Welfare and child support program knowledge gaps reduce program effectiveness

There is little research on knowledge of the policy rules that could affect individuals, either in general or in evaluations of new programs. The lack of research is surprising, given that knowledge gaps could limit the effectiveness of reforms or lead to incorrect inferences regarding the effects of a policy change. In this article, we use survey data to examine the level and sources of welfare participants' policy knowledge in the context of a substantial change in child support and welfare policy in Wisconsin. We find very low levels of knowledge of child support policy rules. Multivariate analyses suggest that people tend to learn policy rules by experience; we find less consistent support for knowledge being primarily imparted through interactions with caseworkers. A difference‐in‐difference analysis suggests that if participants had been more knowledgeable, program impacts would have been larger. Implications of this research for policy implementation and policy evaluations are discussed. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Ideology and Voter Preferences as Determinants of Financial Globalization

We propose that the global spread of ideas affects international economic openness policies, and that to omit ideology as an explanatory variable for economic globalization is to risk omitted variable bias. Using voting data, we create measures of global ideology regarding economic openness and propose that changes in both global and domestic ideology influence how open or closed to international finance an economy is. We also test other influences on liberalization, including proposed state-centered diffusion mechanisms. Using PCSTS and system-GMM models, we estimate the determinants of change in international capital account regulation for 82 countries, 1955 to 1999. We thereby examine diffusion of both liberalizations (1950s and 1990s) and closures (1960s and 1970s). Changes in both global and domestic ideology robustly influence liberalization and closure. The capital account policies of neighboring countries (positively) and of the leading economies (negatively) also influenced a country's capital account liberalization.     

A "politically robust" experimental design for public policy evaluation, with application to the Mexican universal health insurance program.

We develop an approach to conducting large-scale randomized public policy experiments intended to be more robust to the political interventions that have ruined some or all parts of many similar previous efforts. Our proposed design is insulated from selection bias in some circumstances even if we lose observations; our inferences can still be unbiased even if politics disrupts any two of the three steps in our analytical procedures; and other empirical checks are available to validate the overall design. We illustrate with a design and empirical validation of an evaluation of the Mexican Seguro Popular de Salud (Universal Health Insurance)program we are conducting. Seguro Popular, which is intended to grow to provide medical care, drugs, preventative services, and financial health protection to the 50 million Mexicans without health insurance, is one of the largest health reforms of any country in the last two decades. The evaluation is also large scale, constituting one of the largest policy experiments to date and what may be the largest randomized health policy experiment ever.     

Women in the Corporate Channel: a Process of Natural Exclusion?*

This article examines Norwegian women's access to the public committee system. Women's relative underrepresentation is discussed in terms of their social status and their difficulties in gaining entry into the 'pool of eligibles'. Their corporate recruitment via political channels is compared to men's more frequent recruitment via professional channels and via economic interest organizations. The article concludes by comparing conditions for participation in the numerical and corporate channels as well as in issue-oriented, ad-hoc activities. These differ along two dimensions, both of which tend to channel women into the less formalized bodies for political participation.     

The New Zealand Health and Disability Commissioner: a comparative assessment of the commissioner's contribution to protecting the rights of mental health consumers

The Health and Disabliity Commissioner's contribution to the protection of mental health consumers' rights is examined. This assessment covers a number of aspects. It includes the scope of consumer rights jurisdiction, the breadth of legal entitlements, protective mechanisms used, and the effectiveness of that protection. The Commissioner's role is also assessed comparatively. It is contrasted domestically with District Inspectors of Mental Health and internationally with Scottish and United Kingdom reform proposals. While analysis reveals considerable similarities, the New Zealand Health and Disability Commissioner is favourably highlighted in contrast with Scotland and the United Kingdom, particularly in the area of enforceability of mental health consumer rights.     

Mismatch distribution analysis of Y-STR haplotypes as a tool for the evaluation of identity-by-state proportions and significance of matches--the European picture

We suggest the use of the mismatch distribution methodology as an easy way to estimate the distance between all pairs of haplotypes present in a sample. This approach allows the evaluation of the proportion of pairs of Y-STR haplotypes that are prone to become identical by state (IBS), in one generation, by recurrent mutation, a statistic of major importance in the forensic field. The mismatch approach presents some advantages alternatively to the empirical one, since it is not necessary to have simultaneous information on STRs and SNPs, and it allows the evaluation of IBS also within-haplogroups. The estimation of IBS at an European scale showed that there is a high population substructuring for this parameter, increasing from southern-central European countries towards west and north, in accordance to what was found for Y-biallelic markers. This result seems to imply a more careful use of large databases for matching evaluation, even in the absence of population structure for general Y-STR diversity. Furthermore, mismatch distribution can be used to measure the distance between a particular haplotype and all the haplotypes in a sample. When applied to the most frequent haplotypes in Europe it revealed that the opportunity for IBS is not directly related to the frequency of a haplotype, but highly dependent on the proportion of neighbouring haplotypes--so, that reporting on the haplotype frequency for evaluating the significance of a match can be misleading.