A Village in the Clouds

I’d read and heard so much about the miracle of poverty reduction in China that I had to go see it myself firsthand. That opportunity arrived when I went on an excursion to Dawan Village in Anhui Province, east China. I knew very little about the place. All I knew was that it sat 1,500 meters above sea level,and that President Xi Jinping visited it in 2016.     

An Empirical Study of Patent Grant Rates as a Function of Race and Gender

In this article we examine the rate at which patent applications are granted as a function of the inventor's race and gender. Empirical analysis of more than 3.9 million U.S. applications finds minority and women applicants are significantly less likely to secure a patent relative to the balance of inventors. Further analysis indicates that a portion of this bias is introduced during prosecution at the Patent Office, independent of the quality of the application. Mechanisms underlying these disparities are explored. The article concludes with a discussion of our results and their interaction with patent law, innovation policy, and employment trends.     

Characteristics of children with problem sexual behaviour and adolescent perpetrators of sexual abuse: a systematic review

ABSTRACT

People who commit sexual offences are a heterogeneous group, with research suggesting that children and young people commit a large proportion of all sex offences, especially those committed against other children. This systematic review provides a synthesis of literature concerning the characteristics of children and adolescents who exhibit harmful sexual behaviour. There is a particular focus in this review on studies that examine the characteristics of children and young people exhibiting these behaviours within institutional and organisational settings or which take a situational and/or developmental approach to understanding sexually abusive behaviour. Using a developmental and life-course criminology lens, this review explores implications from the literature for the prevention and response to child sexual abuse, with a particular focus on institutional contexts where the perpetrators are children and adolescents.     

Tax and Expenditure Limitations,Salary Reductions,and Public Employee Turnover

This study examines the relationship between salary and employee turnover behavior by analyzing a natural experiment created by the New Jersey Superintendent Salary Cap (NJSSC), which caused salary reductions for 25 percent of NJ superintendents in the initial year. I find that an additional $10,000 reduction in base salary due to the NJSSC corresponds to a 16 percent increase in the likelihood of superintendent turnover. This suggests salary expenditures are important public policy levers to retain employees. This study also contributes to prior research on tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) by documenting one of the first TELs placed directly on public employees.     

Alternative Methods of Experience Rating Unemployment Insurance Employer Taxes

For most states the methodology used for assigning Unemployment Insurance tax rates to employers arose when the program was first established in 1935. More than 80 years later, with evolving employment relationships, state systems have become outmoded. This paper critiques current experience rating methods and presents new methodologies that are much easier to operate and that improve the incentives for employers to increase employment. The proposed methods would assess taxes based on employment or payroll variation such that growing firms would have lower taxes. A simulation analysis illustrates the impact of the new methods on employer groups.