Older Adults Finding Ways to Flourish

Health outcomes of Experience Corps®: A high-commitment volunteer program

S.I. Hong & Nancy Morrow-Howell
Social Science & Medicine, July 2010, Pages 414-420

Abstract:
Experience Corps® (EC) is a high-commitment US volunteer program that brings older adults into public elementary schools to improve academic achievement of students. It is viewed as a health promotion program for the older volunteers. We evaluated the effects of the EC program on older adults' health, using a quasi-experimental design. We included volunteers from 17 EC sites across the US. They were pre-tested before beginning their volunteer work and post-tested after two years of service. We compared changes over time between the EC participants (n = 167) and a matched comparison group of people from the US Health and Retirement Study (2004, 2006). We developed the comparison group by using the nearest available Mahalanobis metric matching within calipers combined with the boosted propensity scores of those participating in the EC. We corrected for clustering effects via survey regression analyses with robust standard errors and calculated adjusted post-test means of health outcomes, controlling for all covariates and the boosted propensity score of EC participants. We found that compared to the comparison group, the EC group reported fewer depressive symptoms and functional limitations after two years of participation in the program, and there was a statistical trend toward the EC group reporting less decline in self-rated health. Results of this study add to the evidence supporting high-intensity volunteering as a social model of health promotion for older adults.

Summer jobs in high school

I remember being pretty happy with getting any amount of money per hour when I got my first job at 15. It seems like more people would be employed if it was worth hiring them. The rise of the minimum wage means that the level of work that can be done must be greater which means that people with less skills (e.g. teens) aren't worth paying since they can't contribute an equivalent amount of value to a business as the business is forced to pay them for their work. This results in essentially underemployment mandated by the inflated cost of hiring due to a high minimum wage.

Teen employment, poverty, and the minimum wage: Evidence from Canada

Anindya Sen, Kathleen Rybczynski & Corey Van De Waal
Labour Economics, forthcoming

Abstract:
In May 2007, the U.S. Congress enacted legislation, which increased the Federal minimum hourly wage from $5.15 to $7.25, over a two year time period. This increase to the minimum wage was the first in nearly a decade and was approved with the objective of alleviating poverty among low income households. However, a higher minimum wage may result in more unemployment and poverty. We exploit time-series variation in minimum wages set by Canadian provinces between 1981 and 2004. OLS and IV results suggest that a 10% increase in the minimum wage is significantly correlated with a 3% - 5% drop in teen employment. Further, a 10% rise in the minimum wage is also significantly associated with a 4% - 6% increase in the percentage of families living under Low Income Cut Offs (LICOs). Difference-in-difference estimates from the 1993, 1995, and 1998 waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) support these findings as they suggest that income earned by teens constitutes a non-trivial portion of household income for families beneath Low Income Cut Offs. Therefore, a higher minimum wage may paradoxically result in a significant negative shock to household income among low-income families.

The Religious Left

I have been wondering about this but Mr. Blow puts some numbers to it (whether those numbers mean anything is another question, polls and Blow's use of them being untrustworthy). It looks like some important decisions might be coming soon to religious leaders on both sides of the political aisle as they find themselves increasingly empowered on the same side of the religious aisle.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/opinion/03blow.html