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.     

Child Health in Elementary School Following California's Paid Family Leave Program

We evaluate changes in elementary school children health outcomes following the introduction of California's Paid Family Leave (PFL) program, which provided parents with paid time off following the birth of a child. Our health outcomes—overweight, ADHD, and hearing‐related problems—are characterized by diagnosis rates that only pick up during early elementary school. Moreover, our health outcomes have been found to be negatively linked with many potential implications of extended maternity leave—increased breastfeeding, prompt medical checkups at infancy, reduced prenatal stress, and reduced non‐parental care during infancy. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies (ECLS) within a difference‐in‐differences framework, our results suggest improvements in health outcomes among California elementary school children following PFL's introduction. Furthermore, the improvements are driven by children from less advantaged backgrounds, which is consistent with the notion that California's PFL had the greatest effect on leave‐taking duration after childbirth mostly for less advantaged mothers who previously could not afford to take unpaid leave.     

Early Impacts of the Affordable Care Act on Health Insurance Coverage in Medicaid Expansion and Non‐Expansion States

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage in the United States through a combination of insurance market reforms, mandates, subsidies, health insurance exchanges, and Medicaid expansions, most of which took effect in 2014. This paper estimates the causal effects of the ACA on health insurance coverage in 2014 using data from the American Community Survey. We utilize difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences models that exploit cross‐sectional variation in the intensity of treatment arising from state participation in the Medicaid expansion and local area pre‐ACA uninsured rates. This strategy allows us to identify the effects of the ACA in both Medicaid expansion and non‐expansion states. Our preferred specification suggests that, at the average pre‐treatment uninsured rate, the full ACA increased the proportion of residents with insurance by 5.9 percentage points compared to 2.8 percentage points in states that did not expand Medicaid. Private insurance expansions from the ACA were due to increases in both employer‐provided and non‐group coverage. The coverage gains from the full ACA were largest for those without a college degree, non‐whites, young adults, unmarried individuals, and those without children in the home. We find no evidence that the Medicaid expansion crowded out private coverage.     

The Impact of Prenatal Exposure to Power Plant Emissions on Birth Weight: Evidence from a Pennsylvania Power Plant Located Upwind of New Jersey

To examine the infant health impact of prenatal exposure to power plant emissions, we draw scientific evidence on the impacted region downwind of a large polluter, a coal‐fired power plant located on the border of two states and proven to be the sole contributor to the violation of air quality standards of the impacted region. Our results show that among all live singleton births that occurred during 1990 through 2006, those born to mothers living as far as 20 to 30 miles away downwind from the power plant (which is also an affluent region) during pregnancy are at greater risks of low birth weight (LBW) and very low birth weight (VLBW): the likelihoods of LBW and VLBW could increase approximately by 6.50 and 17.12 percent, respectively. In light of the continual efforts of The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in reducing cross‐state air pollution caused by transboundary power plant emissions, our study is aimed at broadening the scope of cross‐border pollution impact analysis by taking into account adverse infant health effects of upwind polluters, which can impose disproportionate burdens of health risks on downwind states due to air pollutants transported by wind.     

Semiotising the student perception of learning outcomes in British higher education

This article presents a semiotic analysis of the student perception of learning outcomes in British higher education. It centres on three annotated images in Frank Furedi’s article “The Unhappiness Principles”, published in Times Higher Education in 2012. Drawing upon Peircean semiosis and iconicity, it provides a rhetoric-infused interpretation of the word–image complementarity exhibited in student participants’ written commentaries on the three images. This leads to a dialectical view of formative and summative assessment, in which process and product create each other through the same continuum of learning and teaching. In highlighting intellectualism as central to the ethnography of university life, this article argues that learner autonomy and the potential for transformation is deemed essential to the student experience in higher education.     

A Concurrent Analysis of Three Institutions that Transform Health Technology‐Based Ventures: Economic Policy,Capital Investment,and Market Approval

Drawing on institutional theory, this article articulates qualitative insights from a program of research on Canadian health technology‐based ventures to examine the rules that characterize economic policy, capital investment, and regulatory approval as well as the way these institutions enable and constrain the development of ventures at an early stage. Our findings clarify how economic policy integrates these ventures into the entrepreneurial domain, how capital investment configures them for economic value extraction, and how regulatory approval fully releases their market value. These findings help to revisit current policy modernization initiatives by calling attention to the convergence among the three institutions. Rather than operating solely as a source of constraints, these institutions provide a highly integrated market‐oriented space for health technology‐based entrepreneurial activities to unfold.     

E‐government and public service quality in Ghana

This article contributes to the growing discourse on the potential of e‐government to transform the operations of public sector institutions, thereby improving public services. It does so by conceptualizing public service quality into efficiency, economy (cost reduction), customer satisfaction, and service accessibility and draws on qualitative data from the Ghanaian narrative for illustration. As previous studies have demonstrated, this study also affirms the potential of e‐government in improving public services delivery by increasing efficiency, reducing the cost of operations, expanding access to services, and achieving customer satisfaction. Yet, there remains a repertoire of challenges such as weak ICT infrastructure especially in towns and villages, incessant power outages and illiteracy, which are drawbacks to fully harnessing the benefits of e‐government in Ghana. The study recommends that these challenges should feature prominently in e‐government policies to increase the chances of solving them.     

Competition and switching in public service markets: Can they reduce inequalities?

Regulatory reforms to public infrastructure services across European Union (EU) countries were aimed at increasing consumer welfare by introducing competition and choice into service markets. However, empirical evaluations have questioned whether these reforms have benefitted all consumers, suggesting that vulnerable groups of service users (especially those with lower levels of formal education), might be locked into poorly performing services. We assess the relationship between the level of competition in electricity and fixed telephony markets in EU countries and evaluate the affordability of these services for different socio‐educational layers. Our findings show that – although in countries where there is a relatively high frequency of switching, inequalities between socio‐educational groups are smaller and eventually disappear – competition as such does not play a part. These results suggest that demand‐side regulation that successfully enables consumer switching has the potential to equalize social welfare, thereby reflecting a possible convergence of regulatory instruments and the central aims of the welfare state in this context.