Book review: the housing debate by Stuart Lowe

The UK’s housing shortage and the negative effects this brings for renters, mortgage-payers and those in social housing is rarely out of the news, making Stuart Lowe’s account of the current situation a relevant introduction to the topic. Kerwin Datu would have valued more answers from Lowe on where we can go next, however

The Story of Safe2Tell

This publication highlights the Safe2Tell program, including the far-reaching impact of providing students in all Colorado schools an increased ability to both prevent and report violence by making anonymous calls to 1-877-542-SAFE. It also illustrates through stories and interviews the value of Safe2Tell among families and communities, necessary steps and resources to implement the program, and the hotline's long-term sustainability achieved through legislation

Is Retirement Depressing?: Labor Force Inactivity and Psychological Well-Being in Later Life

This paper assesses how retirement - defined as permanent labor force non-participation in a man's mature years - affects psychological welfare. The raw correlation between retirement and well-being is negative. But this does not imply causation. In particular, people with idiosyncratically low well-being, or people facing transitory shocks which adversely affect well-being might disproportionately select into retirement. Discontinuous retirement incentives in the Social Security System, and changes in laws affecting mandatory retirement and Social Security benefits allows the exogenous effect of retirement on happiness to be estimated. The paper finds that the direct effect of retirement on well-being is positive once the fact that retirement and well being are simultaneously determined is accounted for.

Active rc filter permits easy trade-off of amplifier gain and sensitivity to gain

Passive RC network was designed with zeros of transmission in the right half of the complex frequency plane in the feedback loop of a simple negative-gain amplifier. The proper positioning provides any desired trade-off between amplifier gain and sensitivity to amplifier gain

The Correlation of Welath Across Generations

This paper examines the similarity in wealth between parents and their children, and explores alternative explanations for this relationship. We find that the age-adjusted elasticity of child wealth with respect to parental wealth is 0.37, before the transfer of bequests. Lifetime income and ownership of particular assets, both of which exhibit strong intergeneration similarity, jointly explain nearly two-thirds of the wealth elasticity. Education, past parental transfers, and expected future bequests account for little of the remaining elasticity. Using new experimental evidence, we assess the importance of risk tolerance. The risk tolerance measures vary as theory would predict with the ownership of risky assets, and are highly correlated between parents and children. However, they explain little of the intergenerational correlation in the propensity to own different assets, suggesting that children's savings propensities are determined by mimicking their parents' behavior, or the inheritance of preferences not related to risk tolerance. Additionally, these risk tolerance measures explain only a small part of the remaining intergenerational wealth elasticity.

Gender Differences in Completed Schooling

This paper summarizes the dramatic changes in relative male-females educational attainment over the past three decades. Stock measures of education among the entire adult population show rising attainment levels for both men and women, with men enjoying an advantage in schooling levels throughout this interval. Cohort specific analysis reveals that these stock measures mask two interesting patterns: (a) gender difference at the cohort level had vanished by the early 1950 birth cohort and reversed sign ever since; (b) for several cohorts, attainment rates were flat for women and flat and falling for men. This last is puzzling in the face of the large college premia that these cohorts observed when making their schooling choices. We present a simple human capital model showing how the anticipated dispersion of future wages should affect educational investment and find that a model which includes measures of future earnings dispersion fits the data for relative schooling patterns quite well.