Mandatory reporting: A study on the effect of universal mandated reporting

Scandals at Penn State and Syracuse University have the world talking about mandatory reporting. There no debate in the academic community concerning the detrimental effects of child maltreatment and neglect, but the debate concerning mandatory reporting is ongoing. This study looks at the effectiveness of universal mandatory reporting of child maltreatment versus the current statute of mandated reporting for only certain professions in the states of New York and Pennsylvania. When Pennsylvania changed its legislation to a universal mandatory reporting law, it experienced a great increase, of 500%, in the number of substantiated reports of child maltreatment. While this increase was substantial, because of the low rates of substantiated reports in Pennsylvania to begin with, this increase did not prove to be statistically significant. Also, negative outcomes such as unreasonable financial expenditure and possible negative side effects for children involved in unsubstantiated reports detract from the illustration of the effectiveness of universal mandatory reporting. However, this study demonstrates that a policy change concerning mandatory reporting could detect more cases of child maltreatment and help put a stop to child abuse

The Shimer puzzle and the identification of productivity shocks

Shimer (2005) argues that the Mortensen-Pissarides (MP) model of unemployment lacks an amplification mechanism because it generates less than 10 percent of the observed business cycle fluctuations in unemployment given labor productivity shocks of plausible magnitude. This paper argues that part of the problem lies with the identification of productivity shocks. Because of the endogeneity of measured labor productivity, filtering out the trend component as in Shimer (2005) may not correctly identify the shocks driving unemployment. Using a New-Keynesian framework to control for the endogeneity of productivity, this paper estimates that the MP model can account for a third, and possibly as much as 60 percent, of fluctuations in labor market variables.Labor market ; Unemployment ; Labor productivity

Particle dark matter searches in the anisotropic sky

Anisotropies in the electromagnetic emission produced by dark matter annihilation or decay in the extragalactic sky are a recent tool in the quest for a particle dark matter evidence. We review the formalism to compute the two-point angular power spectrum in the halo-model approach and discuss the features and the relative size of the various auto- and cross-correlation signals that can be envisaged for anisotropy studies. From the side of particle dark matter signals, we consider the full multi-wavelength spectrum, from the radio emission to X-ray and gamma-ray productions. We discuss the angular power spectra of the auto-correlation of each of these signals and of the cross-correlation between any pair of them. We then extend the search to comprise specific gravitational tracers of dark matter distribution in the Universe: weak-lensing cosmic shear, large-scale-structure matter distribution and CMB-lensing. We have shown that cross-correlating a multi-wavelength dark matter signal (which is a direct manifestation of its particle physics nature) with a gravitational tracer (which is a manifestation of the presence of large amounts of unseen matter in the Universe) may offer a promising tool to demonstrate that what we call dark matter is indeed formed by elementary particles.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures. Prepared as inaugural article for Frontiers in High-Energy and Astroparticle Physics. v2: few comments added, to appear in Frontiers (Hypothesis and Theory Article