Supporting Work for Low-Income People With Significant Challenges Summary

Welfare programs require people to work, but some low-income adults struggle with major personal challenges that make it hard to find or hold down a job. In this summary, Loprest and Martinson recommend both short-term changes to current programs and longer-term efforts through a program for competitive federal matching block grants to states. These grants would support efforts to integrate programs that alleviate barriers to work with employment services and to evaluate these initiatives so policymakers can better understand what works

Helping Poor Working Parents Get Ahead: Federal Funds for New State Strategies and Systems

Examines the cost-effectiveness of state job advancement systems and outlines a proposal for federally funding programs that provide more education and training, greater access to better-paying jobs, and more robust financial incentives and supports

Supporting Work For Low-Income People With Significant Challenges

Welfare programs require people to work, but some low-income adults struggle with major personal challenges that make it hard to find or hold down a job. In this essay, Loprest and Martinson recommend both short term changes to current programs and longer term efforts through a program for competitive federal matching block grants to states. These grants would support efforts to integrate programs that alleviate barriers to work with employment services and to evaluate these initiatives so policymakers can better understand what works

Partnering With Employers to Promote Job Advancement for Low-Skill Individuals

Outlines the need for employer involvement in skills development programs that benefit both workers and businesses, barriers to the development of partnerships, promising approaches, and policy considerations for creating and sustaining partnerships

The effect of increased employer contacts within a labour market training program

Using both register and survey data, two types of labour market training programs are compared. One program is part of the regular Swedish labour market training and the other, Swit, was initiated as an experiment during a two-year period, in an attempt to solve a bottleneck problem with people working with information technology. Enrolling in Swit increases the chances of finding employment by 20 percent, as compared to entering the conventional program, directed towards IT. The difference is due to the positive effect of more practical experience within Swit, which is especially large for individuals with a weak position on the labour market.Evaluation; Information technology; Employment rate; Propensity score matching

Modeling Acidification Recovery on Threatened Ecosystems: Application to the Evaluation of the Gothenburg Protocol in France

To evaluate the acid deposition reduction negotiated for 2010 within the UNECE LRTAP Gothenburg Protocol, sulphur and nitrogen deposition time-series (1880–2100) were compared to critical loads of acidity on five French ecosystems: Massif Central basalt (site 1) and granite (2); Paris Bassin tertiary sands (3); Vosges mountains sandstone (4) and Landes eolian sands (5). The SAFE model was used to estimate the response of soil solution pH and [A1] [BC] ratio to the deposition scenario. Among the five sites, critical loads were exceeded in the past at sites 3, 4 and 5. Sites 3 and 4 were still expected to exceed in 2010, the Protocol year. Further reduction of atmospheric deposition, mainly nitrogen, would be needed to achieve recovery on these ecosystems. At sites 3, 4 and 5, the delay between the critical load exceedance and the violation of the critical chemical criterion was estimated to be 10 to 30 years in the top soil and 50 to 90 years in the deeper soil. At site 5, a recovery was expected in the top soil in 2010 with a time lag of 10 years. Unexpectedly, soil pH continued to decrease after 1980 in the deeper soil at sites 2 and 5. This time lag indicated that acidification moved down the soil profile as a consequence of slow base cation depletion by ion exchange. This delayed response of the soil solution was the result of the combination of weathering rates and vegetation uptake but also of the relative ratio between base cation deposition and acid compounds

Polynomial Functors of Modules

We introduce the notion of numerical functors to generalise Eilenberg & MacLane's polynomial functors to modules over a binomial base ring. After shewing how these functors are encoded by modules over a certain ring, we record a precise criterion for a numerical (or polynomial) functor to admit a strict polynomial structure in the sense of Friedlander & Suslin. We also provide several characterisations of analytic functors