Detectives Stories and City Life

Detective stories take place mainly in two settings, constantly changing, many faceted big cities filled with strangers, and stable, fairly homogeneous, innocent small towns whose members know one another. The differences in each clarify the qualities of the other. In solving the mystery of the small town, the detective provides moral instruction and restores the town’s innocence. In solving the mystery in the big city the detective reveals the city as part of the mystery and provides the reader with temporary orientation to the city. Mysteries have grown with the growth of the cities and now appear in every country of the world. Harold J. Bershady is an emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book, edited with Renée Fox and Victor Lidz, is After Parson: A Theory of Action for the 21st Century, published by Russell Sage Press, 2005.     

The Revenue Impact of Repeated Tax Amnesties

Proponents argue that tax amnesties raise revenue both in the short and long run, by bringing former nonfilers back into the tax system. Opponents contend that amnesties produce little short‐run revenue and weaken incentives for long‐run tax compliance. However, over the last 21 years, 27 states offered tax amnesties for a second or third time. While previous research has estimated the impact of specific tax amnesties, none have estimated how the impact changes when offered repeatedly. We find that these additional tax amnesties generate less short‐run revenue than predecessors and tend to magnify revenue losses associated with disincentives for long‐run tax compliance.     

The impact of child support enforcement policy on nonmarital childbearing

The interaction of welfare and child support regulations has created a situation in which child support policy's incentives that discourage unwed fatherhood tend to be stronger than its incentives that encourage unwed motherhood. This suggests that more stringent child support enforcement creates incentives that reduce the likelihood of nonmarital childbearing, particularly among women with a significant chance of needing public assistance in the event of a nonmarital birth and their male partners. We investigate this hypothesis with a sample of women from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, to which we add information on state child support enforcement. We examine childbearing behavior between the ages of 15 and 44 before marriage and during periods of non‐marriage following divorce or widowhood. The estimates indicate that women living in states with more effective child support enforcement are less likely to bear children when unmarried, especially if they are young, never‐married, or black. The findings suggest that improved child support enforcement may be a potent intervention for reducing nonmarital childbearing. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

An Examination of Three Models of the Relationships between Parental Attachments and Adolescents’ Social Functioning and Depressive Symptoms

Three models of attachment relationships—the hierarchy model, the integrative model and the independent model—were compared in order to elucidate which best described the relationship between attachments to fathers versus mothers and its developmental consequences among 1,289 eighth grade students in Taiwan. These consequences included adolescents’ social support from family and friends, social expectations in peer interaction, self-worth, and depressive symptoms. The models can be summarized as follows: the hierarchy model assumes that paternal attachment is influenced by the level of maternal attachment; the integrative model assumes that the combined effects of secure attachments to mother and to father best predict the child’s development; and the independent model suggests that maternal and paternal attachments have differential influences on the child’s developmental outcomes. Our results indicate that the independent model best describes adolescents’ attachment relationships with parents and their subsequent developmental consequences. Moreover, gender differences were found in adolescent’s report of attachment to mother and father in relation with the outcome variables. Yih-Lan Liu is an associate professor at National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, R.O.C. She received her Ph.D degree 1996 from University of Texas at Austin, U.S.A. Her major research interests include parent-child interaction, attachment relationships, ego development and adolescent development and psychosocial adjustment.     

Feminism and the Flat Law Theory

This article examines two modalities of law, depicted spatially as the vertical and the horizontal. The intellectual background for seeing law in vertical and horizontal dimensions is to be found in much socio-legal scholarship. These approaches have challenged the modernist, legal positivist and essentially vertical view of law as a system of imperatives emanating from a hierarchically superior source such as a sovereign. In keeping with the socio-legal critical tradition, but approaching it from the perspective of legal philosophy, my aim is to address three matters. First, why is vertical law problematic for feminists? Second, what are the theoretical characteristics of law in its horizontal register? Third, how is an appreciation of this ‘flat’ law useful for feminist legal theory and practice? In particular, I consider the ways in which feminist legal theory operating in the horizontal dimension can transgress, without transcending, the vertically determined perimeters of the nation state.