Evaluating Pooled Evidence from the Reemployment Bonus Experiments

Social experiments conducted in Pennsylvania and Washington tested the effect of offering Unemployment Insurance (UI) claimants a cash bonus for rapid reemployment. This paper combines data from the two experiments and uses a consistent framework to evaluate the experiments and determine with greater certainty the extent to which a reemployment bonus can affect economic outcomes. Bonus offers in each of the experiments generated statistically significant but relatively modest reductions in UI receipt. Since the estimated impacts on UI receipt were modest, the reemployment bonuses did not generate the UI savings necessary to pay for administering and paying the bonuses. Hence, contrary to earlier findings from a bonus experiment conducted in Illinois, findings from the Pennsylvania and Washington experiments strongly suggest that a reemployment bonus is not a cost-effective method of speeding the reemployment of UI claimants.unemployment, insurance, bonus, experiments, O'Leary, Decker

Sounds Shifty: Gender and Age Differences in Perceptual Categorization During a Phonetic Change in Progress

This paper examines the perception of the low front vowel /ae/ which has been found to be more centralized by younger speakers of some varieties of Canadian English (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006, De Decker 2006). The results of an experiment are presented here revealing that centralized variants of /ae/ are categorized and evaluated differently by members of the same speech community. This suggests that vocalic drift is not merely a mechanical operation but a process mediated by variation in perceptual analysis. In the experiment, subjects listened to different pronunciations of the word sack. The second formant of the vowel was manipulated using Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2009) to produce a 19-step continuum of forms ranging between canonical sack and sock . 39 Subjects were asked to categorize each variant as sounding like “sack”, “sock or either sack or sock . Results reveal differences in categorization of vowel stimuli along the lines of gender and age. Male respondents were found to assign more of the continuum the label sock while female respondents heard a higher percentage of the continuum as sack. That is, when presented with the exact same continuum of forms, males exhibit a narrower range for the vowel /ae/ whereas females showed an extended tolerance for /æ/ further along the continuum. A similar result is found for age: younger speakers exhibited more centralized perceptual boundaries than older speakers. It is argued that these results are consistent with a view that considers phonetic changes like /ae/-retraction are facilitated via perceptual re-analysis. This model of sound change is contrasted with others like Ohala\u27s (1981, 1993) misperception theory which states that sound changes result from the under- or over-application of phonetic reconstruction rules

Contributions to the ecology of the Benthic macrofauna of the Bot River Estuary

This thesis forms part of a multi-disciplinary study of the Bot River estuary, situated between Kleinmond and Hawston on the southwest coast of the Cape Province, and falls within the framework of the investigation of all Cape estuaries, initiated by SANCOR and co-ordinated by the Estuarine and Coastal Research Unit of the CSIR. The motivation for the research program on the Bot River estuary, in particular, was the need to obtain detailed knowledge of its dynamics in order to be able to address its unique management problems