The racial wealth gap,financial aid,and college access

We examine how the racial wealth gap interacts with financial aid in American higher education to generate a disparate impact on college access and outcomes. Retirement savings and home equity are excluded from the formula used to estimate the amount a family can afford to pay. All else equal, omitting those assets mechanically increases the financial aid available to families that hold them. White families are more likely to own those assets and in larger amounts. We document this issue and explore its relationship with observed differences in college attendance, types of institutions attended, degrees attained, and education debt using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). We show that this treatment of assets provides an implicit subsidy worth thousands of dollars annually to students from families with above-median incomes. White students receive larger subsidies relative to Black students and Hispanic students with similar family incomes, and this gap in subsidies is associated with disadvantages in educational advancement and student loan levels. It may explain 10 percent to 15 percent of white students’ advantage in these outcomes relative to Black students and Hispanic students.     

False Profits: Why Product Counterfeiting is Increasing

Product counterfeiting has grown in scope, scale and complexity in the last two decades, and now affects many areas of manufacturing and retailing from clothes and CDs to items such as shampoo and vehicle components. Based on a wide range of interviews in the UK, this article argues that despite recent legislative change and increased criminal penalties for counterfeiters, enforcement is haphazard, resource problems often dictate that no criminal prosecution is undertaken, and actual penalties remain low. Moreover, questions of whether or not a particular item is counterfeit have become greatly complicated by the development of outsourcing and the rise of parallel trading. These points suggest that counterfeiting is likely to grow in the future.     

THE PROSPECT OF ESTABLISHING A TRUTH- TELLING AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION IN UGANDA

While eulogising former President Apollo Milton Obote, President Museveni argued that the time had come to look for ways to bring genuine reconciliation in the country. Since then, in the context of ending the conflict in northern Uganda, calls have been made for the government to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission （TRC） to heal not only the wounds occasioned by that conflict, but also those that have been inflicted in the whole country since independence. In this regard, specific recommendations have been made on the need to establish a TRC once and for all to deal with Uganda＇s past. However, the talk of reconciliation has been heard before. Former dictator Idi Amin instituted a commission in 1974 to look into the disappearance of people in the early years of his rule in 1974, but its recommendations were never implemented. When he took over in 1986, MusevenL in order to show that his government was different from those before, established a commission to look into violations of human rights from independence up to the day he took over. Very few recommendations of this commission were ever implemented. This paper argues that there is momentum to establish a TRC in Uganda, which should deal with the conflict not only in northern Uganda but rather should be national in outlook. This is because there are events that have occurred since independence in the country that need closure. Also, it is the contention of this paper that in order to be successful, any future TRC must learn from the experiences of past commissions.