Many states have experienced closures of abortion clinics in response to a variety of circumstances, such as legislative acts or threats of violence. A recent prominent example occurred in Texas following the 2013 passage of Texas House Bill 2, which banned abortion after 20 weeks, required doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, and held abortion clinics to the same standards as other surgical centers.1 The Supreme Court struck down the law in 2016 for placing an undue burden on women seeking abortion care.2 Still, Grossman et al. (2017) documented a decline in providers from 41 in 2012 to 17 in June 2016, including a reduction of abortion by 14% between 2013 and 2014. For this report, we collected information on abortion service provider locations in Wisconsin, and those nearest to the state border in Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, and Iowa. This report documents changes in distances to the nearest abortion provider for Wisconsin residents over the period 2010-2017.

For public managers facing political and structural constraints, transformational leadership promises to meaningfully improve outcomes by communicating an inspiring vision of the organization. But this promise rests to a great degree upon the communication skills and behaviors of the leader. A better understanding of how transformational leadership functions in organizations therefore requires a deeper application of theory from the field of communication. We explore the question of what communication behaviors facilitate transformational leadership. We apply a media richness framework to propose that transformational leaders will be most effective when employing a face-to-face dialogue approach to communication. Using a multi-source longitudinal research design, we find support for this proposition in an empirical test on 256 Danish tax units, lower- and upper secondary schools, childcare centers, and bank branches. We also find that size matters, with the effectiveness of face-to-face dialogue declining as the organization becomes larger.

Global current account imbalances have reappeared, although the extent and distribution of these imbalances are noticeably different from those experienced in the middle of the last decade. What does that recurrence mean for our understanding of the origin and nature of such imbalances? Will imbalances persist over time? Informed by empirical estimates of the determinants of current account imbalances encompassing the period after the global recession, I find that – as before – the observable manifestations of the factors driving the global saving glut have had limited explanatory power for the time series variation in imbalances. Nonethelesss, fiscal factors have accounted for a noticeable share of the recent variation in imbalances, including in the US and Germany. Examining observable policy actions, it’s clear that net official flows have been associated with some share of imbalances, although tracing out the motivations for intervention is difficult. Looking forward, it’s clear that policy can influence global imbalances, although some component of the US deficit will likely remain given the US role in generating safe assets.

We investigate whether and to what extent macroprudential policies affect the financial link between the center economies (CEs, i.e., the U.S., Japan, and the Euro area), and the peripheral economies (PHs). We first estimate the correlation of the policy interest rates between the CEs and the PHs and use that as a measure of financial sensitivity. We then estimate the determinants of the estimated measure of financial sensitivity as a function of country-specific macroeconomic conditions and policies. The potential determinant of our focus is the variable that represents the extensity of macroprudential policies. From the estimation exercise, we find that a more extensive implementation of macroprudential policies would lead PHs to (re)gain monetary independence from the CEs when the CEs implement expansionary monetary policy; when PHs run current account deficit; when they hold lower levels of international reserves (IR); when their financial markets are relatively closed; when they are experiencing an increase in net portfolio flows; and when they are experiencing credit expansion.

Performance data allows politicians to exert accountability over public organizations, even as ideological biases can affect how they interpret such data. However, we know little about how motivated decision-makers prioritize goals when facing multiple pieces of contradictory performance data that reflect the competing goals of public services. Such goal conflict is an inherent aspect of public management. To understand its implications for the use of performance data use we develop a theory of goal reprioritization. We start by assuming that elected officials have preferences between specific policy goals, and about governance processes – such as a preference for public or private service provision. When elected officials face contradictory pieces of performance data, governance preferences drive performance evaluations to the point that they are willing to reweight their goal preferences to minimize cognitive dissonance. We offer experimental evidence of this process, showing that elected officials asked to evaluate school performance reprioritize between two distinct policy goals for schools – test scores and student well-being – to fit with their governance preferences. Reprioritization is an attractive strategy since it allows elected officials to claim they are using performance data, even as underlying governance preferences lead them to set aside the evaluative goal-based criteria by which they would otherwise make performance evaluations. In other words, preferences concerning the nature of government can trump goal preferences when decision-makers use performance data.

Prior research suggests that volunteering benefits not only the recipient of help, but also the volunteer, who enjoys psychological and health benefits. This study investigates how volunteering and motivation for volunteering is associated with cumulative life-satisfaction among older adults. The results show that volunteering, even volunteering that occurred three decades earlier in one’s life, is associated with cumulative life-satisfaction at retirement age. The results suggest that why people volunteer matters in assessing life-satisfaction. Volunteers who are motivated by a desire to help others enjoy higher life-satisfaction. By contrast, volunteering for self-oriented reasons is either not associated or has a negative association with life-satisfaction.