Does supported employment work?

Providing employment‐related services, including supported employment through job coaches, has been a priority in federal policy since the enactment of the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act in 1984. We take advantage of a unique panel data set of all clients served by the South Carolina Department of Disabilities and Special Needs between 1999 and 2005 to investigate whether job coaching leads to stable employment in community settings. The data contain information on individual characteristics, such as IQ and the presence of emotional and behavioral problems, that are likely to affect both employment propensity and likelihood of receiving job coaching. Our results show that unobserved individual characteristics and endogeneity strongly bias naive estimates of the effects of job coaching. However, even after correcting for these biases, an economically and statistically significant treatment effect remains. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Pearl Harbor and Midway: the decisive influence of two men on the outcomes

Beginning with the attack on Pearl Harbor, the war in the Pacific was a largely losing campaign for the Americans until the Battle of Midway, on 4–5 June 1942. The American ability to predict this Japanese attack the second time around served as the turning point for the war in the Pacific. And the story of how the Americans turned a catastrophic failure into an impressive cryptological achievement involved the story of one man, Joe Rochefort, convincing another man, Admiral Chester Nimitz who commanded the Pacific Fleet, that he could trust his analysis of the intelligence he compiled and analyzed.