisdom holds that women on welfare will be better off in the long run if they take a job, even if it means initially having less money to spend on their and their children's needs. Underlying this thinking is the belief that women who take low‐paying jobs will eventually move up to higher paying jobs either with their current employer or by changing employers. This paper examines the employment transitions of young women focusing on the likelihood that women who turn to the welfare system for support will make the transition from low‐paying to high‐paying jobs. The data are drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Based on the experiences of women who never received welfare, an estimated one‐quarter of young women who received welfare could be firmly established in jobs paying more than $9.50 an hour by ages 26 and 27. An additional 40 percent would work steadily but in low‐paying jobs, and more than one‐third would work only sporadically. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Characteristics of the longest job for new disabled workers: findings from the New Beneficiary Survey

This article describes the characteristics of the longest job held by new disabled-worker beneficiaries responding to questions in the 1982 New Beneficiary Survey, conducted by the Social Security Administration in October-December 1982. The characteristics include pension coverage, job duration, employer type, occupation, and industry. Many disabled workers (about half the men and two-fifths of the women) reported having been covered by a pension plan. Pension coverage, pension receipt, and job tenure all increased with age, and older disabled workers had pension coverage similar to that of retired workers. Disabled and retired workers often differed in other job characteristics, but tended to become more similar with increasing age. Disabled workers were more likely to have had longest jobs with private employers and in operator-laborer occupations. When they were compared with the job characteristics of retired workers, the characteristics of disabled women exhibited less difference than did those of disabled men.     

Job sprawl,spatial mismatch,and black employment disadvantage

This paper examines the relationship between job sprawl and the spatial mismatch between blacks and jobs. Using data from a variety of sources, including the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census and U.S. Department of Commerce's ZIP Code Business Patterns, I control extensively for metropolitan area characteristics and other factors. In addition, I use metropolitan area physical geography characteristics as instruments for job sprawl to address the problem of simultaneity bias. I find a significant and positive effect of job sprawl on mismatch conditions faced by blacks that remains evident in the twostage least squares models but not in first difference change regressions. The crosssectional effect is particularly important in the Midwest and West, and in metropolitan areas where blacks' share of the population is large and where blacks' population growth rate is relatively low. Among others, the results also reveal that the measures of mismatch and job sprawl used in this analysis are highly correlated with blacks' employment outcomes in the expected direction. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Misleading ballot position cue: Party voting in Korea's nonpartisan local elections

In this study, I present evidence that ballot order can provide a misleading cue to voters. In South Korea, nonpartisan municipal legislative elections were held concurrently with other partisan local elections until 2002. The ballot order of the candidates running in nonpartisan elections was randomly determined, whereas it was determined according to a party's number of seats in the national legislature for candidates running in partisan elections. Therefore, if voters are fully informed, the vote share for the candidate listed first in the nonpartisan ballot should not be correlated with the vote share for the party listed first on the partisan ballot. However, I find that the vote share for a first-listed candidate increases when the first-listed party's vote share increases. I also find that the presence of an incumbent does not significantly reduce the degree to which voters mistakenly use ballot position as a party cue.     

Is Running Enough? Reconsidering the Conventional Wisdom about Women Candidates

The conventional wisdom in the literature on women candidates holds that “when women run, they win as often as men.” This has led to a strong focus in the literature on the barriers to entry for women candidates and significant evidence that these barriers hinder representation. Yet, a growing body of research suggests that some disadvantages persist for Republican women even after they choose to run for office. In this paper, I investigate the aggregate consequences of these disadvantages for general election outcomes. Using a regression discontinuity design, I show that Republican women who win close House primaries lose at higher rates in the general election than Republican men. This nomination effect holds throughout the 1990s despite a surge in Republican voting starting in 1994. I find no such effect for Democratic women and provide evidence that a gap in elite support explains part of the cross-party difference.     

The Job of Government: Interweaving Public Functions and Private Hands

Lively and sometimes raucous debate about the job of government has increasingly engulfed American politics. Much of that debate has swirled around government's size, with conservatives arguing the case for shrinking government and liberals fighting to grow it. In reality, however, neither of these debates engages the critical underlying trend: the increasing interweaving of governmental functions deeply into every fiber of the nongovernmental sectors. Many reforms have sought to rein in government's power, but none has engaged the fundamental interweaving of policy implementation, and, not surprisingly, most have failed. Indeed, many have eroded the public's trust in the governmental institutions on which they depend. This process raises fundamental challenges for defining government's core role, for building the capacity to govern effectively, and for enhancing the accountability of governmental programs. Many of government's administrative tools are a poor match for the governance problems they seek to solve.     

The Institutional Basis of Intercommunal Order: Evidence from Indonesia's Democratic Transition

When authoritarian regimes break down, why does communal violence spike and why are some locations more prone to violence than others? To understand violence during transitions, it is necessary to understand what sustains order when regimes are stable. While existing theories attribute order to formal or informal security institutions on their own, I argue that intercommunal order obtains when formal and informal security institutions are aligned. During authoritarian breakdowns, the state's coercive grip loosens, exposing mismatches between formal and informal institutions and raising the risk of communal violence. Formal‐informal mismatches emerge in communities accustomed to heavy state intervention since they will have developed more state‐dependent informal security institutions. I apply an instrumental variables approach on a nationwide dataset of village‐level data to show that prior exposure to military intervention, proxied by the distance to security outposts, led to Indonesia's spike in violence during its recent democratic transition.     

Businessman Candidates

Why and when do businessmen run for public office rather than rely upon other means of influence? What are the implications of their participation for public policy? We show formally that “businessman candidacy” and public policy are jointly determined by the institutional environment. When institutions that hold elected officials accountable to voters are strong, businessmen receive little preferential treatment and are disinclined to run for office. When such institutions are weak, businessmen can subvert policy irrespective of whether they hold office, but they may run for office to avoid the cost of lobbying elected officials. Evidence from Russian gubernatorial elections supports the model's predictions. Businessman candidates emerge in regions with low media freedom and government transparency, institutions that raise the cost of reneging on campaign promises. Among regions with weaker institutions, professional politicians crowd out businessmen when the rents from office are especially large.     

Identifying Irregularities in Mexican Local Elections

A generalized distrust in Mexican local elections raises the question of whether electoral corruption has vanished or remains a prevalent practice in the country. To answer this question, I analyze the 2010 gubernatorial elections, exploiting a feature of the country's electoral system: within each electoral precinct, voters are assigned to polling stations according to their childhood surname. Consequently, the only difference between voters in contiguous polling stations should be their last names. Given that political preferences are seldom correlated with voters' names, I use suspicious differences in turnout levels across contiguous polling stations to identify fraudulent practices. The findings of this article indicate that nondemocratic enclaves that actively obstruct the completion of Mexico's democratic transition still remain today.     

Prominent Role Models: High‐Profile Female Politicians and the Emergence of Women as Candidates for Public Office

Can prominent female politicians inspire other women to enter politics? A woman occupying a high‐profile office directly impacts women's substantive representation through her policy actions. Here, we consider whether these female leaders also facilitate a mobilization effect by motivating other women to run for office. We posit that prominent women in politics serve as role models for other women interested in political careers, causing an increase in female candidates. We test this theory with data from the American states, which exhibit considerable variation in the sex of state legislative candidates and the high‐profile offices of governor and U.S. senator. Using a weighting method and data spanning 1978–2012, we demonstrate that high‐profile women exert substantively large positive effects on female candidates. We conclude that women in major offices are crucial for women's representation. Beyond their direct policy impact, they amplify women's political voice by motivating more women to enter politics.     

Solace for the Frustrations of Silent Citizenship: the Case of Epicureanism

Insofar as no democratic society can fully realize norms of free and equal citizenship, citizens in such regimes are likely to experience some degree of discontent with their political lives. This raises a second purpose for democratic theory beyond the usual focus on improving democratic institutions: the psychological issue of how ordinary citizens might find solace in the face of disappointment. Democratic theory is capable of providing solace because egalitarian commitments – equality, free speech, solidarity, and self-sufficiency – have a double potential: they not only ground efforts to democratize institutions, but when sublimated in apolitical form also have the capacity to generate a transcendence of the political form itself. In this essay, I pursue both ideas – the need for solace and egalitarianism's ability to provide it – through analysis of the way Epicureanism may have functioned for the ordinary, plebeian citizens in late Republican Rome.