The Incidental Fertility Effects of School Condom Distribution Programs

While the fertility effects of improving teenagers’ access to contraception are theoretically ambiguous, most empirical work has shown that access decreases teen fertility. In this paper, we consider the fertility effects of access to condoms—a method of contraception not considered in prior work. We exploit variation across counties and across time in teenagers’ exposure to condom distribution programs in schools. We find that access to condoms in schools increases teen fertility by about 12 percent. The results suggest that the effects of condom access varied significantly across different programs; the positive fertility estimates are driven by communities where condoms are provided without mandated counseling. Programs that mandated counseling have zero or negative fertility effects, but estimates on these counties are less robust across specifications.     

On scale work: evidential practices and global health interventions

Abstract

Scalability can be understood as the ability to expand without changing. Yet, expanding an intervention to a global scale, we suggest, is a significant and difficult accomplishment. In this paper we propose to explore the kind of evidential exigencies that this accomplishment involves. To do so, we focus on the field of global health and examine how child immunization against the pneumococcus bacterium has been scaled up in low-income countries. The paper first attends to initial epidemiological scrutiny that revealed the existence of a large-scale public health problem and the possibility of an expandable solution (vaccination). It then describes the set-up of a funding arrangement using overseas aid to purchase vaccine doses manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, before paying attention to various frictions that affect the widespread use of pneumococcal vaccines. In these different moments through which scalability is accomplished, always partially and temporarily, we show that a dual activity can be witnessed, a pivoting between referential work and forward projection. To conclude, we suggest that scalability is more usefully approached as a form of expansion that is always attentive to the possibilities of change.     

Les dockers dakarois. L’organisation du travail dans un port ouest-africain, 1910–1990s

This paper deals with the long-term evolution of dock labor in Dakar. Through the utilization of archival sources and their analysis, this investigation explores the changes that occurred in this sector and primarily the reform plan developed during the world wars but that was never introduced into the labor regulations, mainly due to the colonial regime. In addition, this paper studies the legal changes since the 1970s when the dockers’ statute was settled. Furthermore, this research uses oral testimony from retired Senegalese dockers to study the way these workers observed these structural changes. It is the first time that this topic has been explored for the port of Dakar from a historical long-term perspective.     

Democracy in Britain: Retrospect and Prospect

The EU referendum has raised questions about the nature of democracy, which is not just majority rule. It is wrong to claim that direct democracy has now replaced representative democracy, as Parliament is required to answer all the questions that the referendum did not. The conduct of the referendum reflected the worst aspects of Britain's political culture of sterile adversarialism. Both left and right have shared assumptions about governing that have made it difficult to develop a culture of democratic citizenship. The political system still reflects its pre‐democratic origins (as in the survival of a House of Lords and the obsession with titles) and the role of money in politics represents a form of corruption. Institutional reforms depend for their success on the nurturing of a democratic culture, which is a task for many hands.     

How Stable is the Condition of Family Homelessness?

Although research has documented the majority of homelessness experienced by individuals and families in the US to be transitional rather than chronic, the mechanisms by which some families successfully escape homelessness while other do not remains relatively unclear. To provide more information to this area of inquiry, this study analyzed the transitional nature of homelessness for a sample of families with school-aged children who were homeless under the McKinney-Vento definition. By conducting a survey with over 1000 homeless families with children enrolled in two public school systems in Central Florida, we find that over a quarter of families exit homelessness in less than six months. We compare these families to those that remained homeless to examine the potential importance of demographic differences and other potential barriers to securing housing. Many of the commonly assumed barriers were not significant predictors of continued homelessness; the most salient difference between the groups was income underscoring the importance of employment opportunities for families to allow them to exit homelessness.     

Ideology,Learning, and Policy Diffusion: Experimental Evidence

We introduce experimental research design to the study of policy diffusion in order to better understand how political ideology affects policymakers’ willingness to learn from one another's experiences. Our two experiments–embedded in national surveys of U.S. municipal officials–expose local policymakers to vignettes describing the zoning and home foreclosure policies of other cities, offering opportunities to learn more. We find that: (1) policymakers who are ideologically predisposed against the described policy are relatively unwilling to learn from others, but (2) such ideological biases can be overcome with an emphasis on the policy's success or on its adoption by co‐partisans in other communities. We also find a similar partisan‐based bias among traditional ideological supporters, who are less willing to learn from those in the opposing party. The experimental approach offered here provides numerous new opportunities for scholars of policy diffusion.     

Job Choice and Performance: Revisiting Core Assumptions about Public Service Motivation

Although there has been considerable enthusiasm for public service motivation (PSM) research in recent years, two of PSM's fundamental assumptions have been relatively untested: its impacts on job choice and on job performance. Using panel data from two different studies, we offer stronger observational tests of these core assumptions. The findings provide mixed evidence. When testing PSM's effect on employment choice, we find that PSM measured during a law student's first year predicts the sector in which they are employed after graduation three years later. In a separate study investigating PSM's effect on job performance, we find that government employee PSM does not predict employee absenteeism or supervisor assessments of their in-role and extra-role performance. Our findings support recent calls for a more nuanced theory and analyses of PSM to help better understand its implications for recruiting, retaining, and motivating the workforce used to provide public goods and services.