Public Sector Personnel Economics: Wages, Promotions, and the Competence-Control Trade-off

We model personnel policies in public agencies, examining how wages and promotion standards can partially offset a fundamental contracting problem: the inability of public sector workers to contract on performance, and the inability of political masters to contract on forbearance from meddling. Despite the dual contracting problem, properly constructed personnel policies can encourage intrinsically motivated public sector employees to invest in expertise, seek promotion, remain in the public sector, and develop policy projects. However, doing so requires internal personnel policies that sort slackers from zealots. Personnel policies that accomplish this task are quite different in agencies where acquired expertise has little value in the private sector, and agencies where acquired expertise commands a premium in the private sector. Finally, even with well-designed personnel policies, there remains an inescapable trade-off between political control and expertise acquisition

Quitting in Protest: A Theory of Presidential Policy Making and Agency Response

This paper examines the effects of centralized presidential policy-making, implemented through unilateral executive action, on the willingness of bureaucrats to exert effort and stay in the government. Extending models in organizational economics, we show that policy initiative by the president is a substitute for initiative by civil servants. Yet, total effort is enhanced when both work. Presidential centralization of policy often impels policy-oriented bureaucrats ( zealots ) to quit rather than implement presidential policies they dislike. Those most likely to quit are a range of moderate bureaucrats. More extreme bureaucrats may be willing to wait out an opposition president in the hope of tempering future policy when an allied president is elected. As control of the White House alternates between ideologically opposed extreme presidents, policy-minded moderates are stripped from bureaucratic agencies leaving only policy extremists or poorly performing slackers. These departures degrade policy initiative in moderate agencies

Deconversion

Streib H. Deconversion. In: Rambo LR, Farhadian CE, eds. The Oxford Handbook on Religious Conversion. Oxford handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2014: 271-296.To include a chapter on deconversion in a handbook on conversion is not only appropriate, but, as I argue, necessary for various reasons: It is no longer possible to ignore the fact that a growing number of contemporaries chose to convert more than once in their lifetime; multiple conversions are unavoidable in cultures in which religion occurs no longer as singular in a mono-religious environment, but as plural. Multiple conversions, however, involve deconversion(s). While some contributions use the term “conversion” for both the disaffiliation and the re-affiliation, I focus on “deconversion” in order to include disaffiliations without re-affiliation – which responds to the growing attention to atheists and apostates in the US (cf. Streib & Klein, 2011). Disaffiliation processes constitute an independent field of study that deserves special scientific attention. And here, the term “deconversion” may serve as a reminder of the depth and intensity of biographical change and the new orientation of one’s life that eventually is associated with disaffiliation and is not reserved to conversion. In this chapter, I will start with a conceptualization of deconversion, discuss recent quantitative and qualitative research, and finally draw conclusions and suggest directions for future research

Incarceration and Unwed Fathers in Fragile Families

Criminal justice policies have resulted in millions of Americans being incarcerated over the past three decades in systems that provide little or no rehabilitation. This study uses a new dataset-The Fragile Families Study-to document poor labor market outcomes that are associated with incarceration. We find that fathers who had been incarcerated earned 28 percent less annually thanfathers who were never incarceratedT hese previously incarceratedfa thers worked less weeks per year, less hours per week and were less likely to be working during the week prior to their interview. We also found that fathers who had been incarcerated were more likely to depend on underground employment and off-the-books earnings

Campaign Finance Reform

The panelists in this session consider the following issues: (1) the problems posed by the current system of campaign finance, (2) alternative approaches and related legal constraints, and (3) advisable strategies to implement preferred reforms

Enrollment of adolescents and young adults onto SWOG cancer research network clinical trials: A comparative analysis by treatment site and era.

BackgroundFew adolescents and young adults (AYAs, 15-39 years old) enroll onto cancer clinical trials, which hinders research otherwise having the potential to improve outcomes in this unique population. Prior studies have reported that AYAs are more likely to receive cancer care in community settings. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has led efforts to increase trial enrollment through its network of NCI-designated cancer centers (NCICC) combined with community outreach through its Community Clinical Oncology Program (CCOP; replaced by the NCI Community Oncology Research Program in 2014).MethodsUsing AYA proportional enrollment (the proportion of total enrollments who were AYAs) as the primary outcome, we examined enrollment of AYAs onto SWOG therapeutic trials at NCICC, CCOP, and non-NCICC/non-CCOP sites from 2004 to 2013 by type of site, study period (2004-08 vs 2009-13), and patient demographics.ResultsOverall, AYA proportional enrollment was 10.1%. AYA proportional enrollment decreased between 2004-2008 and 2009-2013 (13.1% vs 8.5%, P < .001), and was higher at NCICCs than at CCOPs and non-NCICC/non-CCOPs (14.1% vs 8.3% and 9.2%, respectively; P < .001). AYA proportional enrollment declined significantly at all three site types. Proportional enrollment of AYAs who were Black or Hispanic was significantly higher at NCICCs compared with CCOPs or non-NCICC/non-CCOPs (11.5% vs 8.8, P = .048 and 11.5% vs 8.6%, P = .03, respectively).ConclusionNot only did community sites enroll a lower proportion of AYAs onto cancer clinical trials, but AYA enrollment decreased in all study settings. Initiatives aimed at increasing AYA enrollment, particularly in the community setting with attention to minority status, are needed

Fluid/solid transition in a hard-core system

We prove that a system of particles in the plane, interacting only with a certain hard-core constraint, undergoes a fluid/solid phase transition