Knowledge that Transforms

Persistent child poverty and awareness that noncustodial parents contribute to this problem by failing to pay child support has spurred interest in a national child-support assurance program (CSAP). We analyze several variations of a CSAP and find that the policies considered have a limited impact on child poverty. Moreover, the alternative which reduces child poverty the most does so at a high cost. Today, one in five children lives in poverty and over half of these children live in families with a parent living elsewhere. Yet, many of these children do not receive income from their noncustodial parent. Several recent proposals offered in Congress would establish a national or demonstration assurance program, whereby the government would pay a benefit to children when child support is not received. A child-support assurance demonstration project was also included in the final recommendations of the bipartisan National Commission on Children (1991). This paper examines the extent to which a national CSAP would reduce child poverty and at what cost. We use the Urban Institute's unique microsimulation instrument, the Transfer Income Model version 2 (TRIM2), to estimate the costs and effects of this policy using 1990 data. I. Designing a Child-Support Assurance Policy

The canonical problem of equity in production economies consists of two agents with different tastes and abilities, each of whom contributes labor to produce a single consumption good. As a criterion for distributive justice, the author requires that if both agents work equal numbers of hours, they should divide the output equally. He also requires that the labor-supply decision should remain sovereign. Sufficient conditions are established for achieving an efficient allocation using a division procedure that is consistent with the equal-division-for-equal-work principle and it is shown that the conditions are satisfied in many standard economies.

Graphs are used extensively in the teaching of economics principles (see e.g., Myra H. Strober and Allen Cook, 1992), and instructors assume that students are capable of reproducing graphs drawn on the board or shown on an overhead projector. One purpose of this study was to verify the accuracy of this assumption. Another purpose of this inquiry was to study whether the accuracy of graphs in students' notes affects success on tests in which graphs are included. Finally, we examined the extent to which instructor handouts containing graphs presented in a lecture (but not easily available to the student elsewhere, such as in the textbook) facilitated learning. To address the above issues, we conducted a classroom experiment at the University of South Carolina during the spring semester of 1992. Our investigation was an outgrowth of our previous research on the role of cognitive variables in learning principles of economics (Cohn et al., 1993).

The purpose of this paper is to outline a formal analytical framework that can accommodate considerations of individual rights as well as the more familiar ethical concerns of conventional welfare economics. The failure to accommodate such fundamental values as rights has been at the heart of Amartya K. Sen's (1979) criticism of welfarism which is inherent in much of welfare economics and social-choice theory. However, the roots of the problem seem to lie quite deep. Even if one discards neutrality and similar properties which are regarded as capturing the essence of welfarism, the very concept of a social-decision function itself, so widely used in socialchoice theory, turns out to be too restrictive a vehicle for articulating our intuition about rights. We propose an extension of the standard framework of social-choice theory, which can overcome some of these difficulties and enables us to discuss individual rights and other social values in one integrated framework.