Population Studies at Michigan, the Harris School and an ASSA session where Evelyn Lehrer provided a very useful discussion. We acknowledge the support of NSF grant 0520188 through the NBER. Abstract The Catholic countries of Europe pose a puzzle for economic demography – their fertility is the lowest in history despite low female labor force participation rates. Total fertility rates now avera...

Social welfare is one of the accepted goals of the United States and of the entire free world. Great interest attaches, therefore, both in this country and elsewhere, to the status of social wegare programs in the United States today. The standard of living and general welfare of the American people derive from the multiform activities of a free people, working individually, through voluntary g...

Empathy is defined as a predominantly cognitive attribute that involves an understanding of experiences, concerns and perspectives of another person, combined with a capacity to communicate this understanding. Empathy in the context of clinical care can lead to positive patient outcomes including greater patient satisfaction and compliance, lower rates of malpractice litigation, lower cost of m...

I n previous articles in this series (1–3), I explored aspects of veterinary leadership in animal welfare. I suggested that the apparent lack of leadership may be partly attributable to a lack of guidance during veterinary training (1). The present article examines this and offers some suggestions. The physical aspects of animal welfare are the basis for most of the veterinary curriculum and, u...

As a major quality management issue, in health care we have to deal with limitless complexity, be it at the level of the individual patient or at the level of the health system. Today complexity is characterized by four aspects: (1) unprecedented diversity, (2) interconnectedness, (3) speed, and (4) limited influenceability. In constrast, one has to admit that all our medical interventions are ...

The education, recruitment, training, and retention of a quality child welfare workforce is critical to the successful implementation of public policy and programs for the nation's most vulnerable children. Yet, national information about child welfare workers has never been collected. The National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being is a study of children who are investigated for child m...

Bringing a child into contact with the criminal justice system is an extremely difficult issue. Decisions have to be made that will affect that child's future. The first issue to be decided is whether it is even necessary or wise to bring a child before a justice system. Is there a need for justice designed to cope with wayward children? Is it necessary to establish a separate system of justice...

The inclusion of animal welfare into the German Constitution in 2002 gained worldwide attention. Animal welfare organisations had been striving to reach this goal for more than a decade, and they had good reasons to do so: in several court cases the regulations of the German Animal Welfare Act had been overruled by basic rights laid down in the Constitution, such as the freedom of research and ...

Gutenberg’s printing press was the great revolution in Renaissance information technology. Economists have struggled to identify its impact in data on productivity, output, or wages. This paper documents the welfare impact of the technology by exploiting data on the price and consumption of books in England between the late 1400s and 1700. I find that the welfare impact of the printed book was ...