Rude and crude?: When teens in your library respond negatively to you, think back to how you approached them

Skaters, taggers, gang members, and other groups of young people are being identified all over America as problems for libraries. However, these teens respond negatively to librarians because of the way that they are approached and because they experience so much discrimination. If teen behavior needs to be changed, there needs to be a change in the way they are approached and an appeal toward their code of ethics

Socioeconomics of Individual Transferable Quotas and Community-Based Fishery Management

In many fisheries around the world, the failures of centralized, top-down management have produced a shift toward co-management—collaboration and sharing of decision making between government and stakeholders. This trend has led to a major debate between two very different co-management approaches—community-based fishery management and market-based individual transferable quota management. This paper examines the debate over the relative merits of these models and undertakes a socioeconomic analysis of the two approaches. The paper includes (1) an analysis of differences in the structure, philosophical nature, and underlying value systems of each, including a discussion of their treatment of property rights; (2) a socioeconomic evaluation of the impacts of each system on boat owners, fishers, crew members, other fishery participants, and coastal communities, as well as the distribution of benefits and costs among fishery participants; and (3) examination of indirect economic effects that can occur through impacts on conservation and fishery sustainability. The latter relate to (a) the conservation ethic, (b) the flexibility of management, (c) the avoidance of waste, and (d) the efficiency of enforcement. The paper emphasizes the need for a broader approach to analyzing fishery management options, one that recognizes and properly assesses the diversity of choices, and that takes into account the interaction of the fishery with broader community and regional realities.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Garment Industry and Economic Empowerment: A case study of Swaziland

This paper examines the extent to which garment industry in Swaziland has contributed to the economic empowerment of the Swazi people through creation of new jobs and improvement in their overall welfare. In Swaziland as elsewhere in many African countries, unemployment has been and is still a major constraint to the country’s sluggish economic growth. In response to the unemployment situation in the country, Swaziland Investment Promotion Authority (SIPA) was established in 1977 under the Ministry of Enterprise and Employment with the main aim of attracting, encouraging, promoting, and facilitating both local Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) in the country. Among the efforts to entice foreign investors into the country was the construction of several factory shells to be used by would be investors. This initiative led to the influx of garment firms into the country primarily driven by the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). This analysis is based on a survey data of 235 employees randomly selected from five garment firms in the country. Understanding the actual contribution made by the garment industry towards the country’s economy is important for the government for it to reassess its economic policies regarding unemployment and poverty alleviation strategies. The empirical results show that the industry created employment for 64% of the sample, most of them females. It also enhanced the general welfare of the people by improving family expenditures on education, health and ensuring food security. Consequently, it can be concluded that the industry has the potential to contribute significantly to the economic empowerment of the Swazi people.Economic Empowerment, Garment, Investors, Swaziland, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Demand and Price Analysis, Environmental Economics and Policy, Financial Economics, Food Security and Poverty, International Relations/Trade, Labor and Human Capital, Marketing, Production Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Modelling Citation Networks

The distribution of the number of academic publications as a function of citation count for a given year is remarkably similar from year to year. We measure this similarity as a width of the distribution and find it to be approximately constant from year to year. We show that simple citation models fail to capture this behaviour. We then provide a simple three parameter citation network model using a mixture of local and global search processes which can reproduce the correct distribution over time. We use the citation network of papers from the hep-th section of arXiv to test our model. For this data, around 20% of citations use global information to reference recently published papers, while the remaining 80% are found using local searches. We note that this is consistent with other studies though our motivation is very different from previous work. Finally, we also find that the fluctuations in the size of an academic publication's bibliography is important for the model. This is not addressed in most models and needs further work.Comment: 29 pages, 22 figure

The Effect of the State Children's Health Insurance Program on Health Insurance Coverage

This paper presents the first national estimates of the effects of the SCHIP expansions on insurance coverage. Using CPS data on insurance coverage during the years 1996 through 2000, we estimate two-stage least squares regressions of insurance coverage. We find that SCHIP had a small, but statistically significant positive effect on insurance coverage. Our regression results imply that between 4% and 10% of children meeting income eligibility standards for the new program gained public insurance. While low, these estimates indicate that states were more successful in enrolling children in SCHIP than they were with prior Medicaid expansions focused on children just above the poverty line. Crowd-out of private health insurance was estimated to be in line with estimates for the Medicaid expansions of the early 1990s, between 18% and 50%.

Irreversible Investment and Optimal Fisheries Management: A Stochastic Analysis

In recent years, attention has been devoted to fishery management problems that arise because capital embodied in fishing fleets is often nonmalleable. having few if any alternative uses. This problem of irreversible investment was analyzed by Clark et al. (1979), using a deterministic model. In reality, however, most investment decisions must be made within an uncertain environment. This paper describes recent efforts to account for uncertainty in analyzing the problem of optimal fishery investment, where the uncertainty is caused by stochastic variability in the resource stock from year to year.Environmental Economics and Policy, International Development, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Risk and Uncertainty,

Group amenability properties for von Neumann algebras

In his study of amenable unitary representations, M. E. B. Bekka asked if there is an analogue for such representations of the remarkable fixed-point property for amenable groups. In this paper, we prove such a fixed-point theorem in the more general context of a $G$-amenable von Neumann algebra $M$, where $G$ is a locally compact group acting on $M$. The F{\o}lner conditions of Connes and Bekka are extended to the case where $M$ is semifinite and admits a faithful, semifinite, normal trace which is invariant under the action of $G$