Investigating the Causal Effects of Arts Education

There is a paucity of research on the causal relationship between arts learning and educational outcomes. Investigating these relationships has become imperative as policymakers increasingly prioritize empirical evidence of educational impacts, which often leads to curriculum narrowing that favors traditionally-tested subjects. Employing a randomized controlled trial with 42 elementary and middle schools in Houston, Texas, we find that randomly assigning arts educational opportunities reduces disciplinary infractions, improves writing achievement, and increases students’ emotional empathy. Students in elementary schools, which were the primary focus of the program, also experience increases in school engagement, college aspirations, and cognitive empathy. As the first large-scale randomized control trial of arts learning in an authentic school setting, these findings provide strong evidence that the arts can produce meaningful impacts on students’ academic outcomes and social-emotional development. Education policymakers should consider these benefits when assessing the role of the arts in schools.     

Zur Anwendung von Pestiziden in Natura 2000-Gebieten

Natur und Recht - In den Schutzgebieten des europäischen Netzes Natura 2000 (Vogelschutzgebiete und Flora-Fauna-Habitat-(FFH-)Gebiete) sind bestimmte natürliche Lebensräume sowie...     

Development Finance: Debates,Dogmas and New Directions

Intense controversy surrounds the interpretation of national survey and census data on employment trends in rural Java. The analysis of exclusionary labour arrangements developed in this paper helps resolve this controversy. It also sheds light on the mechanisms that underlie different labour arrangements, and the ways in which these mechanisms are connected with wider political and economic forces.     

Employment versus empowerment: A case study of the nature of women's work in Ecuador

This research re‐evaluates the female marginalisation thesis through an examination of the changing nature of work in Latin America and of women's incorporation into paid employment. We combine labour market segementation theory, which explains the emergence of low level occupations in terms of capitalist restructuring, with feminist theory, which explains why women become concentrated in inferior positions. We operationalise this reconceptualisation through an empirical analysis of women's and men's relative occupational position across economic sectors and through time in Ecuador. A key finding is that women's and men's occupations are differentiated in terms of control over economic resources and control over the labour process and that this worsens over time.     

Informating policy and administration a comparative perspective on terrorism

The cliche that ‘one man's terroirist is another man' freedom fighter’ represents the major dilemma of anti-terrorism policymakers and administrators. The conceptual confusion is further complicated by the ideological orientations and policy interests of the observers. The comparative study of terrorism, however, has provided a conceptual underpinning and does provide the tools for sorting out the biases. This article compares the six principal models of political terrorism and suggests that each in fact describes a distinct form of political violence depending upon the perspective of the observer. Each of the forms of terrorism, moreover, may require a unique set of remedies. Using the widely publicized TWA bijacking during the summer of 1985 as an example, the analysis examines the differences in the American, Israeli, and Lebanese government perspectives and how those differences influenced policymaking.     

How bad is the federal budget deficit?

This paper describes two views on the economic effects of government budget deficits. According to the traditional view, deficits have a variety of adverse economic consequences. In particular, they cause domestic residents to save less and eventually to have a lower standard of living than would have occurred if the same level of government spending had been financed entirely with current taxes. A competing view, known as the Ricardian view, holds that the economy is little affected by whether a given level of government spending is financed entirely by current taxes or by some feasible combination of taxes and borrowing. Most of the empirical research on the economic consequences of deficits has failed to isolate the effects predicted by the traditional view. The paper also discusses why the conventional methods of measuring the government budget deficit are not the most economically meaningful ones.     

Teaching public policy in a public administration program

An overlooked aspect of academic concern in public administration is the realm of public policy. Policy intrudes into administration at a number of crucial points; administration influences the direction and emphasis of policy in various ways. These interrelationships warrant more attention in the training of public administrators. Regrettably, they have remained largely off-limits in the training of public administrators. Why and how we should proceed to alter this state of affairs is the essence of the symposium that follows.     

Ethics and public policy: an analysis of a research tradition ∗

This article focuses on the relevent scholarly literature devoted to ethics and public policy. A literature search revealed an extensive body of research which lacked a coherent ordering. This article provides a model to understand a field of academic inquiry which has a rich tradition.