Advice to a New Child Services Leader

Offers advice to new leaders of child services agencies in the areas of leadership, administration, communication, and data. Discusses developing a strategy for change, building a management team, working with the media, and measuring workload

Mutual Fund Expense Disclosures: A Behavioral Perspective

Mutual funds have enjoyed phenomenal growth with their numbers exceeding the number of public companies and their assets aggregating in excess of $9 trillion. Increasingly they are the investment instrument of choice by the proverbial widows, widowers and orphans, and a few school teachers are included as well. But how are best can that choice be one that is not only informed but informed in a way more likely to elicit a wise decision? This paper examines from a behavioral perspective how regulation can best disclose information related to two key factors for investors to compare competing mutual funds: fund returns and fund expenses. Our analysis reflects that the current disclosure process is deficient because it fails to reflect the insights of research on judgment and decision making, and particularly the need to distinguish between the availability of information and its processability by its user. The message of our article is straightforward: if regulators adhered to the insights provided by our paper, not only investors, but also the fund\u27s directors, would be greatly empowered so that better returns and lower costs could be expected

Griggs and Corrothers: Historical Reality and Black Fiction

Sutton E. Griggs\u27s Imperium in Imperio and James D. Corrothers\u27s A Man They Didn\u27t Know are two early Afroamerican fictions which suggest a black alliance with foreign powers in the face of unrelenting racial injustice at home.1 Imperium in Imperio, published in 1899, has been described as the first political novel by a black American;2 and A Man They Didn\u27t Know, appearing in 1913, is probably the first Afroamerican fiction to suggest a specific alliance between American blacks, groups in Mexico, and the Japanese. Sutton E. Griggs is currently undergoing rediscovery, and Imperium in Imperio is by now well known to students of Afroamerican literature, if not to students of American literature in general. However, aspects of the historical context of Imperium in Imperio have been overlooked by literary scholars at significant cost to a complete appreciation of what Griggs is doing in the novel. Corrothers\u27s A Man They Didn\u27t Know has been overlooked in all respects. This highly interesting fictional work, comparable in important respects to Griggs\u27s novel, needs to be brought to the attention of students of American culture of various disciplines, and, like Imperium in Imperio, to be fully understood, it must be read in its historical context

Government Grants to Private Charities: Do They Crowd-Out Giving or Fundraising?

When the government makes a grant to a private charitable organization, does it displace private giving? This is one of the fundamental policy questions in public finance, and much theoretical and empirical research has been devoted to understanding the relationship between private donations and government funding. Under the classic crowding-out hypothesis, donors let their involuntary tax contributions and substitute for their voluntary contributions. This paper raises the prospect of a second reason: that the stretegic response of the charity will be to pull back on its fundraising efforts after receiving a grant. We develop a theoretical model to show a charity that chooses its level of fundraising efforts strategically will reduce fundraising in response to government grants. We then analyze data on tax returns of 474 social services organizations and 245 arts organizations between 1982 and 1996. These two types of charitable organizations differ in both the nature of the services they provide and in their reliance on private donations and government grants. We find evidence that government grants to nonprofits are causing significant reductions in fundraising efforts, after looking at different types of fundraising activities. This finding is important for two reasons. First, it means that the behavior of the nonprofit organizations is consistent with the predictions of an economic model within a strategic environment. Second, it adds an important new dimension to the policy discussions on the effectiveness of government grants to increase the services of charitable nonprofit organizations. Charities are not passive receptables of contributions, as they have so often been treated in the past, but are active players in the market for donations. When the government gives a grant to charities, we shoul take into account the behavioral response of the charity itself, as well as the behavioral responses of the individual donors.nonprofit organizations, fundraising, crowd-out, private donations, government grants

Carbon dioxide emissions intensity convergence: Evidence from central American countries

This paper extends the literature on the convergence of carbon dioxide emissions intensity and its determinants (energy intensity and the carbonization index) for six Central American countries over the period 1971 to 2014. Using the Phillips-Sul club convergence approach, the results indicate two distinct convergence clubs with respect to carbon dioxide emissions intensity and energy intensity with the first convergence club consisting of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras and the second convergence club consisting of Nicaragua and Panama. However, in the case of the carbonization index, only one convergence club emerges that includes Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua with Panama exhibiting non-convergent behavior.N/

Credit rating changes’ impact on banks: evidence from the US banking industry

This study examines the impact of credit rating upgrades and downgrades on six comprehensive banks’ asset classes, profitability, leverage and size using data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s call reports and Bloomberg over the period 1989-2008. In summary, the results suggest that a downgrade has a lasting and relatively more severe impact on banks than an upgrade; however, downgraded banks do not seem to effectively reduce their appetite for risk over a longer horizon. It seems that the role of credit rating agencies as an integral part of banks’ prudential supervision through market discipline is, in a longer horizon, overstated.Credit rating changes; banks; market discipline

Physical Transport and Chemical Behavior of Dispersed Oil

During response operations, scientific information is provided to decision makers, such as the Federal On-Scene Coordinator (FOSC), state and federal trustees, and the public. The decision to use chemical dispersants during a response is made among all these parties, and during the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill the dispersant discussion included both surface and subsurface application of chemical dispersants. This paper is intended to provide perspective on research needs considered pre- and post-DWH oil spill related to response modeling and data collection needs for decision support of dispersant application and its potential effects. Given time constraints for implementing models and sampling strategies for response, requirements for data and types of questions to be addressed may be significantly different than requirements for research or damage assessment activities. At the time of this writing, just over a year after the successful response operations to cap the well, many studies are still in progress, and data are still being collected and evaluated to assess dispersant effectiveness and possible impacts. More information and research results will become available over the next months to years. Thus these research needs, as summarized for this workshop, should be evaluated again at a later time

A varactor-tuned RF coil for nuclear quadrupole double resonance with Fast Field-Cycling MRI

Non peer reviewedPublisher PD

Random Walks and Market Efficiency: Evidence from International Real Estate Markets

This study performs tests of the random walk hypothesis for international commercial real estate markets utilizing stock market indices of real estate share prices for three geographical regions: Europe, Asia and North America. The augmented Dickey-Fuller and Phillips-Perron unit root tests and Cochrane variance ratio test find that each of these markets (as well as associated broader stock markets) exhibits random walk behavior. Moreover, a non-parametric runs test provides support for weak-form market efficiency in the real estate markets. In addition, Johansen-Juselius co-integration analysis reveals that all three markets appear co-integrated and share a common long-run stochastic trend. Results of co-integration analyses and vector error correction models suggest that diversification benefits through international real estate securities can only be achieved in the short run.