Seeking A Sustainable Journey to Work: Findings from the National Bridges to Work Demonstration

The Bridges to Work demonstration was designed to test whether efforts to help inner-city job seekers overcome barriers to accessing suburban jobs would result in better employment opportunities and earnings for these workers. This report examines outcomes for more than 1,800 applicants to Bridges to Work, half of whom were randomly selected to receive the programs transportation, job placement and supportive services for up to 18 months and half who were not offered these services. The researchers found that Bridges to Work did not positively impact participants employment and earnings, results that were consistent across cities and across various strategies for providing transportation services. Given the programs implementation challenges, costs and lack of results, the report concludes that the Bridges model is not a viable policy response to the mismatch between the location of jobs and the location of unemployed workers. However, the models lack of success does not diminish the importance of improving transportation options to increase workers access to employment, and the authors derive a number of important lessons from the demonstrations experience to inform future mobility efforts

A Promising Start: Year Up's Initial Impacts on Low-Income Young Adults' Careers

Year Up, a non-profit organization headquartered in Boston, was founded by a former software entrepreneur in 2000 to provide a year of training and work experience to urban young adults ages 18 to 24. It has been able to develop a network of program sites across the country without the constraints imposed by public funding. Initial results from a small-scale impact study conducted by Mobility demonstrate that Year Up students experience remarkable earnings gains after a year in the labor market, compared to a control group. These gains were achieved during one of the worst economic recessions in recent memory, a recession that hit young people particularly April 2011 A Promising Start Year Up's Initial Impacts on Low-Income Young Adults' Careers Anne Roder Mark Elliott economic mobility corporation 1 A Promising Start Year Up's Initial Impacts on Low-Income Young Adults' Careers hard. Also, the Year Up experience does not deter young people from pursuing further education—program participants are just as likely to enroll in postsecondary education as control group members

Renormalized Finite Temperature phi^4 theory from the 2PI Effective Action

We present an analytical and numerical study of scalar phi^4 theory at finite temperature with a renormalized 2-loop truncation of the 2PI effective action.Comment: 4 pages. Presented at International Conference on Strong and Electroweak Matter (SEWM 2006), Upton, New York, 10-13 May 200

REDUCING GHG EMISSIONS BY ABANDONING AGRICULTURAL LAND USE ON ORGANIC SOILS

6.5% of the German UAA is located on organic soils (fens and bogs). Nevertheless, the drainage of these areas in order to allow their agricultural utilization causes roughly a third of the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) of the German agricultural sector, being equivalent to 4% of the total German GHG emissions. Obviously, German policies trying to reduce the GHG emissions successfully must tackle this issue. The abandonment of the cultivation of organic soils would be an effective policy to reduce the GHG emissions however the question remains whether it is an efficient measure compared with the other options? In the paper we compare the land use on mineral and organic soils using the data of the farm structure survey. We assess the mitigation costs on the basis of the standard gross margin of the agriculturally used peatlands and with the sector model RAUMIS. Without engineering and transaction costs the mitigation costs are in the magnitude of 10 to 45 € per to of CO2eq.. This makes rewetting of peatlands at least in the medium and long run a fairly efficient options for reducing GHG emissions, especially as the implications on the sector are fairly small due to reallocation affects.Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Which parameters determine farm development in Germany?

In 2005, Germany implemented the Single Payment Scheme which lead to the conversion of direct payments into tradable, production decoupled, single farm payments. The transition from coupled to decoupled support instruments may impact the rate of structural change. The rate of structural change may accelerate since farms with a high share of income derived from CAP payments will abandon farming and lease their land. However, there are also good reasons why the rate of structural change might decrease especially if farmers do not behave as profit maximizers. In Germany agricultural land use is very heterogeneous with respect to management orientation and productivity even at local level. Most of the concerns related to structural change and development of land use intensity, e.g. abandonment of high nature value farmland, are only relevant in a very specific local context. Therefore, it is necessary to establish indicators for farm development on adisaggregated level. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we derive criteria and threshold values to classify regions according to their respective natural, socio economic conditions and land use. Second, we evaluate the stability of the link between a set of explanatory variables and the rate of structural change at different spatial scales. Our results indicate that only for a few variables a generally valid link between them and the rate of structural change can be established. For the majority of the explanatory variables, their respective impact on structural change depends heavily on the regional context.Structural change, Data mining, Fischler Reform, Agricultural and Food Policy, Q16, Q15, R14,

Salvage the treasure of geographic information in Farm census data

In Germany, since several decades the RAUMIS modelling system is applied for policy impact assessments to measure the impact of agriculture on the environment. A disaggregation at the municipality level with more than 9.600 administrative units, instead of currently used 316 counties, would tremendously improve the environmental impact analysis. Two sets of data are used for this purpose. The first are geo-referenced data, that are, however, incomplete with respect its coverage of production activities in agriculture. The second set is the micro census statistic itself, that has a full coverage, but data protection rules (DPR) prohibit its straightforward use. The paper show how this bottleneck can be passed to obtain a reliable modelling data set at municipality level with a complete coverage of the agricultural sector in Germany. We successfully applied a Bayesian estimator, that uses prior information derived a cluster analysis based on the micro census and GIS information. Our test statistics of the estimation, calculated by the statistical office, comparing our estimates and the real protected data, reveals that the proposed approach adequately estimates most activities and can be used to fed the municipality layer in the RAUMIS modelling system for an extended policy analysis.Highest Posterior Density estimator (HPD), RAUMIS, Down scaling, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, C11, C61, C81, Q15,

Mentoring School-Age Children: A Classification of Programs

The number of mentoring programs providing adult support to youth has increased dramatically in recent years. This report presents information on the characteristics of programs serving school-aged youth (K-12). We found that rather than simply replicating the traditional Big Brothers Big Sisters model, newer programs are emphasizing somewhat more instrumental goals and activities, as well as experimenting with different types of relationships (group, school-based, etc.). Most programs seem to have sufficient infrastructure to screen, train, and supervise their mentors adequately, but many de-emphasize the importance of developing long-term relationships

Targeting Industries, Training Workers and Improving Opportunities: The Final Report from the Sectoral Employment Initiative

Over the past 30 years, American workers have faced daunting challenges, including declines in real wages and dwindling upward mobility. Paths to advance within companies have deteriorated, leaving many low-skilled workers "stuck" indefinitely in low-wage jobs -- and swelling the ranks of the working poor. As opportunities for less-educated workers to access well-paying jobs grow scarce, it is clear that our nation requires new approaches to workforce development.In a departure from traditional strategies, some workforce organizations have begun to implement services and activities that focus on the needs of specific industry sectors. By identifying local sectors that lack workers -- which might range from health care to manufacturing to construction -- these organizations can help low-income workers acquire the specific skills they need to fill available positions. To explore the potential of this approach, P/PV launched the Sectoral Employment Initiative (SEI) in 1998, with support from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. This final report relies on data gathered during interviews with staff members at the SEI organizations and other key players in the targeted sectors, site visits, reviews of program documentation, and baseline and follow-up interviews with program participants focusing on a range of outcomes, including employment, earnings, education, housing and household income. The report presents key findings and explores some of the challenges sectoral programs encountered

Targeting Industries, Training Workers and Improving Opportunities: The Final Report from the Sectoral Employment Initiative Executive Summary

This executive summary provides a brief look at the key findings and challenges sectoral programs encountered while participating in the Sectoral Employment Initiative (SEI). By identifying local sectors that lack workers -- which might range from health care to manufacturing to construction -- these organizations were shown, in many cases, to help low-income workers acquire the specific skills they need to fill available positions