General training by firms, apprentice contracts, and public policy

Workers will not pay for general on-the-job training if contracts are not enforceable. Firms may if there are mobility frictions. Private information about worker productivities, however, prevents workers who quit receiving their marginal products elsewhere. Their new employers then receive external benefits from their training. Training firms increase profits by offering apprenticeships committing them to high wages for trainees retained on completion. At those wages, only good workers are retained, which signals their productivity and reduces the external benefits if they subsequently quit. Regulation of apprenticeship length (a historically important feature) can enhance efficiency, as can appropriate subsidies.

Interest Groups and the Media in Post-Cold War U.S. Foreign Policy

How successful are interest groups in shaping American foreign policy? How successful are the media in affecting foreign affairs? During the cold war, the usual answer to both questions was not much. With the exception of some ethnic and economic groups under speciiic circumstances, most analysts would conclude that interest groups did not fare very well, and the media largely played a supportive role to official policy, at least until the Vietnam War.1 With the end of the cold war, however, are the answers to these questions likely to be the same? In this chapter, I discuss the access, involvement, and influence of these two nongovernmental actors in the foreign policy process after the cold war. In particular, I focus upon how and why the role of interest groups and the media in foreign policy have changed in recent years. In doing so, I shall explore several domestic and international factors that have increased interest group and media access to the foreign policy decision-making machinery, discuss how new and differing interest groups and media flourish in this changed environment, and analyze how more and more foreign policy decisions have moved away from the crisis to the structural and strategic varieties, a change that enhances the impact of interest groups and the media on the foreign policy process? Finally, and as others have done before, I take up the more difficult issue of relative influence of these actors in this new environment

Graduate Training and Research Productivity in the 1990s: A Look at Who Publishes

The relationship between reputational rankings of political science departments and their scholarly productivity remains a source of discussion and controversy. After the National Research Council (1995) published its ranking of 98 political science departments, Katz and Eagles (1996), Jackman and Siverson (1996), and Lowry and Silver (1996) analyzed the factors that seemingly influenced those rankings. Miller, Tien, and Peebler (1996) offered an alternate approach to ranking departments, based both upon the number of faculty (and their graduates) who published in the American Political Science Review and upon the number of citations that faculty members received. More recently, two studies have examined departmental rankings in other ways. Ballard and Mitchell (1998) assessed political science departments by evaluating the level of productivity in nine important disciplinary and subfield journals, and Garand and Graddy (1999) evaluated the impact of journal publications (and other variables) on the rankings of political science departments. In general, Miller, Tien, and Peebler found a high level of correspondence between reputation rankings and productivity, Ballard and Mitchell did not, and Garand and Graddy found that publications in “high impact” journals were important for departmental rankings