Personality differences between police and fire applicants

An increasingly common administrative policy is to combine police and fire departments into one collective unit titled something such as “Department of Public Safery”. However, in order to make such a combination, job incumbents must be able to perform the duties of both a patrolperson and a firefighter. Thus a combination of police and fire departments assumes that police and fire applicants are similar in skills, abilities, and personality characteristics. The purpose of the present study was to determine if police and fire applicants were similar in terms of personality. The results indicated that there were significant personality differences between police and fire applicants. These differences were discussed in terms of the policy of combining police and fire departments.     

Soft budgets and hard rents: a note on Kornai and Gomulka

This note shows how Kornai's concept of the soft budget constraint can be decomposed into separate elements of technical inefficiency and relative price distortion. The distinction between r-budget softness and m-budget softness introduced by Gomulka is shown to correspond to the equivalent and compensating variation measures of efficiency loss. It is also argued that budget softness should be viewed as the outcome of a rent-seeking process in which a firm's action in the control sphere incurs an opportunity cost in the real sphere. Adopting such a perspective leads to a re-definition of the resource loss associated with budget softness and results in much higher estimates of the social costs of soft budgets than those proposed in the existing literature.     

Analyzing factors influencing readmission to a battered women's shelter

Factors that distinguished first admission and readmission to an emergency woman's shelter were examined using discriminant function analysis. Records from 563 women who were residents were analyzed. Results suggest that source of income, number and developmental stage of children, and prior history of physical assault are precursors of readmissions. This study was discussed in terms of improving follow-up services to former residents of emergency shelters.     

The effect of shock and regular probation upon recidivism: A comparative analysis

Previous studies of shock probation have reported mixed effects with regard to recidivism rates. This particular study compared the attributes of a sample of shock and regular probationers and discovered that type of probation was not significantly related to rearrest rates.