1998 NATIONWIDE SURVEY OF COURT-CONNECTED DIVORCE EDUCATION PROGRAMS

This second nationwide survey of 3,118 counties and independent cities indicates that 1,516 counties or cities in the United States currently have education programs available for divorcing parents. This is in contrast to results from a 1993–1994 study in which 541 counties had programs available, and is an increase of 180%. Comparisons are made between programs that are mandated and not mandated by the court or state and between court-provided and community-provided programs. Curriculum, format, funding, and evaluation efforts of programs are summarized. A typical program is described, and implications of the findings for program developers and court systems are included.     

Parents' Achievement Goals and Perfectionism in Their Academically Talented Children

Parents of academically talented students have been accused of pushing their children to attain high levels of achievement, as well as fostering performance anxiety and perfectionism in their children. Parents' achievement goals for their children, in terms of the focus on high performance or learning for understanding, were examined in relation to children's perfectionism. Parents (127 sets) and their sixth-grade academically talented children (56% boys) completed the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale and parents reported their achievement goals for their children. Most parents reported learning goals, suggesting that emphasis on meeting external standards is not predominant among parents of talented students. Children of performance goal parents were significantly more likely to exhibit dysfunctional perfectionism than children of learning goal parents, reporting a combination of high concern about mistakes, doubts about actions, parental expectations, and parental criticism. Parents' achievement goals can help predict which students might be at risk for adjustment problems and future underachievement.     

Federal finance and fiscal federalism: the two worlds of Canadian public finance

Abstract: Canadians are all too aware of such effects of “federal finance” as the impact of federal deficit–cutting on provincial and local governments. Economists have a well–developed theory of “fiscal federalism” that they commonly use to analyse problems of multilevel finance. Are “federal finance” and “fiscal federalism” just different names for the same thing? This paper argues that the two concepts differ in some important key respects and illustrate our argument in terms of marked contrasts in developments at the federal–provincial and provincial–municipal levels with respect to taxes, transfers and borrowing. Sommaire: Les Canadiens ne connaissent que trop bien certaines réalités de la fiscali–té fédérale telles que les effets de lutte anti–deficit du fédéral sur les gouvernements provinciaw et locaux. Les éonomistes ont une thérie bien développée du fédéra–lisme fiscal qu'ils utilisent couramment pour analyser les problémes des finances multi–paliers. En réalité, est–ce que finances fedérales et fédéralisme fiscal ne sont que des noms différents pour désigner la même chose? Nous avanqons dans cet article que les deux concepts diffèrent fortement sur certains points importants; nous défendons notre argument en contrastant ce qui se passe aw paliers fédéral–provincial et provincial–municipal en ce qui concerne les impôts, les paiements de transfert et l'emprunt.     

Do the elderly “vote with their feet?”

This research explores whether the elderly vote with their feet by migrating to states with government policies that treat them favorably. A theoretical model is presented that clarifies the effects of cost-of-living, amenities and the public sector on migration decisions and that informs our empirical analysis. Using state-level migration data from the 1990 Census, we estimate out-migration and in-migration equations that suggest that the public sector is an important determinant of elderly migration, but in sometimes unexpected ways. Our results lend some support for the Tiebout hypothesis, but they also raise serious questions about the nature of the elderly's preferences for government policy.     

Does Foreign Aid Promote the Expansion of Government?

Building on the literature on public finance, I seek to advance our understanding of variations in government size by exploring the impact of official development assistance on fiscal policy. I hypothesize that foreign aid operates in accordance with the "flypaper effect," systematically generating incentives and opportunities for the expansion of government spending. Results from a time-series cross-sectional regression analysis of growth in government spending over the 1970–99 time period are consistent with the hypothesis. For middle- and lower-income nations, aid represents an important determinant of government expansion. Looking at the tax and revenue side of the equation, however, reveals a more perverse pattern of response: aid promotes not only increased spending but also reduced revenue generation. The results have important implications from both a theoretical and policy perspective. Inter alia they point to the potentially self-defeating nature of efforts to promote market-oriented programs of state retrenchment via development assistance as well as to the importance of incorporating international transfers into future research on government spending.     

A Longitudinal Analysis of Stress in African American Youth: Predictors and Outcomes of Stress Trajectories

Few researchers have studied trajectories of stress over time in relation to psychosocial outcomes and behaviors among adolescents. A sample of African American adolescents were assessed longitudinally on perceived stress, psychological well-being, support, antisocial behaviors, and academic success. Patterns of stress over 4 time points were developed using a cluster-analytic approach. Differences among the trajectory clusters were examined using psychosocial outcomes and behaviors. Adolescents with chronic levels of stress reported more anxiety and depression, engaged in antisocial behaviors, and reported less active coping than youth in other trajectories. Adolescents with low levels of stress over time reported fewer psychological problems, perceived more social support, and were more likely to graduate from high school than those with higher stress levels over time. We also found that an increase in stress coincided with a lack of support and more psychological problems over time.     

Decentralization and poverty alleviation. International experience and the case of the Philippines

In recent years, decentralization has become quite common in developing countries. The essence of decentralization is that it does not occur in general but rather in a particular context, so that decentralization takes many different forms in different countries at different times. Comparative analysis is often illuminating and the article uses it to cast some light on the current moves towards decentralization in the Philippines. Section 2 provides a quantitative overview of the relationship between decentralization and poverty across a number of Asian and Latin American countries. Section 3 discusses key aspects of the relationship between decentralization and poverty alleviation in the Philippines, drawing on a number of decentralization experiences in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia and Vietnam. Section 3.1 focuses on local capacity and Section 3.2 on local financial resources, in particular the role of fiscal transfers. Section 3.3 examines the effects of different approaches to decentralization on the targeting and delivery of poverty‐related services—health, primary education, housing and infrastructure. Section 4 concludes by noting the importance of migration in any treatment of decentralization and poverty. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Credit card debts of the poor: High and rising

In this article we report on a little‐known aspect of the consumer credit explosion: It has also happened among the poor. Focusing on credit cards, we use data from four releases of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), 1983–1995, to trace the evolution of the debt position of the poor as compared to that of the population at large. The data indicate that from 1983 to 1995 the fraction of poor households with a credit card more than doubled, and the average balances held on these cards rose almost as rapidly as the balances of nonpoor households. In 1983, fewer than 1 in 30 poor households had credit card debts greater than twice their monthly incomes; by 1995, more than 1 in 8 did. There is no strong evidence at the moment that the added debt has increased the financial distress of these households. Nonetheless, because of the debt increase, poor households at the end of the 1990s are more vulnerable to an economic downturn than they were at the end of the 1980s.© 1998 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management