Performance Funding in Federal Agencies: A Case Study of a Federal Job Training Program

Our case study highlights important details that enter into developing performance contingent budgeting schemes—details that do not emerge in more general discussions of the subject—and shows how the handling of these details can be crucial to these schemes' success. We study a federal job training program that gives state and local decision makers discretion over the program's operation, but through performance funding holds them accountable for achieving specific objectives. We find that states' modifications to the scheme's construction produced over time highly individualized performance funding schemes that likely varied in their effectiveness.     

The Jews of early modern Marburg, 1640s—1800: A case study in family and household organization

This article examines Jewish household and family organization in a middle-sized German city, the Upper Hessian regional center of Marburg, the population of which ranged from 2500 to 6000 from the Thirty Years War to the end of the 18th century. Some general hypotheses about population development, household structure, and family life conveniently summarized by Toch [Toch, M. (1995). Aspects of stratification in early modern German Jewry: Population history and village Jews. In R. P. Hsia & H. Lehmann (Eds.). In and out of the ghetto: Jewish-Gentile relations in late medieval and early modern Germany (pp. 77-89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] serve as an organizational frame for the case study. In Toch's view, Jews' comparative wealth, as well as governmental restrictions on their settlement and marriage in central Europe, led to their having larger and more complex households than those of the Christian majority. While household enumerations over time confirm several of Toch's observations, especially the larger size of Jewish families, neither Hessian settlement policy nor local Marburg opposition prevented the Jewish minority of about 1% from keeping pace with general population growth. Moreover, Jews did not respond to their regulated living conditions and status as cultural outsiders with a family organization exhibiting remarkably more internal complexity than did Christian households.