The majority of children in poverty are in working families. One reason for this is that worklessness in families with children, while an important cause of poverty, has fallen significantly over the last 20 years. In addition, the relative poverty rates for children living in working families have risen over that period. As a result, the risk of poverty is more similar for children in working and non-working households now than it was 20 years ago. Earnings are still well below their levels seen prior to the 2008 recession, increasing the risk that simply having someone in work is not enough to take families out of poverty.
I study a game theoretic spatial model of elections with many heterogeneous constituencies in which both party and candidate behavior are modeled. Parties choose a platform and a ‘whip rate,’ representing the proportion of final policy that will be made by the party, as opposed to by the successful candidates. Candidates are office-motivated and can choose both a platform and a level of advertising in order to defeat their opponent. It is shown that the introduction of whipping as a choice variable can cause party platforms to diverge and that parties will whip on some but not all issues, reflecting the empirical reality of parties influencing rather than determining policy outcomes exclusively.
Last week’s Queen’s Speech inevitably focused on Brexit. A lot of the subsequent media coverage highlighted the Conservative manifesto pledges that were missing. But councils will have noticed another notable absence: a Local Government Finance Bill. With the 2016/17 Bill failing to pass before the election, where does this leave reforms to the local government finance system?
This paper investigates whether disadvantaged children learn less than advantaged children when both types of children are enrolled in the same school, using data from Vietnam and Peru. Two different results emerge: in Vietnam, there is no evidence that schools are less effective for disadvantaged groups, while in Peru disadvantaged groups do learn less.
