Beyond Change-Overcoming the Barriers to Small Rural Church Revitalization

Many of the rural churches of the Free Methodist Denomination in the Northeast region of the United States have experienced substantial stagnation and/or decline of their attendance rates over the past five years. This begs the questions, What is preventing these churches from being revitalized so they too can be used as vessels to grow the Kingdom of God? Though many obstructions to kingdom growth1 exist, this study focuses on the following five barriers: resistance to change, under-utilization of spiritual gifts, relational dysfunction, apathy, and lack of love. The source of these barriers was discovered through personal observation and experience in pastoral ministry as well as conversations with other denominational leaders. These same five barriers were further identified in part through a comparative study of eight opposing quality characteristics of a healthy church as defined by Natural Church Development in Color Your World in Natural Church Development. They are: empowering leadership, gift-based ministry, passionate spirituality, effective structures, inspiring worship services, holistic small groups, need-oriented evangelism, loving relationships. 2 The question was asked, If those are the quality characteristics of a healthy church, what could be some of the barriers that prevent those quality characteristics? Due to the limited scope of this dissertation, the barrier of overcoming the resistance to change became our primary focus. We found that resistance to change causes people to become inactive and their thinking becomes paralyzed, self-centered and apathetic toward outreach and Kingdom growth.3 We claim that innovative engagement, such as story-telling, can revitalize the rural church. A number of different factors and values influence decision-making and participatory processes.4 These include legal, organizational, financial and socio-cultural factors, as well as the influence of different interests from numerous actors (clergy, board of administration members, congregants, community). The challenge then is to provide a product that will cause the actor to psycho1ogica11y become invested in the concept. This investment should result in recognition of a barrier and then willing engagement of a behavior to change it. Specifically, this innovative engagement can be accomplished by speaking to the common people in language they understand with images to which listeners connect and understand so that the barrier is removed and revitalization can occur

The effects of unemployment insurance on labor supply and search outcomes : regression discontinuity estimates from Germany

"This paper evaluates the impact of large changes in the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) in different economic environments on labor supply, job matches, and search behavior. We show that differences in eligibility thresholds by exact age give rise to a valid regression discontinuity design, which we implement using administrative data on the universe of new unemployment spells and career histories over twenty years from Germany. We find that increases in UI have small to modest effects on non-employment rates, a result robust over the business cycle and across demographic groups. Thus, large expansions in UI during recessions do not lead to lasting increases in unemployment duration, nor can they explain differences in unemployment durations across countries. We do not find any effect of increased UI duration on average job quality, but show that the mean potentially confounds differential effects on job search across the distribution of UI duration. However, it appears that for a majority of UI beneficiaries increases in UI duration may lead to small declines in wages." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))Arbeitslosenversicherung, Arbeitskräfteangebot, Arbeitsuche, Lohnhöhe, Arbeitslosigkeitsdauer, Konjunkturzyklus, geschlechtsspezifische Faktoren, matching, amtliche Statistik

Beyond Change- Overcoming the Barriers to Small Rural Church Revitalization

Many of the rural churches of the Free Methodist Denomination in the Northeast region of the United States have experienced substantial stagnation and/or decline of their attendance rates over the past five years. This begs the questions, What is preventing these churches from being revitalized so they too can be used as vessels to grow the Kingdom of God? Though many obstructions to kingdom growth1 exist, this study focuses on the following five barriers: resistance to change, under-utilization of spiritual gifts, relational dysfunction, apathy, and lack of love. The source of these barriers was discovered through personal observation and experience in pastoral ministry as well as conversations with other denominational leaders. These same five barriers were further identified in part through a comparative study of eight opposing quality characteristics of a healthy church as defined by Natural Church Development in Color Your World in Natural Church Development. They are: empowering leadership, gift-based ministry, passionate spirituality, effective structures, inspiring worship services, holistic small groups, need-oriented evangelism, loving relationships. 2 The question was asked, If those are the quality characteristics of a healthy church, what could be some of the barriers that prevent those quality characteristics? Due to the limited scope of this dissertation, the barrier of overcoming the resistance to change became our primary focus. We found that resistance to change causes people to become inactive and their thinking becomes paralyzed, self-centered and apathetic toward outreach and Kingdom growth.3 We claim that innovative engagement, such as story-telling, can revitalize the rural church. A number of different factors and values influence decision-making and participatory processes. 4 These include legal, organizational, financial and socio-cultural factors, as well as the influence of different interests from numerous actors (clergy, board of administration members, congregants, community). The challenge then is to provide a product that will cause the actor to psycho1ogica11y become invested in the concept. This investment should result in recognition of a barrier and then willing engagement of a behavior to change it. Specifically, this innovative engagement can be accomplished by speaking to the common people in language they understand with images to which listeners connect and understand so that the barrier is removed and revitalization can occur

The Effects of Extended Unemployment Insurance over the Business Cycle: Evidence from Regression Discontinuity Estimates Over Twenty Years

One goal of extending the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) in recessions is to increase UI coverage in the face of longer unemployment spells. Although it is a common concern that such extensions may themselves raise nonemployment durations, it is not known how recessions would affect the magnitude of this moral hazard. To obtain causal estimates of the differential effects of UI in booms and recessions, this paper exploits the fact that, in Germany, potential UI benefit duration is a function of exact age which is itself invariant over the business cycle. We implement a regression discontinuity design separately for twenty years and correlate our estimates with measures of the business cycle. We find that the nonemployment effects of a month of additional UI benefits are, at best, somewhat declining in recessions. Yet, the UI exhaustion rate, and therefore the additional coverage provided by UI extensions, rises substantially during a downturn. The ratio of these two effects represents the nonemployment response of workers weighted by the probability of being affected by UI extensions. Hence, our results imply that the effective moral hazard effect of UI extensions is significantly lower in recessions than in booms. Using a model of job search with liquidity constraints, we also find that, in the absence of market-wide effects, the net social benefits from UI extensions can be expressed either directly in terms of the exhaustion rate and the nonemployment effect of UI durations, or as a declining function of our measure of effective moral hazard.

The Long-Term Effects of Unemployment Insurance Extensions on Employment

The majority of papers analyzing the employment effects of unemployment insurance (UI) benefit durations focuses on the duration of the first unemployment spell. In this paper, we make two contributions. First, we use a regression discontinuity design to analyze the long-term effects of extensions in UI durations. These estimates differ from standard estimates that they incorporate differences in UI benefit receipt and employment due to recurrent unemployment spells. Second, we derive a welfare formula of UI extensions that incorporates recurrent nonemployment spells. We find that accounting for nonemployment beyond the initial spell leads to a significant reduction in estimates of the nonemployment effect of UI extensions by about 25 percent. We show this effect is only partly explained by a mechanical effect due to finite follow-up durations, and mainly arises from a lower probability of days in nonemployment in months after end of the initial nonemployment spell.

Sharp lines in the absorption edge of EuTe and Pb0.1_{0.1}Eu0.9_{0.9}Te in high magnetic fields

The optical absorption spectra in the region of the \fd transition energies of epitaxial layers of of EuTe and \PbEuTe, grown by molecular beam epitaxy, were studied using circularly polarized light, in the Faraday configuration. Under \sigmam polarization a sharp symmetric absorption line (full width at half-maximum 0.041 eV) emerges at the low energy side of the band-edge absorption, for magnetic fields intensities greater than 6 T. The absorption line shows a huge red shift (35 meV/T) with increasing magnetic fields. The peak position of the absorption line as a function of magnetic field is dominated by the {\em d-f} exchange interaction of the excited electron and the \Euion spins in the lattice. The {\em d-f} exchange interaction energy was estimated to be $J_{df}S=0.15\pm 0.01$ eV. In \PbEuTe the same absorption line is detected, but it is broader, due to alloy disorder, indicating that the excitation is localized within a finite radius. From a comparison of the absorption spectra in EuTe and \PbEuTe the characteristic radius of the excitation is estimated to be $\sim 10$\AA.Comment: Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter (2004, at press

Improving Future Policy Responses to Foreseeable Bank Risk-Taking

This brief offers new perspectives on the behavior of banks during the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the limited success of unconventional monetary policies in stimulating bank credit to the private sector during the subsequent economic recovery. The common narrative about the financial crisis is that it was caused by a large credit expansion with overly risky loan-granting behavior by banks. We argue, however, that banks actually made optimal financial decisions in the lead-up to the crisis, based on their calculation of their franchise value. The brief explains the mechanics of franchise value—how it led banks to shift their portfolios toward riskier household loans before the crisis, as well as how it dampened the impact of quantitative easing and other novel monetary policies meant to stimulate the investment of capital into the private sector. Policymakers have failed to recognize the role that franchise value plays in all bank decisions. If they wish to devise appropriate fiscal or monetary policies to prevent or mitigate a future crisis, they need to properly account for how franchise value drives the decision-making of bank managers.https://repository.upenn.edu/pennwhartonppi/1068/thumbnail.jp

The Long-Term Impact of Job Displacement in Germany During the 1982 Recession on Earnings, Income, and Employment

We show that workers displaced from their stable jobs during mass-layoffs in 1982 recession in Germany suffered permanent earnings losses of 10-15% lasting at least 15 years. These estimates are obtained using data and methodology comparable to similar studies for the United States. Exploiting advantages of the German data, we also show that while reduction and recovery in time worked plays a role in explaining earnings losses during the first ten years, the majority of the long-run loss is due to a decline in wages. We also show that even the generous German unemployment insurance system replaced only a small fraction of the total earnings loss. These findings suggest that job displacements can lead to large and lasting reductions in income even in labor markets with tighter social safety nets and lower earnings inequality

Purification and analytical characterization of an anti- CD4 monoclonal antibody for human therapy

A purification process for the monclonal anti-CD4 antibody MAX.16H5 was developed on an analytical scale using (NH&SO, precipitation, anion-exchange chromatography on MonoQ or Q-Sepharose, hydrophobic interaction chromatography on phenyl- Sepharose and gel filtration chromatography on Superdex 200. The purification schedule was scaled up and gram amounts of MAX.16H5 were produced on corresponding BioPilot columns. Studies of the identity, purity and possible contamination by a broad range of methods showed that the product was highly purified and free from contaminants such as mouse DNA, viruses, pyrogens and irritants. Overall, the analytical data confirm that the monoclonal antibody MAX.16H5 prepared by this protocol is suitable for human therapy