A Public Voice for Youth: The Audience Problem in Digital Media and Civic Education

Part of the Volume on Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth.Students should have opportunities to create digital media in schools. This is a promising way to enhance their "civic engagement," which comprises political activism, deliberation, problem-solving, and participation in shaping a culture. All these forms of civic engagement require the effective use of a "public voice," which should be taught as part of digital media education. To provide digital media courses that teach civic engagement will mean overcoming several challenges, including a lack of time, funding, and training. An additional problem is especially relevant to the question of public voice. Students must find appropriate audiences for their work in a crowded media environment dominated by commercial products. The chapter concludes with strategies for building audiences, the most difficult but promising of which is to turn adolescents' offline communities -- especially high schools -- into more genuine communities

Happiness Inertia: Analytical Aspects of the Easterlin Paradox

Using a New-Keynesian flexi-price model with external habit formation in consumption and labor supply, we identify the channels underlying the Easterlin Paradox (or “Happiness Inertia”, its generalization). These include whether external habit formation is in “difference” or “ratio” form; the growth and convexity characteristics of non-pecuniary effects; and the nature of risk aversion. We show that the impact of labor habit formation on welfare can (unlike consumption) be positive or negative. The form of habit formation (rather than habit per se) is a key determinant of whether welfare functions reproduce happiness inertia; only when habit is modelled in ratio form, does this possibility open up. The model thus bridges the gap between theoretical models and social policy, pecuniary and non-pecuniary motives.Efficiency wage; Unemployment; Regional growth.

Robust Inflation-Targeting Rules and the Gains from International Policy Coordination

This paper empirically assesses the performance of interest-rate monetary rules for interdependent economies characterized by model uncertainty. We set out a two-bloc dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with habit persistence (that generates output persistence), Calvo pricing and wage-setting with indexing of non-optimized prices and wages (generating inflation persistence), incomplete financial markets and the incomplete pass-through of exchange rate changes. We estimate a linearized form of the model by Bayesian maximum-likelihood methods using US and Euro-zone data. From the estimates of the posterior distributions we then examine monetary policy conducted both independently and cooperatively by the Fed and the ECB in the form of robust inflation-targeting interest-rate rules. Comparing the utility outcome in a closed-loop Nash equilibrium with the outcome from a coordinated design of policy rules, we find a new result: the gains from monetary policy coordination rise significantly when CPI inflation targeting interest-rate rules are designed to account for model uncertainty.monetary policy coordination, robustness, inflation-targeting interest-rate rules.

Getting Narrower at the Base: The American Curriculum After NCLB

Examines curriculum changes in elementary, middle, and high schools since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was enacted, requiring regular testing in reading and math. Analyzes shifts in time allocations to four subjects, contributing factors, and implications

Changes in Managerial Pay Structures 1986-1992 and Rising Returns to Skill

We examine the relationship between wages and skill requirements in a sample of over 50,000 managers in 39 companies between 1986 and 1992. The data include an unusually good measure of job requirements and skills that can proxy for human capital. We find that wage inequality increased both within and between firms from 1986 and 1992. Higher returns to our measure of skill accounts for most of the increasing inequality within firms. At the same time, our measure of skill does not explain much of the cross-sectional variance in average wages between employers, and changes in returns to skill do not explain any of the time series increase in between-firm variance over time. Finally, we find only weak evidence of any declines in the rigidity of internal wage structures of large employers.

Media Literacy for the 21st Century. A Response to The Need for Media Education in Democratic Education

We cannot pretend to educate young people for citizenship and political participation without teaching them to understand and use the new media, which are essential means of expressing ideas, forming public opinions, and building institutions and movements. But the challenge of media literacy education is serious. Students need advanced and constantly changing skills to be effective online. They must understand the relationship between the new media and social and political institutions, a topic that is little understood by even the most advanced social theorists. And they must develop motivations to use digital media for civic purposes, when no major institutions have incentives to motivate them. Until we address those challenges, students will struggle to make sense of the new media environment, let alone take constructive action

Quantifying and sustaining welfare gains from monetary commitment

The objectives of this paper are: first, to quantify the stabilization welfare gains from commitment; second, to examine how commitment to an optimal rule can be sustained as an equilibrium and third, to find a simple interest rate rule that closely approximates the optimal commitment one. We utilize an influential empirical micro-founded DSGE model, the euro area model of Smets and Wouters (2003), and a quadratic approximation of the representative household’s utility as the welfare criterion. Importantly, we impose the effect of a nominal interest rate zero lower bound. In contrast with previous studies, we find significant stabilization gains from commitment: our central estimate is a 0.4 - 0.5% equivalent permanent increase in consumption, but in a variant with a higher degree of price stickiness, gains of over 2% are found. We also find that a simple optimized commitment rule with the nominal interest rate responding to current inflation and the real wage closely mimics the optimal rule. JEL Classification: E52, E37, E58commitment, discretion, Monetary rules, welfare gains