The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition articles from March 2004

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition archives from March 2004

Editors' summary.(Editorial)
March 22, 2004... THE BROOKINGS PANEL ON Economic Activity held its seventy-seventh conference in Washington, D.C., on March 25 and 26, 2004. This issue of Brookings Papers on Economic Activity includes the papers and discussions presented at the conference. The...

Assessing the impact of welfare reform on single mothers.(Part 1)
March 22, 2004... THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), signed into law in 1996, transformed the U.S. welfare system. PRWORA replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with Temporary Assistance for...

Assessing the impact of welfare reform on single mothers.(Part 2)
March 22, 2004... Work Participation Rates In summarizing trends in work participation rates for single mothers from 1980 to 2002, we combine part-time work (defined above as from eight to thirty-two hours a week) and full-time work (more than thirty-two...

Comments and discussion.(Assesing the Impact of Welfare Reform on Single Mothers)
March 22, 2004... Rebecca M. Blank: This paper adds to the growing literature that attempts to assess the impact of the welfare reforms of the mid-1990s. A key problem in this literature is how to parameterize the reforms in a way that allows them to be clearly...

Ending Africa's poverty trap.(Part 1)
March 22, 2004... AFRICA'S DEVELOPMENT CRISIS is unique. Not only is Africa the poorest region in the world, but it was also the only major developing region with negative growth in income per capita during 1980-2000 (table 1). Some African countries grew during...

Ending Africa's poverty trap.(Part 2)
March 22, 2004... The Role of Trade Reform Most of this paper has focused on the quantity and direction of ODA needed for African countries to make the public investments necessary to break out of a poverty trap. The implied aid flows are large, equivalent...

Comments and discussion.(Ending Africa's Poverty Trap)
March 22, 2004... Michael Kremer: This is an interesting and indeed provocative paper, arguing for a large increase in foreign aid to Africa to help the continent escape from a poverty trap. I agree that aid should be increased, but I will take issue with a few...

Demography and the long-run predictability of the stock market.(Part 1)
March 22, 2004... THE SECULAR MOVEMENT OF the U.S. stock market in the postwar period has been characterized by three distinct twenty-year episodes of sustained increases or decreases in real stock prices: the bull market of 1945-66, the subsequent bear market...

Demography and the long-run predictability of the stock market.(Part 2)
March 22, 2004... Introducing Business Cycle Shocks If the real S&P 500 index is used as an approximate proxy for the level of stock prices, then the trough-to-peak variations observed over the past fifty years are more than twice those predicted by the...

Comments and discussion.(Demography and the Long-Run Predictability of the Stock Market)
March 22, 2004... Robin Brooks: Do changes in the population age distribution account for long-run cycles in the U.S. stock market? If so, what will happen to stock prices when the baby-boomers retire? Before this paper, the literature on demography and the...

What does the public know about economic policy, and how does it know it?(Part 1)
March 22, 2004... A LONG TRADITION IN economic theory models economic policy decisions as solutions to optimization problems solved by rational and well-informed agents: (1) a single policymaker minimizes a loss function subject to some constraints. Another body...

What does the public know about economic policy, and how does it know it?(Part 2)
March 22, 2004... Does Information Breed Knowledge? We begin with estimates of equation 2, which explains our admittedly imperfect measure of knowledge by information sources (the quantity and nature of sources used by respondents), the desire to be...

Comment and discussion.(What Does the Public Know about Economic Policy, and How Does It Know It?)
March 22, 2004... William D. Nordhaus: In a democracy, one might suppose, the decisions of elected politicians are to some extent influenced by public opinion. This is the motivation for the question, which Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger address in this paper, of...