Soft budgets and hard rents: a note on Kornai and Gomulka

This note shows how Kornai's concept of the soft budget constraint can be decomposed into separate elements of technical inefficiency and relative price distortion. The distinction between r-budget softness and m-budget softness introduced by Gomulka is shown to correspond to the equivalent and compensating variation measures of efficiency loss. It is also argued that budget softness should be viewed as the outcome of a rent-seeking process in which a firm's action in the control sphere incurs an opportunity cost in the real sphere. Adopting such a perspective leads to a re-definition of the resource loss associated with budget softness and results in much higher estimates of the social costs of soft budgets than those proposed in the existing literature.     

Making Tradeoffs in Federal Block Grant Programs: Understanding the Interplay Between SSBG and TANF

Welfare reform gave states the option of transferring up to10 percent of their annual federal Temporary Assistance forNeedy Families (TANF) award to the Social Services Block Grant(SSBG). Drawing on administrative data, we consider the impactof TANF transfers on SSBG. We find evidence suggesting thatmore innovative states, states that experienced larger TANFcaseload declines, and states that transferred a higher percentageof TANF funds to the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) havetransferred higher portions of their TANF allocations to SSBG,all else equal. Preliminary analysis of changes in SSBG expenditurepatterns from FY 1995 to FY 2000 indicates that states are transferringsignificant sums to SSBG, but that TANF transfers do not appearto have a consistent effect on SSBG spending priorities acrossstates.     

State Courts, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Protection of Civil Liberties

Advocates of federalism, both in the United States and elsewhere, often cite the potential for enhanced protection of individual civil liberties as an emerging rationale for a federal system dividing governmental responsibilities between central and regional governments and central and regional judiciaries. Echoing this, some judicial officials and scholars, confronting an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, have called for state supreme courts to use the state constitutional grounds to preserve and increase the protections of the Bill of Rights. Using event count analysis, we examine state search-and-seizure cases for 1981 to 1993 to ascertain under what circumstances state courts would use this opportunity to eliminate Supreme Court review. We find that the relative ideological position of the state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court often prevents, or does away with the need for, liberal courts to use the adequate and independent state grounds doctrine to expand the rights of criminal defendants and that state supreme court justices react more predictably in the assertion of constitutional protection law than the general consensus suggests.     

Evaluating Public Sector R&D Programs: The Advanced Technology Program's Investment in Wavelength References for Optical Fiber Communications

Griliches (1958) [Journal of Political Economy,66: 419--431] and Mansfield et al. (1977) [Quarterly Journal of Economics 91: 221--240] pioneered the application of fundamental economic insight to the development of measurements of private and social rates of return to innovative investments. This paper illustrates field-based methods for measuring the social rates of return to innovative investments by the public sector. The case study described herein relates to the development of an improved standard reference material for the measurement of the wavelength of light in an optical fiber network.     

The marriage license as a hitting license: A comparison of assaults in dating,cohabiting, and married couples

There are many studies of marital and dating violence. However, methodological differences between these studies make it difficult to determine differences in the nature and extent of physical assault between marital status groups. This paper helps fill that gap by analyzing data from two surveys: a study of 526 dating couples at a large midwestern university, and a study of a national probability sample of 5005 married and 237 cohabiting couples. The results show that cohabiting couples have a higher rate of assault than dating and married couples. These findings persist after controls for age, education, and occupational status are introduced. Violence is also more severe in cohabiting than dating or married couples. A number of factors may account for the more frequent violence in cohabiting relationships. These include social isolation, the issue of autonomy and control, and the investment in the relationship.     

Fertility,family planning,and development: Indirect influences

This paper focuses on the indirect influences on changing fertility and on the direct and indirect influences on family planning effort. Complete data on the variables under consideration were gathered from a variety of sources for 65 developing countries. The results here should be generalized only to high fertility, high mortality, low education, and low per capita gross national product nations. 1) Some social variables, like education, are more important than others for explaining fertility and family planning effort. The treatment of social setting as a single variable obscures the importance of lower level education (literacy, primary, and secondary school enrollment) for fertility and family planning. 2) Ignoring the indirect influences on fertility may lead us to understimate the importance of some variables on fertility, and perhaps to overestimate the importance of others. When both direct and indirect effects (the latter through family planning effort) are examined, the impact of education increases to nearly equal that of family planning effort in 3 of the 4 models developed here. 3) Program effort can be explained at least as well with a single variable (literacy or female school enrollment) as with the composite variable "social setting." 4) In addition to its importance in explaining fertility, education may also be important in explaining mortality. 5) It appears that the absolute and relative status of women may be an important variable which has not yet been adequately measured. Overall, the results of this study lend additional support to the position that, in addition to family planning effort, education may play a more crucial role than is obvious in fertility reduction in developing countries.