Land Markets in the Harris-Todaro Model: A New Factor Equilibrating Rural-Urban Migration

Recent research in the Harris-Todaro (HT) tradition has added an important new element to the model by incorporating an urban land market. Brueckner and Zenou (1999) (hereafter BZ) argue that a model where migration equalizes expected wages between city and countryside may overlook another important force that equilibrates the process of rural-urban migration. This force is the migration-induced rise in the urban cost of living, which occurs principally through escalation of urban land rents as the city population expands. Land-rent escalation, which tends to limit rural-urban migration, provides an important additional force that may help determine city sizes in developing countries. The present paper provides a simpler alternative to BZ's analysis by assuming that urban residents smooth their income as they cycle between formal and informal employment. This allows migration decisions to be based on the expected wage, as in the usual HT framework, in a model that includes a land market. The analysis shows that this modified framework generates results slightly different from those of BZ.     

Child Poverty in the American States: The Impact of Welfare Reform,Economics, and Demographics

This article identifies the predictors of child poverty rates at the state level before and after the adoption and implementation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The analysis shows that the most important state‐level factors that influence child poverty rates are demographics, the health and viability of the state economy, and often the generosity, inclusiveness, and quality of state welfare programs. States with large numbers of black citizens, and those that score highest on infant mortality, teen births, births to unmarried women, children living with a parent without a high school degree, and children living with a single parent have the highest rates of child poverty. Child poverty rates are lowest in states that suffer less unemployment, and in wealthier states. States that score higher on per capita personal income, tax revenues, and taxable resources have lower child poverty rates. While specific “tough” welfare policies adopted by some states seem to have no impact on child poverty rates, we tested for the first time a sophisticated measure of the overall quality of state welfare programs. The analysis reveals that the global quality of a state's welfare programs is often an independent predictor of child poverty. States with the most generous, inclusive, and supportive welfare programs have done the best job of lowering and containing child poverty.     

The Trial of Socrates Revisited

Different sorts of people have been revisiting the trial of Socrates for almost 2,500 years: philosophers, political theorists, politicians, jurists, historians, journalists and artists. Each has his or her own agenda for reconstructing the motives of the prosecution, the thinking of the jurors, and the apparently perverse behaviour of Socrates himself. This paper examines some of the more influential approaches to Socrates (including those of his contemporaries, Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes), and attempts to set them in appropriate contexts. By way of a conclusion, there is an exploration of the background and context to the trial itself, taking into account recent work on Athenian law, religion and punishment, closing with an attempt to explain the significance of the likely location of the law-court, within the Agora or city square of Athens.     

Male Cults Revisited: The Politics of Blood Versus Semen

In this article I explore some major differences between male initiations in Melanesia that I ignored in my earlier study. In particular, I focus on the differential emphasis that was placed on blood-letting as against semeningesting as the key means whereby boys were believed to be transformed into men. In the case of the blood-letting rites men seemingly sought both to appropriate to themselves the positively valued capacity of women to give birth to children and to protect themselves from women's negative ability to cause either death or destruction through menstruation, sexual intercourse or witchcraft. By contrast, in the semeningesting rites the properties of women that the men seemed most concerned to appropriate focused on their capacities to receive semen in the act of sexual intercourse and to give milk in the nurturant context. Such major cult differences were, I suggest, directly associated with parallel differences in four inter-related sets of variables; the form of marital exchange (direct as against indirect), the predominant variety of social relations (centripetal as against centrifugal), the prevailing form of leadership (conservative as against entrepreneurial) and, finally and most importantly, differences in gender relations, especially concerning the nature of male dependency on female cooperation in attaining specifically male goals.