Whether poor single mothers move in response to welfare benefits has important implications for social policy in a federal system. Many scholars claim that welfare does not affect migration. These claims are not definitive, however, because the models underlying them rely on problematic assumptions and do not adequately control for nonwelfare determinants of migration. I address these shortcomi...

Reporting an Independent political identity does not guarantee the absence of partisanship. Independents demonstrated considerable variability in relative identification with Republicans versus Democrats as measured by an Implicit Association Test (IAT; M = 0.10, SD = 0.47). To test whether this variation predicted political judgment, participants read a newspaper article describing two competi...

Political scientists have approached the administration of George W. Bush from the perspectives of his foreign policy, tax plan, and entitlement reform proposals. One overlooked facet of Bush’s presidency was his commitment to overhauling the social welfare system. This commitment provided the basis for his first campaign speech in 1999, “The Duty of Hope,” as well as his first and second execu...

In this paper the optimal choice of a monetary target is investigated for a small open economy that is subject to foreign monetary policy shocks. In contrast to large parts of the literature, pegging the exchange rate is never the best policy choice for the small open economy in our model. Instead, monetary targeting and, depending on the parameter combination, producer price index targeting co...

This note analyses the interaction between nominal wage stickiness and costly employment adjustment in a small closed-economy New Keynesian model with simple rule-based or optimal monetary policy. The results show (1) the costs of nominal and real rigidity to depend on the policy regime, (2) optimal policy to substantially contain the welfare loss, and (3) the absence of quantitatively importan...

This paper considers the potential effects of the government's Welfare to Work policy on general practitioner (GP) working patterns, and aims to explore the relationship between unemployment, ill health, and GP sickness certification. Social security and employment policy initiatives are discussed in relation to the literature on the relationship between unemployment and ill health, sociologica...