Why the EITC Doesn’t Make Work Pay

Alstott offers an evaluation of the significance of the credit and, in a historical spirit, hark back to an earlier, critical perspective on the earned income tax credit (EITC)--a perspective rarely heard in recent years. She argues that these concerns remain apt, despite the expansion of the EITC and oft-repeated praise for its importance as an antipoverty program. Moreover, she highlights three features of U.S. law that constrain the effectiveness of the EITC in improving the wellbeing of low-income workers and their children: labor and employment laws that structure markets that produce low wages and harsh working conditions, laws that condition access to primary goods on market earnings, and a social safety net with gaps through which low-income workers often fall. Furthermore, she suggests the importance of reforms in the laws governing labor markets, consumption opportunities, and the social safety net

Security, Information, and Memory Determine Locomotor Exploration in Rattus Norvegicus

Since the 1930s, researchers have framed rat locomotion in a lit open field in terms of fear and anxiety. Modern studies have continued this interpretation, describing open field behavior in terms of security optimization. Since rats are a prey animal, such hypotheses certainly seem ecologically appropriate, and empirical research supports them. Rats placed in a new environment will spend most of their time next to walls or objects that provide some protection. However, the structure of rat movement in an open field cannot be predicted solely by fear reduction or ”security optimization.” The sex of the animal, the lighting conditions, and the temporal stability of the environment can all significantly affect the ambulation of rats in a novel or familiar environment devoid of food. Additionally, where the rats spend most of their time, their “home base,” is a function not just of a location’s relative security, but also of its familiarity. These results indicate that information gathering has a significant role in rodent exploration, which can supplement and potentially supersede evolutionary pressures to maximize security

Tax Policy and Feminism: Competing Goals and Institutional Choices

Despite the dramatic increase in women\u27s labor market participation in recent decades, women continue to perform a disproportionate share of family labor, or the unpaid work of caring for children and other family members. Feminists have long been concerned that the gendered division of family labor reduces women\u27s wages, contributes to the high and disproportionate rate of poverty among single mothers, limits married women\u27s autonomy within the marital household, and circumscribes women\u27s life choices and social and economic power

GENDER QUOTAS FOR CORPORATE BOARDS: OPTIONS FOR LEGAL DESIGN IN THE UNITED STATES

The gender gap in U.S. business leadership remains shockingly wide. Today, 57.6% of all bachelors\u27 and higher degrees are awarded to women, including 54.2% of social science and law degrees, and 43.5% of science and mathematics degrees. But, despite their academic prowess, women find their careers stalled before they reach top management. In 2012, women held 16.6% of seats on Fortune 500 boards. One-tenth of the Fortune 500 had no women at all on their boards. Recently, U.S. activists, scholars, and policy makers have turned their attention to one notable effort to address the gender gap in management: gender quotas for corporate boards of directors. Twelve European countries have pioneered quotas in this context

Ordinal numbers: Not superlatives, but modifiers of superlatives

The few existing accounts of the semantics of ordinal numbers attribute to them all or almost all of the semantic properties of superlatives. This work discusses a construction problematic for existing theories of ordinals: the ordinal superlative construction (e.g. Joel climbed the third highest mountain). Existing theories give ordinals and superlatives such similar semantics that they struggle to explain how an ordinal and a superlative could join together and form a complex modifier. As an alternative, I propose a semantics according to which ordinals are exceptive modifiers of superlatives. For example, the n-th highest mountain is the mountain that, with n - 1 exceptions, is the highest. When an ordinal does not co-occur with an overt superlative (e.g. the second train), I posit a covert superlative adjective that represents the contextual ordering. Not only does this approach account for the ordinal superlative construction, but it lends itself to a principled explanation of differences between ordinals and superlatives with respect to plurality

What Does a Fair Society Owe Children and Their Parents?

What role do-and should-parents play in a fair society, taking the term fair society in a Rawlsian sense? Over time, our society\u27s demands on parents have steeply increased, while the economic rewards of child-rearing have diminished. At one time, children were an emotional and economic bonus, providing workers for the farm or factory as well as security in old-age. For today\u27s parents, in contrast, child-rearing is a one-way obligation: parents spend time and money preparing their offspring for modern life, without expecting much other than love in return