Economics Commons^™

Education, Complaints, And Accountability, Juan Botero, Alejandro Ponce, Andrei Shleifer

Alejandro Ponce

Better educated countries have better governments, an empirical regularity that holds in both dictatorships and democracies. A possible reason for this fact is that educated people are more likely to complain about misconduct by government officials and that more frequent complaints encourage better behavior from officials. Newly assembled individual-level survey data from the World Justice Project show that, within countries, better educated people are more likely to report official misconduct. The results are confirmed using other survey data on reporting crime and corruption. Citizen complaints might thus be an operative mechanism that explains the link between education and the quality …

Flexible Work Arrangements: Improving Job Quality And Workforce Stability For Low-Wage Workers And Their Employers, Jessica Glenn, Liz Watson

Published Reports

In 2009, workers and their families across the country felt the impact of serious economic downturn, with unemployment reaching a 26-year high. While recent news suggests things may be improving, we cannot forget that for many low-wage and hourly workers -- who now represent over a quarter of the U.S. workforce -- the recession only exacerbated their ongoing struggle to hold down quality jobs while caring for their families.

Low-wage workers face many of the same challenges that the rest of us face in reconciling our work, family and personal lives, but for many of these workers, it's simply a …