John Scholz, PhD - US grants

Drs. Scholz and McGraw capitalize on a unique opportunity to undertake a massive study of the impact of changes in the tax law on compliance. From an empirical perspective, this research employs a complex design using several different data collection techniques, including surveys of taxpayers, experiments, and a rich but untapped data base of tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The surveys of taxpayers before and after the introduction of the 1986 Tax Reform Act constitutes a naturalistic experiment of the effects of legal change on citizen behavior. Combining the individual self-reported measures with objective information from IRS records is especially innovation insofar as it permits modelling the interrelationship between perceptions, belief, and behavior. In addition to the surveys, experimental study further probes the impact of different types of information and appeals on taxpayer orientation and action. The analytic approach of these investigators combines elements of self-interest and normative models to produce a comprehensive framework for testing alternative theories of compliance. As such, this work should add substantially to our knowledge of how citizens respond to the tax system and to our theoretical understanding of the interaction of norms and self- interest in shaping compliance. Further, subjective considerations are rarely examined in social control research, although speculation abounds about how they mediate the effects of structural changes in law, punishment, and enforcement. This study provides direct data on reasoning and perceptions that should advance our knowledge of the underlying processes that mediate compliance. Finally, beyond these investigators' own scientific ambitions, the project will yield a data base for other researchers' use.

Federal bureaucracies operate in an environment of competing forces - political, economic and organizational - at every level from federal to local. This research addresses the question of how and to what extent the enforcement actions of federal bureaucracies respond to the local environment in which enforcement actions take place. Through her doctoral dissertation, under the direction of Dr. Scholz, Ms. Headrick will examine safety enforcement by the Occupational Safety and Health Administrtaion (OSHA). The study extends existing work on enforcement bureaucracies by analyzing the interaction of city politics and federal agency behavior, using detailed local level measures not available at other levels of analysis to map more explicitly the mechanisms linking variables already studied. It analyzes hypotheses from three literatures - implementation, regulation and urban politics - at the city level. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, hypotheses tested reveal how these forces affect the incentives of "street-level" enforcers - OSHA inspectors - that increase or reduce the enforcement level. The project holds substantial promise of advancing our understanding of how bureaucratic actions respond to internal and external pressures. The resulting effects on bureaucratric accountability, and in this case, the process of legal enforcement, also will be elucidated.

One of the most striking political developments of the past century has been the expansion of government regulation and the consequent intrusion of "civil" enforcement agencies into most areas of social and economic life. The past three decades in particular has witnessed a dramatic growth in the scope of authority and size of government agencies that focus coercive enforcement activities on normal citizens, rather than on criminals and criminal activities. While studies of regulatory enforcement and administrative justice have also expanded rapidly, there is a considerable gap in our knowledge of civil enforcement and the behavior of non-policement enforcement agencies. In particular, the critical question addressed in this project is the extent to which the expanded coercive activities of enforcement agencies are controlled by democratic political institutions and principles. This project analyzes the extent to which the coercive enforcement powers of federal agencies are controlled by elected officials and democratic principles. The project expands the conceptual framework to include the democratic principles of efficiency and equality, which may constrain even controls exerted by elected officials over enforcement actions against citizens. The research team analyzes the responsiveness of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) enforcement activities to democratic controls. This will be accomplished through interviews with Financial and Examination officials in the IRS and political leaders and knowledgeable observers in Washington, New York and California. The researchers will develop three state-level data bases consisting of: IRS audit activities by audit class for 1960-1980; total individual and corporate audit activities for 1960-1990; and, IRS personnel for 1975-1990. They will use multiple indicators to probe the impact of presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative officials on IRS audits and personnel. They will clarify the concepts, develop measures, and probe the impact of the democratic principles of efficiency and equality on IRS audits and personnel. Finally, they will compare enforcement production functions for effectiveness of audits in improving tax compliance over time, states, and audit classes. This research will provide an extensive analysis of IRS enforcement, focusing on the impact of political controls, democratic principles, organizationl constraints, and enforcement effectiveness in explaining the variance of enforcement across tates and taxpayer categories for the last three decades.

This research consists of four separate, but related empirical projects aimed at increasing our understanding of altruistic behavior and household saving. The projects examine the relationship between monetary charitable contributions and volunteer labor supply; the degree to which private intrafamily transfers are affected by public transfers; the effects on household saving of the 1986 changes in the tax treatment of Individual Retirement Accounts; and the effects of borrowing constraints on household saving and the consumption of durables. The first study develops a theoretical model of household charitable behavior that yields several important empirical propositions. These will be examined using data from both the 1986 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and a new dataset on volunteerism. The study of intrafamily transfers will be the first to examine existing theoretical models and the responsiveness of intrafamily transfers using data from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics. The third study will use the three-way SCF panel to analyze the effects of statutory changes in deductible IRA contribution limits. It will extend the authors' previous work in this area. The last project will investigate the duration of borrowing constraints and the effects of these constraints on household saving and the consumption of durables using the SCF panel.

This research is supported by the Joint NSF/Private Sector Initiative and focuses on the following two closely related questions: Do individuals make reasonable financial decisions for savings and retirement? How do various forms of financial education affect financial behavior? The cooperating organization is the Smith Richardson Foundation. Numerous previous authors have documented the poor quality of personal financial decisions, and several studies have, in particular, found that Americans save too little for retirement. The adequacy of saving for retirement among younger Americans has, however, proven controversial, in large part beaause pertinent economic developments over the next 30 to 40 years are highly uncertain, and may profoundly affect retirement prospects. Previous research has also shed considerable light on the general public's level of economic and financial literacy. However, few determinants of economic literacy have been studies (aside from formal education among high school students). The determinants of financial knowledge among adults are essentially unexplored, and virtually nothing is known about the effects of knowledge on financial behavior. Finally, the existing literature has not systematically considered the effects of financial education on financial decisions; nor has it evaluated the various mechanisms (knowledge, comfort, or habituation) through which financial education may affect behavior. Thus, a central objective of this research is to examine financial education as an important dimension of human capital accumulation. The study will focus on the analysis of three extremely promising and previously unexploited data sources. The first is a series of household survey sponsored by Merrill Lynch; the second is a series of unique employer surveys undertaken by KPMG Peat Marwick; and the third is an extensive 401(k) database compiled by Hewitt Associates. The research is of direct relevance to private firms interested in using education to alter the behavior of participants in contributory retirement plans. Indeed, it bears on the continued viability of 401(k) plans, and the relative merits of defined benefit and defined contribution plans. In addition, the research has potentially important implications for national economic policy, including strategies for promoting national saving, the design and implementation of education curricula, pension policy, information policy, and securities regulation.

9515344 Scholz Why do citizens obey democratic laws? Consider, for example tax laws to collect money for desired public goods or environmental laws to minimize widely-recognized public bads. Obedience would leave everyone better off, but the temptation to free ride and shirk citizenship duties makes obedience an uncertain proposition. Is Hobbesian deterrence essential to gain compliance, or can social cooperation support compliance with laws designed to resolve collective action problems? Scholz's prior NSF research suggests that compliance behavior can only partly be explained by deterrence, and that a theory of cooperation in collective action situations is needed to understand obedience with democratic laws. His proposed "trust heuristic" explains cooperation in terms of trust in government, trust in other citizens, and other civic attitudes that reflect the positive and negative experiences the citizen has with the cooperative. Tm the extent that the individual's likelihood of cooperation increases as attitudes become more positive toward the collective, these attitudinal heuristics replicate the "nice, retaliatory, yet forgiving" characteristics associated with robust cooperative strategies in prisoners dilemma games, and hence may provide the basis for social cooperation. The trust heuristic represents "social capital" which dramatically increases the ability of weak enforcement agencies to maintain compliance (cooperation) with laws resolving collective action problems. To further develop and test this hypothesis and also to provide a more solid foundation for the theory of cooperation in large-scale collective action settings, the current research: 1) extends existing results based on 2-person, full information prisoners dilemma games to investigate the generic properties of robust strategies capable of supporting cooperative solutions to n- person collective action problems. 2) utilizes laboratory experiments to test the correspondence bet ween formal strategies and heuristics used by human subjects in collective action settings. The research integrates the diverse approaches of five productive researchers essential for tackling the challenging problem of cooperation in large-scale collective action settings. The combined methodology can be applied to numerous other collective action problems and should be of great interest to a variety of social science researchers. ***

This research investigates community-based environmental protection agreements that have been implemented for watersheds in the United States. The research uses a transaction cost framework to analyze the factors constraining and facilitating cooperation among the administrators, politicians and interest groups that negotiate policy agreements cutting across many political jurisdictions. The project consolidates information from more than 2,000 watersheds, interviews a large number of stakeholders from a sample of those watersheds and then uses case study methods to intensively study a handful of watersheds. This research provides an enhanced understanding of the ways in which cooperative agreements can be tailored for specific institutional settings and environmental domains.

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from Applicant's Description): Although the nervous system probably exerts some level of control over all movement-related variables involved in a task, certain variables are likely to be assigned greater priority than others. A knowledge of the most important control variables for a given task would enhance our ability to evaluate functional performance clinically. Emphasizing such variables when teaching a functional task to patients could lead to more efficient learning and more successful task performance. The project's first aim, therefore, is to develop and evaluate a new method for identifying variables that constitute the nervous system's primary focus of movement control. The approach is motivated by the hypothesis that stability is a signature feature of control. That is, the nervous system keeps variables that are most important for successful task performance more stable than other variables. The sit-to-stand (STS) task is one of the most common activities of daily living. Many patients with neurological deficits (e.g., stroke or cerebral palsy) as well as many elderly individuals have difficulty performing this task. Because knowledge of the motor control of this task is limited, the investigators will use the proposed model to obtain preliminary data on the nervous system's control of this task in healthy subjects as a basis for future experiments on patients and elderly individuals. Thus, the second aim of the project is to identify the primary control variables for the task of standing up from sitting, using the proposed model. The mathematical model will be extended from its current kinematic form to also treat kinetics. Hypotheses about control of the center of mass (CM) under four task conditions will be used to evaluate the kinematic and kinetic versions of the model. The four task conditions are (1) standing up under normal support conditions; standing onto a narrow base of support (2) with and (3) without practice; and (4) standing onto a narrow base of support and immediately grasping a rigid support. Specific hypotheses about what are the primary control variables for the STS task will be tested using stability estimates obtained from the mathematical model for each hypothesized control variable. Kinematic and kinetic data will be collected from 16 healthy adults. The primary dependent variables will be measures of the contribution of joint trajectory variance to the (1) variability and (2) stability of the center of mass, head and hand trajectories, all hypothesized control variables.

This research extends an on-going investigation of community-based environmental protection agreements that have been implemented for watersheds in the United States. The research uses a transaction cost framework to analyze the factors constraining and facilitating cooperation among the administrators, politicians, and interest groups that negotiate policy agreements cutting across many political jurisdictions. The project consolidates information from more than 2,000 watersheds, interviews a large number of stakeholders from a sample of those watersheds, and then uses case study methods to intensively study a handful of watersheds. This research provides an enhanced understanding of the ways in which cooperative agreements can be tailored for specific institutional settings and environmental domains. Building on previous and on-going research, the present research implements a design that makes it possible to track how the institutions for establishing community-based environmental protection agreements evolve over time and how stakeholders' strategies for involvement change accordingly. ©Á ??%Á ? ?¥©Á? Á??%/>/¥??` Â/?¥??¢ ¥©Á ?/¥¥Á?> _??Á% ??%% ?Á ?¢Á? ¥? ??Á>¥?Â` ©?? ¢?Á??Â?? Á??>?_?? ?>Â??_/??> /ÂÂÁ?¥¢ Â?>/% ?Á??¢??> ??¥??_Á¢ «Á??Â??/¥??> ? ?Á¢?%¥¢ ?¢ /???_?%?¢©Á? ?` /??%`?>À ¥©Á _??Á% ¥? / ?Á??Á¢ Á>¥/¥??Á ¢/_?%Á ? ?/¢Á¢ />? Á?/_?>?>À ©?? ?%?¢Á%` ¥©Á _??Á% ?Á??Á¢Á>¥¢ ¥©Á ?Á??¢??> ????Á¢¢ />? ??¥??_Á¢ ¼©Á ??Á>¥?Â??/¥??> ? ?©/¥ Á??>?_?? >Â??_/¥??> ?¢ _?¢¥ ?¢ÁÂ?% />? ??Á???%Á ¥? ?Á??¢??> ?/?¥????/>¥¢ ?> Á?/%?/¥?>À Á>????>_Á>¥/% ?©/>ÀÁ¢ ??%% %Á/? ¥ ? _??Á ÁÂÂÁ?¥??Á ?>??????/¥??> ? Á>????>_Á>¥/% ?/%?Á¢ ?>¥? ???%?? ?Á??¢??>¢

When humans reach to grasp an object, many different combinations of
muscles and joints can be used than are strictly necessary to achieve
accurate hand motion and final hand placement. Thus, when reaching to
the same location, two general strategies are possible: a) choose one
set of joint motions and use the same set every time, or b) use a range
of different joint motions, each of which takes the hand to the same
location. Using multiple, equivalent (i.e., in terms of the goal),
joint combinations confers advantages under special circumstances,
such as when a movement is unexpectedly disturbed. Scientists do not
know the extent to which the nervous system uses this strategy during
routine tasks. This project will address this question by studying
reaching and pointing to target locations throughout the workspace.
Motion of the arm and hand will be measured using high-speed video
analysis. The experiments are designed to understand how factors such
as the subject's level of skill, the presence or absence of vision, and
the direction and curvature of the reach, influence which strategy is
used. Formal modeling of the nervous system's control of reaching will
be used to help explain the experimental results and generate
predictions for future work.

This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation analyzes the strategies competing interest groups use to influence implementation of public policy. Specifically, the student investigates group's choice to cooperate in the implementation of Section 10(1) of the Endangered Species Act (Habitat Conservation Planning). The student argues that the political and structural environments shape this choice by determining the relative advantages of conflictual versus cooperative strategies available to groups. Decisions regarding strategy choice are conditional upon the external political context, group resource capacity, and underlying nature of the problem. By focusing on group behavior at implementation, the analysis will contribute to our understanding of the policy process, and cooperation and political behavior.

The Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project proceeds in several stages. In-depth case study analysis of selected HCPs will allow refinement of the hypotheses and enhance the study's validity. The analysis of the model using a broader, existing study, spanning multiple policy areas proceeds. The primary data collection strategy includes an electronic mail survey of group behavior. The data collected allow assessment of those contextual factors that influence the choices groups make.

This proposal aims to contribute to understanding decentralized forest management by examining, the role of social capital in the success or failure of the decentralization efforts in comparative perspective. In addition, my objective is to analyze the links among decentralization, development, and forest conservation. I do so through a focus on three questions.
The first question involves how the level of social capital influences decentralization in forest management in the communities. This question allows us to relate interaction among people and networks to the efficient functioning of organizations. I refer to this as the operational level. The second question pertains to the importance of linkages between organizations in the two domains of forest management and development planning for the functioning of forest-related committees. The important point here is that the specialized forest-related committees are nested within more generalized development planning committees. Answering this question allows us to explore and analyze whether the de facto linkages between the two bodies are beneficial to the smaller and more specialized organization. I refer to this as the complementary level. The third question asks how inter-departmental linkages at higher levels in the state government hierarchy affect the performance of the decentralized forest management bodes. This question helps us to move from the operational level to the collective choice level. Many studies show that the operational rules are important to overcome collective action problems. However, there has been very little inquiry into the links between the operational and collective choice level. The third question attempts to undertake this inquiry. The research is conducted in Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling districts in North Bengal, India.

This project develops a simple framework that highlights the ways that household pension wealth is related to non-pension wealth. The framework illustrates potential problems that may arise with previous work examining this relationship. If some households are credit constrained (which, in a simple model, would show no relationship between pension and non-pension wealth) and some households are unconstrained (which, in a simple model, would have dollar-for-dollar pension offsets), the correlation between pension and non-pension wealth estimated from conventional specifications is not necessarily even bounded by the correlations that apply to each population type. The framework is used to specify an empirical model that characterizes the relationship between pension and non-pension wealth. The model is estimated using data from the Health and Retirement Study. The empirical portion of this study explores the robustness of estimates, accounts carefully for population heterogeneity and takes different approaches to estimating the underlying parameters. The work distinguishes between defined contribution (DC) pension wealth, defined benefit pension (DB) wealth, and social security wealth. Due to different risks associated with these pension sources, they may have different effects on wealth. Extensions to this work explore how asset revaluations between 1992 and 1998 are correlated with intergenerational transfers, saving and expectations about retirement and bequests. The work will provide new insights into factors affecting the ability of elderly households to maintain their standard of living in retirement and into factors influencing national saving.

This research investigates the little-studied interaction between federal agencies and local policy networks concerned with the same policy arenas. The project extends Ostrom's (1990) framework to develop the hypothesis that dense, overlapping, locally-oriented networks of shareholders involved in "governing the commons" will increase both enforcement and compliance with' federal regulations. While Ostrom's analysis clarifies the potentially adverse impact of central regulatory policies on local institutions that "govern the commons", this project investigates the potentially beneficial impact that local networks may have on federal policies in the more complex federal system in America.

Water resource management provides the critical research site for observing the interaction between two institutional approaches to the governance of water usage; the EPA's "first generation" federal permit system created by the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the local watershed management networks and institutions that have evolved during the last decade to resolve pollution and water usage issues not addressed by the federal permit system (Kraft and Vig 2000).

In the complex institutional environment of the U.S. Federalist system, water policy networks may involve pollution dischargers, stakeholders affected by pollution, and in particular the elected and administrative officials from federal, state, and local institutions that have local jurisdiction over water management issues. Effective networks can provide cooperative advantages to its members comparable to those of the self-organized institutions studied by Ostrom (1990). We explore three implications of this perspective for the interaction between local networks and federal enforcement:

*Local Sanction Hypothesis: Effective networks increase compliance.
*Magnification Hypothesis: Effective networks increase the deterrence impact of enforcement actions on compliance.
* Concentration Hypothesis: Effective networks increase inspection activities.

To test these hypotheses, the project integrates two independent traditions that study opposite halves of the enforcement system: the democratic control of bureaucracy literature that analyzes political influence on regulatory enforcement actions, and the deterrence literature that analyzes the deterrence effects of enforcement actions on compliance. The first phase of research uses regression analysis based on available archival records of all permit holders to test the hypotheses, while the second phase develops direct measures of local networks for a sample of permit holders to provide a more intensive analysis:

Phase One: The first phase analyzes quarterly enforcement and compliance data from the EP A's Permit Compliance System (PCS) for the full period for which data are available, from 1994 to present. The required supplementary data on permit holders and local policy networks will be appended from census and governmental databases. We apply Feinstein's detection-controlled estimation procedure (Feinstein 1989, 1990) to simultaneously estimate enforcement actions and compliance responses for all major permit holders active throughout this period. Empirical results from phase-one analysis are then used for developing the phase-two sample.

Phase Two: The second phase has five specific goals: I) develop survey-based data on the local policy networks relevant to the permit enforcement and compliance system for a sample of permit holders, 2) calculate survey-based measures of network capabilities and analyze the link between these measures and the county-level factors from the previous analysis, 3) repeat phase one tests with the improved measures, 4) extend phase one tests to include the analysis of beliefs and attitudes related to compliance, and 5) develop confirmatory case studies in four selected communities. The project will produce journal articles in the fields of the political economy of institutions, bureaucratic controls, and enforcement and deterrence theory. Detailed efficiency analysis of
enforcement will be directly relevant to EPA enforcement policies. Finally a book will integrate project findings with the broader research context of the design of governance institutions, with a focus on the advantages, limitations, and interactions between federal and local approaches to "governing the commons."

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): If supported, this three-year project will develop new theoretical and empirical models to better understand the timing, magnitude, and consequences of intergenerational transfers. Our theoretical work will develop models that can better match empirical facts about the timing of transfers within the family, and can help explain the prevalence of "tied" educational and housing transfers. We also develop potentially innovative ways to assess circumstances under which cooperative models better match behavior than non-cooperative models. Better underlying behavioral models of intergenerational transfers will enhance researchers' and policy-makers' understanding of intergenerational linkages within families, human capital formation of young Americans, and the way public policies and families interact to affect behavior. Our proposed empirical work focuses on 1) the role of tied transfers in understanding college attendance and graduation, 2) empirical tests of the implications of cooperative models of transfers, 3) the effects of retirement on inter-vivo transfers, 4) the effects of estate and gift tax changes on inter-vivo transfers, and 5) the joint estimation of inter-vivo transfers of time and money and related projects exploring the degree to which transfers are compensatory. The empirical projects test specific implications of new behavioral models of intergenerational transfers, and hence can demonstrate (or falsify) their ability to better understand behavior. Equally importantly, we address practical policy questions about the degree to which retirement affects transfers, about the effects of estate and gift taxation on inter-vivos transfers, and about the degree to which families efficiently allocate resources across family members. Our empirical work will be based on complementary transfer questions from the Health and Retirement Study (and AHEAD), the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey (WLS), and the Surveys of Consumer Finances. The co-investigators are helping to design new transfers information in the 2003 wave of the WLS and are ideally situated to analyze these data.

Part 1 of this project will provide new information on the employment effects of tax policies targeted to low-income families. Part 2 will produce new information on the relative effectiveness of welfare policy choices, tax policy, and economic growth in enhancing the incomes of poor families. And part 3 will develop new information on the degree to which administrative problems arise with low income tax provisions.

Many previous studies find the EITC has large, positive employment effects. But much of this work uses indirect identification strategies and it has not been able to verify with tax data that the EITC causes the observed employment patterns. We examine the employment effects of the EITC using a sample of California adults who received AFDC or TANF sometime between 1987 and 2000. Our proposed work will be the first study to use information on whether sample members actually filed a tax return and claimed the EITC. Using an identification strategy similar to that used by earlier studies, the PIs document employment patterns across groups, both in the raw data and in regression-adjusted estimates, that are consistent with significant, positive EITC employment effects. Tests using tax data, however, raise questions about whether the EITC employment effects reported by others are in fact caused by the credit. The PIs will also carry out additional work to examine the validity of the preliminary results and help reconcile our work with past EITC employment studies.

Employment rates of low-skilled single mothers increased sharply in the 1990s and welfare caseloads declined precipitously. Considerable uncertainty remains about the relative importance of factors accounting for these changes. This project is a systematic analysis of the relative importance of welfare reform, the EITC, and the role of labor demand in understanding patterns of employment and welfare use. Four features make this proposed work promising. Tax data improve the identification of EITC effects. The PIs use more geographically precise measures of labor market characteristics than other papers. And they use much more detailed characterizations of the "treatments" of state (and county) welfare programs than other papers. Finally, samples exceeding 3 million adults allow us to examine interactions in the way welfare and tax policy influence employment and welfare use in different labor market.

Part 3 of the project examines the extent to which families respond to welfare program and tax system incentives to inaccurately report their income or household circumstances. The PIs use statistical models to study income reporting to welfare and tax authorities. They will also complete a unique study that examines misreporting of family structure, the largest single source of EITC non-compliance.

The work will directly inform policymaking. Our partners in this research include the Internal Revenue Service, California Franchise Tax Board, and the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. They are making data available to (under strict confidentiality agreements) and underwriting much of the cost of data construction and processing, because they are convinced the research promises to improve the tax policy effectiveness and administration. Second, this work has required a substantial investment in data infrastructure. The PI team will continue to make data available to other researchers, except in cases where confidentiality restrictions legally prevent them from doing so.

This research investigates the impact of policy network structure on the cooperative behavior of policy participants, focusing specifically on cooperative behavior among participants in joint projects undertaken by two or more government agencies and related constituencies. The researchers develop and test two competing hypotheses associated with the policy community and the issue network perspectives, and apply them respectively to the implementation and design phases of the policy process. The credibility-clustering hypothesis emphasizes the importance of tightly, linked, clustered networks to constrain free-riding and provide credible support for cooperation. Since the implementation phase of joint projects involved a greater risk of free-riding by those who do not meet project obligations, organizations and projects with more tightly-clustered network positions are expected to achieve higher levels of cooperation and performance. The information-bridging hypothesis emphasizes the importance of extensive, bridging networks to discover the potential advantages of joint undertakings, suggesting that organizations with extensive bridging networks have a higher probability of participating in joint projects. The investigators test multiple versions of these hypotheses using a panel design that measures networks and cooperative performance of participants in more than 100 joint projects in the Tampa Bay Estuaries. In addition to utilizing existing survey results from 1999 and 2002, they conduct more extensive interviews in 2005 and 2007 to measure network characteristics and outcomes more precisely. To provide a solid foundation for these tests, the researchers utilize evolutionary game theory and dynamic network simulation models to clarify the hypotheses and determine the most appropriate network measures for each hypothesis.
Intellectual Merit: Policy networks play an increasingly important role in understanding complex political systems, but analysis has primarily focused on the role of networks in determining who controls policy arenas. This project extends the foundations of policy network analysis by developing appropriate tools from evolutionary game theory, graph theory, and empirical network analysis and applying them to understand the role of policy networks in resolving the collective action problems imposed by our fragmentary federalist system.
Broader Impacts: The investigators study joint projects because they are becoming increasingly important for resolving fragmentation problems, particularly for environmental policies in which multiple agencies oversee interconnected aspects of a single ecosystem. This study examines factors that enhance the performance of these joint projects, particularly in terms of relationships between project participants and among the broader set of political actors that enhance the benefits of cooperation. The researchers expect to oversee at least seven dissertations relating to this research and to produce an advanced text as a basis for training other researchers to study this important problem. In addition, they will present their findings to national professional conferences and to the local overseers of the projects we study. They expect to critique the current perspective that favors extensive participation and comprehensive planning that imposes considerable costs, and to offer a more nuanced strategy for improving joint projects through cultivating patterns of participation more appropriate for different types of problems encountered in the design and implementation phases of joint projects. This should be of considerable interest to decision makers.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Reaching is an essential activity of daily living, the loss of which imposes immediate and significant disability. Successful reaching can be accomplished through a variety of joint and muscle combinations on different repetitions, even when reaching along an identical hand path. This variability or redundancy of motor solutions ('motor redundancy') forms the basis of the famous 'degrees-of-freedom problem' in movement science. Nonetheless, to what extent the nervous system utilizes motor redundancy during the performance of functional tasks is still unclear. In addition, it is unclear whether limited use of motor redundancy underlies the dysfunctional reaching displayed by neurological patients. A goal of our laboratory has been to understand the extent to which motor redundancy is utilized to control the arm during reaching and how the use of motor redundancy is altered in persons with motor dysfunction resulting from stroke. The specific aims of this application are to (1) characterize differences in the synergies of joint motion of patients with mild to moderate impairments and healthy individuals and how these relate to the use of motor redundancy for reaching, (2) determine the contribution of motor planning to the use of motor redundancy, (3) account for differences in motor redundancy with respect to posture and movement timing, and (4) develop a formal model of reaching control to account for current and predict experimental results. These aims will be addressed through three experiments involving healthy individuals and persons with a stroke, combined with formal modeling and simulations. The Uncontrolled Manifold (UCM) approach, used to identify motor redundancy, will be combined with principal components analysis to characterize synergies of joint motion (1) when reaching within and beyond subjects' functional arm length; (2) when reaching under a timed response paradigm (to address motor planning effects); and (3) when reaching with and without an external timing constraint. The UCM approach will be combined with principal components analysis in this application to more fully explore movement synergies of patients with stroke in comparison to matched control subjects and will be extended to an analysis of motor redundancy with respect to movement timing. Simulations of our mathematical model, with manipulations of factors such as oscillator stability or relative inter-joint coupling strength, will help to account for differences in the use of motor redundancy to control posture and movement timing between patients with mild and moderate impairments and healthy individuals, and to generate predictions for future experimental results.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Project Summary and Abstract: This project is designed to provide new information on the degree to which American households are financially well-prepared for retirement. We rely on an augmented life-cycle model, modified to incorporate essential aspects of the various pieces of the problems that we study, to conduct our work. We focus on two factors that the literature (and we) believe are important influences on the wealth available for retirement. First, despite a vast literature relying on the life-cycle model to examine wealth accumulation, few papers focus on the role of children. Our work will highlight the role children play in wealth accumulation. In doing so, we compare the effects of children on wealth to the effects if asset- and income-tested transfers on wealth. Our work also has potentially important implications for thinking about Social Security replacement rates. Second, we will examine the role of pensions on non-pension wealth accumulation. While a large prior literature examines this topic, our work differs by accounting fully for lifetime (past and future) resources. More importantly, past estimates of the effects of pensions on non-pension wealth accumulation are difficult to interpret if there is a mixture of credit constrained and unconstrained households in the samples used for estimation. We clarify these issues and offer a new way of thinking about the effects of pensions on wealth accumulation. Our third proposed project will examine the way in which wealth interacts with retirement expectations and retirement. One way for some households to respond to actual or perceived shortfalls (surpluses) in retirement wealth is to defer (hasten) retirement. We will use differences between actual and optimal net worth (derived from an augmented life cycle model with uncertainty) to study the way retirement expectations and wealth are correlated with retirement decisions. We will also develop and estimate the parameters from a new model of retirement. Our fourth project will provide a comprehensive look at the adequacy of retirement wealth preparation of households in different U.S. birth cohorts. In earlier work we showed that the original HRS cohort, born between 1931 and 1941, overwhelmingly were on track in 1992 to having resources in retirement necessary to maintain their accustomed living standards. A critical unresolved issue, however, is the degree to which these results hold for other cohorts, particularly those born after 1941. Our proposed work will answer this question. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: We propose new fundamental analyses of factors central to understanding the living standards of Americans in and prior to retirement. There is a well-documented association between wealth and health. Understanding the factors associated with wealth accumulation may improve understanding of the health-wealth relationship. Moreover, consumption and health are fundamental inputs to the well-being of elderly households. Our work will provide new models and empirical work on factors influencing consumption and hence, well-being.

This proposal seeks funding to stage a conference at Harvard University in June 2008 to bring together scholars studying networks in political science. Although network analysis tools have expanded dramatically in the past decade, most have been developed outside of political science. The purpose of the conference is to allow scholars who have been dealing with the unique problems of network analysis in political science to explore common problems that arise in this analysis. The participants will include political scientists who struggle with the complexities of network analysis, believe that the development of network analysis will contribute significantly to the ability of political science to analyze critical relationships that fall between individuals and formal institutions, and believe that current individual efforts will benefit substantially by creating opportunities to work together on these problems.

Political science applications offer important theoretical challenges to network analysis because the specific variables of interest and approach in political science differ from those in sociology and other fields. At the same time, the application of network methodology will help to bring political science more actively into collaboration across these intellectual communities and help bring important theoretical and infrastructure advances in both political science and network studies. A conference will increase the pace of development and spread of innovations, so available approaches (theoretical, empirical, analytical) will be applied more rapidly to the range of political science issues that are not readily analyzed with the current emphasis on individual behavior and formal institutions.

This project's broader impacts include the training of at least 15-20 graduate students and faculty not already trained in network analysis. The conference will also broaden the dissemination of the most recent advances in network analysis to a political science audience, to ensure that current analyses of policies and the political system have these techniques available for studying the broad range of topics affected by networks or relationships.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

This proposal seeks funding to stage a set of yearly conferences at Harvard University starting in June 2009 to bring together scholars studying networks in political science. Although network analysis tools have expanded dramatically in the past decade, most have been developed outside of political science. The purpose of the conference is to allow scholars who have been dealing with the unique problems of network analysis in political science to explore common problems that arise in this analysis. The participants will include political scientists who struggle with the complexities of network analysis, believe that the development of network analysis will contribute significantly to the ability of political science to analyze critical relationships that fall between individuals and formal institutions, and believe that current individual efforts will benefit substantially by creating opportunities to work together on these problems.

Political science applications offer important theoretical challenges to network analysis because the specific variables of interest and approach in political science differ from those in sociology and other fields. At the same time, the application of network methodology will help to bring political science more actively into collaboration across these intellectual communities and help bring important theoretical and infrastructure advances in both political science and network studies. A conference will increase the pace of development and spread of innovations, so available approaches (theoretical, empirical, analytical) will be applied more rapidly to the range of political science issues that are not readily analyzed with the current emphasis on individual behavior and formal institutions.

This project's broader impacts include the training of at approximately 40 graduate students and faculty not already trained in network analysis. The conference will also broaden the dissemination of the most recent advances in network analysis to a political science audience, to ensure that current analyses of policies and the political system have these techniques available for studying the broad range of topics affected by networks or relationships.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Healthy People 2010 initiative encourages people to engage in regular exercise throughout their lives. Running is one of the most popular fitness activities that Americans engage in. However, due to its repetitive nature, overuse injuries are common. Stress fractures are among the most serious overuse injuries a runner sustains. Retrospective and prospective studies have shown stress fractures are related, in part, to the amount of tibial shock a runner experiences. This suggests that reducing tibial shock would reduce the risk of these serious bony injuries. Therefore, the purposes of this investigation are: 1. to establish whether tibial shock (and consequently vertical loads) can be reduced through realtime feedback in runners exhibiting high shock;2. determine which kinematic strategies are used to reduce lower extremity loading;3. determine whether the changes made during the retraining on the treadmill transfer to overground running;and 4. determine whether these gait changes persist over a 6 month period. 40 male and female runners free of current injuries, aged 18-45 yrs and running at least 10 miles/week will be recruited. They will exhibit increased tibial shock, determined by a prescreening assessment. Subjects will be randomly assigned to one of two groups and undergo a baseline instrumented gait analysis of their lower extremity kinematics and kinetics. 20 subjects will be placed into a 2-week, four times a week retraining program. They will run on an instrumented treadmill with an accelerometer tightly fixed to their distal-medial tibia. With each foot strike, they will be provided with real-time visual feedback of their tibial shock. They will be asked to reduce their shock to within normal limits (indicated by a target on the monitor). Run time will be gradually increased and feedback gradually removed over the 12 sessions. The second group will serve as a control group and undergo a similarly progressed treadmill protocol with no feedback. A post-training overground gait analysis will be conducted following the treatment, and at a 6-month follow-up for both groups. RELEVANCE;Results from this investigation will provide information regarding the ability to alter and maintain gait mechanics to reduce the risk for lower extremity stress fractures. These results can be applied to both preventative medicine as well as rehabilitation with the planned development of a simple portable tool to identify and retrain those at risk.

How is sensory information used to coordinate the many joints of the body during stable standing, while simultaneously allowing for the performance of other more dynamic movements? This project will examine the influence of visual information on muscle and joint coordination related to the control of the body's center of mass and head position. The generality of sensory influences on multijoint coordination will be assessed by modifying tactile information from the support surface. Finally, the work will examine how postural stability is maintained when some of the body's segments are prevented from moving, analogous to what may occur as a result of injury and some disease processes.

Poor standing balance is a leading contributor to falls and subsequent hospitalization of the elderly and this project may provide important insights to guide the development of new treatments. The project will also provide laboratory experiences for undergraduate students (through the University of Delaware's Undergraduate Research Program) and for high school students (through the STEM program of Cecil County, Maryland). The work fosters an international collaboration between investigators at the University of Maryland and the University of Delaware and those at the University of Bochum in Germany, including international research experience for a graduate student from each of the two participating U.S. universities.

This work is co-funded by SBE/BCS, EPSCoR, and the Office of International Science and Engineering.

This team is exploring questions about how policy making actors decide which problems to tackle, what policymaking venues to participate in, and who to collaborate with in solving the problems. They hypothesize that the patterns of collaboration, or policy networks, strongly affect the efficiency and effectiveness of governing institutions in resolving complex problems.

The study involves three estuaries located in California, Florida and Argentina, where problems such as declining water quality, dwindling water supply, flooding, and threats to biodiversity require coordinated action from multiple stakeholders. The three sites provide different mixtures of regulatory, collaborative, and voluntary institutions governing these issues, and thus provide an ample range of conditions in which to study the questions. Data will be collected from news media and internet analysis as well as surveys of all major policy actors in each estuary. Analytic techniques will include qualitative descriptions of the local ecologies as well as quantitative analyses based on Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques.

The study seeks to integrate informal networks and institutional structure into a theory of governance more relevant to complex policy problems. In particular, the team seeks a better understanding of how natural resources are managed through cooperative activities when actors are embedded in complex policy-making systems. Many policy analyses focus on single policy programs, and advice from these studies can to lead to unintended consequences when they fail to recognize the complex interaction of actors, institutions, and problems within the full ecology of games. This study seeks to understand the interrelatedness of economic, environmental, and social benefits at stake in estuaries and similar ecological systems. In addition, the comparisons between the U.S. and Argentina enable analysis of how different political cultures and national institutions affect the ability of policy actors to solve these key environmental problems.