Nurturing California's Next Generation Arts and Cultural Leaders

Leaders in the nonprofit arts world, many of them founders and builders of their organizations for decades, will be retiring in unprecedented numbers in the coming years. Organizations could become weaker and destabilized during this transition, a prospect that should be addressed with some urgency. Younger professionals should be able to take on these leadership roles and chart a new course in stressful and changing times. Yet an operational divide between the workplace needs and values of Next Geners and those currently in charge threatens this transition. It does not help that the nonprofit arts field suffers from a paucity of training and professional degree-granting programs, low pay, long work hours, and inadequate career advancement opportunities. The generation that sparked a powerful nonprofit arts movement more than thirty years ago now wonders about their successors: Are they motivated? Prepared? How can we recruit, train, nurture, and retain them?This study was commissioned by the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) as part of a large-scale Next Generation Arts Leadership Initiative funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation that aspires to strengthen and retain a new generation of administrative talent in California's nonprofit arts field. It addresses nonprofit arts leaders' desire to know more about their younger colleagues and their experiences as professionals, board members, and volunteers. To explore the experience of Next Geners, the author developed a survey conducted in the summer of 2010. In this report, Next Gen arts leaders are defined as individuals between the ages of 18 and 35 years who are currently working with a California nonprofit arts organization as administrators, artists or board members and who have worked in the field for less than ten consecutive years. More than 1,300 California Next Geners took the survey and with modest exceptions (under-representation of Latinos, African and Asian-Americans, and men, non-metropolitan regions, and certain art forms), their workplaces are generally representative of the size of and variation within the nonprofit arts sector in the state. For example, some 23% of our Next Gen respondents work for organizations with budgets under $100,000, while 22$2 million

Modeling the Offshoring of White-Collar Services: From Comparative Advantage to the New Theories of Trade and FDI

Trade theory consists of a portfolio of models. What elements might be useful in modeling the offshoring of white-collar services, or do these issues call for an entirely fresh approach? I try to identifying some of the important aspects of this phenomenon and then argue that modeling could focus on (a) vertical fragmentation of production, (b) expansion of trade at the extensive margin, (c) fragments that differ in factor intensities and countries that differ in endowments, and (d) knowledge or capital stocks of countries or firms that are complementary to skilled labor, and create missing inputs for countries otherwise well suited to skill-intensive fragments. I argue that we can make good progress by selecting a number of "modules" from existing theory. I use these to formulate a series of simple "template" models which capture many of the characteristics of offshoring, and then use those models to identify the effects of technological or institutional changes which allow offshoring of white-collar services to occur.

Native Artists: Livelihoods, Resources, Space, Gifts

Examines the experiences of Ojibwe artists in Minnesota, including access to training, funding, space, paying markets, and institutional support; discrimination and isolation; and relationships with communities. Profiles artists and makes recommendations

A Multi-Country Approach to Factor Proporations Trade and Trade Costs

Classic trade questions are reconsidered by generalizing a factor-proportions model to multiple countries, multi-stage production, and country-specific trade costs. We derive patterns of production specialization and trade for a matrix of countries that differ in relative endowments (columns) and trade costs (rows). We demonstrate how the ability to fragment production and/or a proportional change in all countries’ trade costs alters these patterns. Production specialization and the volume of trade are higher with fragmentation for most countries but interestingly, for a large block of countries, these variables fall following fragmentation. Countries with moderate trade costs engage in market-oriented assembly, while those with lower trade costs engage in export-platform production. These two cases correspond to the concepts of horizontal and vertical affiliate production in the literature on multinational enterprises. Increases in specialization and the volume of trade accelerate as trade costs go to zero with and without fragmentation. Classification-

Heater Control for Thermionic Power Generation

The purpose of this report is to detail the conceptualization, analysis, budget, manufacturing, and assembly the heater for a thermionic energy converter for portable energy generation. This proof of concept will be created to provide a full thermionic energy converter with a reliable and satisfactory heater than can be used in future systems. The report highlights the feasibility and realities in the design and fabrication of the system

Learning on the quick and cheap: Gains from trade through imported expertise

Gains from productivity and knowledge transmission arising from the presence of foreign firms has received a good deal of empirical attention, but micro-foundations for this mechanism are weak . Here we focus on production by foreign experts who may train domestic unskilled workers who work with them. Gains from training can in turn be decomposed into two types: (a) obtaining knowledge and skills at a lower cost than if they are self-taught at home, (b) producing domestic skilled workers earlier in time than if they the domestic economy had to rediscover the relevant knowledge through “reinventing the wheel”. We develop a three-period model in which the economy initially has no skilled workers. Workers can withdraw from the labor force for two periods of self study and then produce as skilled workers in the third period. Alternatively, foreign experts can be hired in period 1 and domestic unskilled labor working with the experts become skilled in the second period. We analyze how production, training, and welfare depend on two important parameters: the cost of foreign experts and the learning (or “absorptive”) capacity of the domestic economy. Classification-

Standards and Related Regulations in International Trade: A Modeling Approach

Standards and technical regulations which govern the admissibility of imported goods into an economy raise costs of exporters entering new markets, and may have a particularly high impact on firms seeking to export from developing countries. Yet standards may also have a positive side, such as certifying product quality and safety for the consumer. This paper suggests approaches to modeling standards and technical regulations, with a particular concern that these approaches are at least potentially implementable in an applied general-equilibrium model with real data.

Teaching Locals New Tricks: Foreign Experts as a Channel of Knowledge Transfers

Gains from productivity and knowledge transmission arising from the presence of foreign firms have received a good deal of empirical attention, but theoretical micro-foundations for this mechanism are limited. Here we develop a dynamic model in which foreign experts may train domestic workers who work with them. Gains from training can in turn be decomposed into two types: (a) obtaining knowledge and skills at a lower cost than if they were self-learnt at home, (b) producing domestic skilled workers earlier in time than if the domestic economy had to rediscover the relevant knowledge through "reinventing the wheel." We use fixed effects and nearest neighbour matching estimators on a panel of plant-level data for Colombia that identifies the use of foreign experts, to show that these experts have substantial, although not always immediate, positive effects on the wages of domestic workers and on the value added per worker.

Trade in Business Services in General Equilibrium

Trade in business services has been attracting attention from academic researchers, policy makers, and business journalists. While there are many anecdotes, there has been little in the way of formal theory applied to this issue. In this paper, we adapt a general model of fragmentation of production activities to try to capture the specific features of business services. Following a general discussion, we calibrate a numerical general-equilibrium simulation model to a situation in which both trade and foreign investment in services are initially banned to technically infeasible. We then compute three counter-factual scenarios: one in which trade but not investment in services is feasible or allowed, one in which investment but not trade is allowed, and onein which both trade and investment in services are allowed.

Learning on the Cheap and Quick: Gains from trade through imported expertise

Gains from knowledge transmission arising from the presence of foreign firms has received a good deal of empirical attention, but micro-foundations for this mechanism are weak . Here we focus on production by foreign experts who may train domestic unskilled workers who work with them. Gains from training can in turn be decomposed into two types: (a) obtaining knowledge and skills at a lower cost than if they are self-taught at home, (b) producing domestic skilled workers earlier in time than if they the domestic economy had to rediscover the relevant knowledge through “reinventing the wheel”. We develop a three-period model in which the economy initially has no skilled workers. Workers can withdraw from the labor force for two periods of self study and then produce as skilled workers in the third period. Alternatively, foreign experts can be hired in period 1 and domestic unskilled labor working with the experts become skilled in the second period. We analyze how production, training, and welfare depend on two important parameters: the cost of foreign experts and the learning (or “absorptive”) capacity of the domestic economy.