Entrepreneurial Activities of Homeless Men

Encouraging and assisting homeless people to become self-employed provides a way for some of them to increase their incomes, and may help close the gap between the cost of housing and labor market earnings. A survey of operators of homeless shelters was conducted to determine the types of work activities that adult homeless men participate in. Self-employment was found to be a common activity for a substantial proportion of adult homeless men; and a preferred mode of employment for many. Advantages and disadvantages of such an approach are discussed. Several program models are described which can be used to enhance and initiate self-employment activity for adult homeless men

Self-Employment Training Programs for the Poor

 As a strategy to help law income people create their awn jobs, numerous training programs have been developed to assist the poor to start a small business. This effort is becoming widespread in both the U.S. and Europe. While there seems to be a consensus of what a self-employment training program should contain, the appropriateness of the typical program, for low income people with severe educational deficiencies, is questioned. A typology for differentiating self-employment training programs  is generated and their distribution is described from a survey of self-employment training programs for low income people  in the United  States.

Utilizing the Informal Economy: The Case of Chicago's Maxwell Street Market

The goal of the Mexican American Studies & Research Center's Working Paper Series is to disseminate recent research on the Mexican American experience. The Center welcomes papers from the social sciences, public policy fields, and the humanities. Areas of particular interest include economic and political participation of Mexican Americans, health, immigration, and education. The Mexican American Studies & Research Center assumes no responsibility for statements or opinions of contributors to its Working Paper Series

A theory of optimal random crackdowns

An incentives based theory of policing is developed which can explain the phenomenon of random “crackdowns,” i.e., intermittent periods of high interdiction/surveillance. For a variety of police objective functions, random crackdowns can be part of the optimal monitoring strategy. We demonstrate support for implications of the crackdown theory using traffic data gathered by the Belgian Police Department and use the model to estimate the deterrence effect/nof additional resources spent on speeding interdiction