Child support enforcement for teenage fathers: Problems and prospects

Data from the NLSY (National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experiences-Youth Cohort) indicate that about 7.3 percent of teenage males become fathers and that very few of these fathers live with their children. Father absence and the concurrent increase in female-headed households are closely associated with the impoverishment of children. Most absent teen fathers never come into contact with the child support enforcement program, and the extent to which they financially support their children informally is not well understood. While the income of absent teen fathers is low in the teen years, it increases over time, as does the potential for collecting child support. Nevertheless, men who were absent teen fathers earn less in early adulthood than men who deferred parenting until age 20 or later and teen fathers who lived with their children. Early establishment of paternity and greater standardization in the treatment of adolescent fathers by the child support enforcement program are recommended. Further, the substantial and persistent income deficit experienced by adolescent fathers who live apart from their children raises an interesting dilemma. While children may benefit financially and psychosocially from living with two parents, the lower income of men who were absent teenage fathers may make them poor marital prospects. This raises doubts about the recent recommendations of some scholars that we should bring back the shotgun wedding.     

An analysis of youth crime and employment patterns

This paper investigates the relationships between the employment and the crime decisions of youths. We assume that youths maximize expected utility and we allow divergence betweenex ante andex post time allocations to legal and illegal activities. This gap motivates the exclusion restrictions which allow us to explore feedbacks between criminality and employability. Moreover, by using a panel of individual-level data, we are able to investigate the impact of historical crime and labor-market activities on the current delinquency and employability of juveniles. The measures of the endogeneous variables of our model are dichotomous. Furthermore, our sample is choice-based. Maximum-likelihood procedures which deal with these complications are used in our empirical investigations.     

Testing the Development and Diffusion of E‐Government and E‐Democracy: A Global Perspective

E‐government uses information and communication technology to provide citizens with information about public services. Less pervasive, e‐democracy offers greater electronic community access to political processes and policy choices. Few studies have examined these twin applications separately, although they are widely discussed in the literature as distinct. The authors, Chung‐pin Lee of Tamkang University and Kaiju Chang and Frances Stokes Berry of Florida State University, empirically analyze factors associated with the relative level of development of e‐government and e‐democracy across 131 countries. Their hypotheses draw on four explanations of policy change—learning, political norms, competition, and citizen pressures. All four explanations are strongly linked to nations where e‐government policy is highly advanced, whereas a country’s e‐democracy development is connected to complex internal factors, such as political norms and citizen pressures.     

On the Success of AmeriCorps Programs in Strengthening Communities: Evidence from Florida

In 1993 President Clinton signed into law the National and Community Service Trust Act, the centerpiece of which was a new national service initiative—AmeriCorps. The overall purpose of AmeriCorps was to promote community building through volunteer service. AmeriCorps was one high-profile program established in part to highlight government-nonprofit partnerships and their capacity to improve communities and service delivery to the most vulnerable in communities—poor children, frail elderly, and teenagers who are at risk of dropping out of school or getting into serious juvenile delinquency problems. AmeriCorps' programs nationally work to achieve three goals—Getting Things Done, Member Development, and Strengthening Communities. Few of the studies on AmeriCorps have explicitly studied their impact on community strengthening. This article reports on a two-year study of twenty two AmeriCorps programs in Florida from 1997–2000, emphasizing their objectives and success in community strengthening. Program results are limited. The programs increased the number of volunteers delivering their services and developed one or more community partner organizations at each site. Nearly all of the program staff and community partners believed that the AmeriCorps programs positively influenced the community's self-help capacity to some extent. However, data indicating broader community strengthening impacts were hard to find and difficult to track. Reasons for this relatively modest impact on broader community strengthening goals are articulated based on surveys, interviews, and site visits.     

Framework for Analysis of Legal Mobilization: A Decision-Making Model

The American legal system, structured in an entrepreneurial mode, relies upon the individual actor to personally evaluate the burdens and benefits of invoking the law on his or her own behalf Without discounting the contribution to our understanding of legal mobilization which has been made by the access-to-justice movement, the author argues that focusing on the poor and the distribution of legal services has limited our understanding of the legal system.
The article presents an alternative analytic framework for examination of citizen use of the law. The model of legal mobilization presented focuses on demands rather than needs, on citizens rather than lawyers or judges, on decision making rather than access, and on invoking the law rather than compliance with it. Drawing on the literature and available empirical evidence, the author attempts to analytically clarify the complex process of legal mobilization by organizing relevant variables into a decision-making model that focuses on the individual actor and the factors weighed in deciding whether and how to proceed in mobilizing the law.     

Publicsector worker safety and legal remedies

While much is known about the affirmative responsibilities private employers must undertake in order to protect workers on the job, the responsibilities of public-sector employers have not been heretofore addressed. This article analyzes federal laws that pertain to worker safety. These laws will be discussed in light of legal responsibilities placed on public-sector agencies to provide a safe work environment for employees.