SURREPLY

This is a follow‐up to our previous “Comment” responding to an article by William How and Hugh McIsaac.     

Did welfare reform influence the fertility of young teens?

During the 1990s, states made several reforms to their welfare programs designed to reduce teenage fertility among minors. Among the most prominent of these changes, states started requiring teenage mothers younger than 18 to live with a parent or legal guardian and enroll in high school in order to receive welfare benefits. Using natality data from the National Center for Health Statistics, we compare the trend in fertility rates for young women aged 15 to 17 to the trend for a control group of 18-year-olds. Our estimates imply that the annual percent decline in fertility rates following implementation of these minor parent provisions was 0.7 percentage points larger for young teens than for teens aged 18, a difference of over 22 percent.     

Resourceful communities: empowering traditional knowledge holders

Community Resources is itself a community resource (CR), interrogatingand reframing the debate over IP and traditional knowledge (TK)with a range and spirit that is rare in dense, arid academicliterature. With energy, insight, and originality, it probesthe dilemmas of global governance initiatives that aim to addressintrinsically local TK systems. The hundred-page bibliography, itself a CR, measures both theauthor's industry and the diffuse academic discourse this bookaugments. TK is a rich resource for the academic community.Yet can this analytical effort respect the irreducible diversityof those communities for whom TK is integral to their collectiveidentities? Community Resources systematically critiques international efforts,underscoring their limitations and embedded values, before settingout the conceptual foundations for a new form of internationalgovernance, with CR as the central organizing idea. How canjustice be done to the cultures, values, and interests of disparate     

Maternal employment and teenage childbearing: Evidence from the PSID

Over the last 30 years, the tenet of promoting self‐sufficiency through work has become one of the primary objectives of many social welfare policies in the United States. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the author asks if a mother's work hours influence her daughter's teenage fertility. The findings suggest a negative relationship, with the largest effects for the daughters of mothers who work more than 1,000 hours per year. Results among AFDC recipients suggest that an increase in a mother's work hours from zero to 20 hours per week reduces her daughter's probability of a teen birth by 33 percent. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Competitive analysis using a flexible demand specification

Econometric methods can be helpful when one is trying to understandthe nature of competition between products in differentiatedproducts industries, an issue that arises in many competitionpolicy contexts. However, misspecification of the consumer demandsystem can result in biased econometric results and misleadingconclusions. We discuss some considerations that go into choosinga demand system specification and suggest that a ‘flexiblefunctional form’ be used. This approach avoids placingrestrictions on the demand elasticities. We identify and discussother issues that arise in the estimation of demand systems.We conclude with an empirical example concerning the calculationof lost profits damages in a patent infringement case. Thisexample demonstrates how using a flexible functional form leadsto a substantially more reliable damages calculation than usingthe particular restrictive functional form that is commonlyused to calculate lost profits damages in patent litigation.     

Law and Politics Reconsidered: A New Constitutional History of Dred Scott

This essay synthesizes recent writing on the constitutional history of slavery, featuring Mark Graber's Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (2006) . It offers a historical and legal analysis of Dred Scott that attempts to clarify the roles of both law and politics in controversial judicial decisions. It joins Graber in rehabilitating Chief Justice Taney's Dred Scott opinion as a plausible implementation of a Constitution that was born in slavery and grew only more suffused with slavery over time. It integrates much recent writing on the social, political, and constitutional history of slavery to develop the context in which the Dred Scott opinions must be read. And it finds that Justice Curtis's celebrated dissent amounted to an unjudicial manipulation of the law, albeit for the higher purpose of striking at the political hegemony of the slaveholding class.
This essay is an abridgement of a longer work ( Leonard 2009 ) that offers, among other things, further analysis of the unjudicial character of Curtis's dissent.     

Professional Skills in International Financial Surveillance: Assessing Change in IMF Policy Teams

In 2006, the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) lauded Iceland's capacity to “withstand extreme, but plausible, shocks,” which was clearly an error in judgment. After the international financial crisis hit, IMF officials bemoaned the lack of professional market skills in FSAP teams. Importing these skills was difficult given IMF staff freezes, but postcrisis FSAP continued with heightened legitimacy inside and outside the IMF. This article provides an assessment of FSAP teams, focusing on the hiring of external experts and their professional skills. We use an Optimal Matching analysis of work roles in career histories to identify differences in policy teams and external experts' attributes. The article also draws on interviews with FSAP team members from 2008 to 2013. We demonstrate that changes in professional skills and team composition are a consequence of demands for professional insulation, institutional legitimation, and a view of professionalism as transnational organizational competence.