The Impact of After-School Programs: Interpreting the Results of Four Recent Evaluations

Within the last decade, after-school programs have moved from the periphery to the center of the national education policy debate. The demand for after-school care by working parents and a new focus on test-based accountability are the two primary reasons. Reflecting these pressures, federal funding for after-school programs has grown dramatically over the last half-decade. Between 1998 and 2002, federal funding for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program grew from $40 million to$1 billion. State and local governments have also increased their funding, with California committing itself to a six- fold increase in funding for after-school programs over the next few years.As a wave of evaluation results has recently become available, policymakers are understandably eager to see evidence that these investments are paying off. The purpose of this review is to summarize the results of four recent evaluations, to draw the lessons we have learned so far, and to identify the unanswered questions

Regulatory Structure in Futures Markets: Jurisdictional Competition Among the SEC, the CFTC, and Other Agencies

This paper studies competition among alternative regulatory bodies for authority over innovative financial contracts. In the United States, this rivalry embraces not only the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, but state and federal deposit-institution regulators and various private regulatory cooperatives. From a political perspective, multipleregulators develop as a way of formally providing ongoing protection for the interests of diverse political constituencies. But from an economic perspective,competition resulting from overlaps in regulatory responsibility establishes an evolutionary mechanism for adapting regulatory structures to technological and regulation-induced innovation. Using both perspectives, this paper explains how interaction between governmental regulatory agencies and self-regulatory cooperatives produces more-efficient regulatory structures over time.The study also seeks to catalog the particular costs and benefits that may be associated with the regulatory tools used to control futures and securities markets(e.g., broker and trader registration, disclosure requirements, margin requirements,and contract-approval processes) and with changes in the distribution of jurisdiction over these tools. The analysis seeks to clarify the tradeoff between the perceived probability of various problems of market performance (e.g., contract nonperformance, widespread financial instability, and activities such as price manipulation by which corrupt or sophisticated operators separate naive investors from their wealth) and the implicit and explicit cost of reducing this probability.

Thermal barrier pressure seal

An apparatus is described for providing thermal and pressure sealing in an elongated space of varying width between adjacent surface of two members. The apparatus is mounted for at least limited lateral movement between the members and may comprise: an elongated support attached to one of the adjacent surfaces; a second elongated support member attached to the other of the adjacent surfaces, and an elongated seal member sandwiched between the first and second support members. In its non-deformed state, the elongated seal member may be substantially cylindrical but capable of deformation to accommodate limited lateral movement between the adjacent surfaces and varying widths of the space

Nested Tests of Alternative Term-Structure Theories

Controversies in term-structure theory center around the existence and variability of term premia in securities yields. In this paper, the term premium on a default-free n-period bond is defined as the difference between its observable yield to maturity and the average expected per-annum rate of return on an n-period strip of rollover investments in one-period bonds. To test alternative term-structure theories without introducing ex post proxies for expectational variables, this paper uses a set of cross-section interest-rate forecasts collected jointly with Burton Malkiel of Princeton University from a population of large institutional lenders at four different phases of a single interest-rate cycle. Statistical tests strongly confirm the existence of nonzero term premia at each survey date, thereby rejecting the pure-expectations theory of the term structure. Additional tests are unable to reject restrictions implied by the liquidity-premium hypothesis that term premia should be positive and increase with maturity. Finally, contrary to the martingale hypothesis, ex ante term-premium data vary significantly overtime and show a positive association with the level of interest rates.

Stopping Information Asymmetries in Government from Promoting Risk Shifting by Banks

Bank managers are said to shift risks when the downside of the profit opportunities that the bank pursues is absorbed in nontransparent fashion by the bank's creditors and guarantors. Risk shifting is facilitated by information asymmetries that tempt government officials to show creditors and taxpayers about how effectively government bureaus are controlling bank risk. The growing sophistication of financial products and financial institutions' net risk-taking positions demands a regulatory regime that—like Pinocchio's nose—can create and enforce incentives for transparency and truth-telling about the nature and value of taxpayers' implicit stake in regulated financial institutions. This paper was presented at the Financial Institutions Center's October 1996 conference on "

Deregulation, Savings and Loan Diversification, and the Flow of Housing Finance

This paper assesses the probable impact on S&Ls' profitability and participation in mortgage markets of The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. It tracks inflation-induced secular declines in the value of S&L mortgage holdings between 1965 and 1979 and argues(contrary to conventional wisdom) that deposit-rate ceilings proved no more than a minor and temporary source of help to S&Ls. Analysis presented shows that Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation guarantees, not deposit-rate ceilings, kept the industry afloat in recent years. Further analysis centers on federal and state restrictions on S&L loan opportunities and on mortgage lenders' ability to design and to price mortgage instruments for an environment marked by accelerating inflation and increasing inflation uncertainty. Since S&Ls were free to raise whatever amount of funds they wished through large certificates of deposit, restrictions on S&L lending opportunities had to lie responsible for the much-publicized bouts of disintermediation these institutions suffered near post-1965 business-cycle peaks.

Accelerating Inflation and the Distribution of Household Savings Incentives

This study describes how accelerating inflation has led households indifferent economic and demographic classes to reallocate their "transactable savings." Cross-section data from the 1962 and 1970 Surveys of Consumer Finances are used to estimate both the composition of accumulated households having and prospective rates of return on this saving. The paper shows that accelerating inflation has, in thee presence of comprehensive ceilings on deposit interest rates, altered the savings incentives of different types of households. The effect has been to bias small savers toward leveraged investments in tangible assets (especially real estate) and large savers toward certificates of deposit and marketable bonds. Small savers with disadvantaged access to credit are simply victimized. Our analysis helps to explain a number of anomalous features of the 1975-1979 macroeconomic recovery, particularly the dominant role of consumer spending, the unprecedented expansion of household debt, the boom in housing, and declining flows of household savings into deposit institutions. These data underscore the unintended consequences of trying to reconcile deposit-rate. ceilings with accelerating inflation. This combination of policies unpleasantly distorts the sectoral composition of spending and risk-bearing (crowding out some productive business investment) and aggravates inequities in the distribution of income and opportunity.

Charles Kindleberger

Minimalist economists stubbornly resist Charles Kindleberger's characterization of investor expectations in a financial bubble as "irrational." This paper seeks to resolve the controversy by imbedding Kindleberger's well-researched, impressionistic theory of financial crises into an expanded, but still-minimalist model of rational expectations. Introducing the concepts of malicious disinformation and rational overpromotion creates an informational environment in which it is time-consuming and costly to distinguish fact from fiction. Rationality still requires that expectations and market fundamentals move together over long periods of time, but dishonorable overpromoters can earn substantial profits in the interim.

Inadequacy of Nation-Based and VaR-Based Safety Nets in the European Union

Considered as a social contract, a financial safety net imposes duties and confers rights on different sectors of the economy. Within a nation, elements of incompleteness inherent in this contract generate principal-agent conflicts that are mitigated by formal agreements, norms, laws, and the principle of democratic accountability. Across nations, additional gaps emerge that are hard to bridge. This paper shows that nationalistic biases and leeway in principles used to measure value-at-risk and bank capital make it unlikely that the crisis-prevention and crisis-resolution schemes incorporated in Basel II and EU Directives could allocate losses imbedded in troubled institutions efficiently or fairly across member nations.

Rising Public College Tuition and College Entry: How Well Do Public Subsidies Promote Access to College?

Though economists have spent the past decade analyzing the rising payoff to schooling, we know much less about the responses of youth or the effectiveness of policies aimed at influencing those decisions. States and the federal government currently spend more than $53 billion annually, hoping to promote greater access to college. This paper evaluates the price sensitivity of youth, using several sources of non-experimental variation in costs. The bulk of the evidence points to large enrollment impacts, particularly for low-income students and for those attending two-year colleges. The states have chosen to promote college enrollment by keeping tuition low through across-the-board subsidies rather than using more targeted, means-tested aid. As public enrollments increase, this has become an expensive strategy. Means-tested aid may be better targeted. However, the evidence of enrollment responses to such targeted aid is much weaker. After a federal means-tested grant program was established in 1973, there was no disproportionate increase in enrollment by low-income youth. Given the number of public dollars at stake, the two sets of results should be reconciled.