Paper:ewp-hew/0501004 From: Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2005 21:16:10 -0600
Using the Africa Educational Trust (AET) as a case study, the primary aim of the research was to investigate whether or not the employment outcomes of those refugees who received financial grants to enable them attend their education/training courses were different from those who did not. 122 individuals who applied to AET for grants in 1993/94 were interviewed and data analysed using the Probit model and McNemar's Chi- squared test of significance. The study found that grant holders were more likely to successfully complete their courses than those who did not receive any grants and that there was a positive relationship between the level of study and the probability of later employment. Although the differences in subject area were not statistically significant, the results suggested that computing and IT studies were less likely to lead to employment than education/ social science and health studies.
EconWPA began as a conversation between Bob Parks and Larry Blume on January 28, 1993. I located Paul Ginsparg's archive (then xxx.lanl.gov) and he graciously installed his software on a Sun Sparc system which was supporting the department of economics email and computation. EconWPA began accepting papers July 1, 1993 and had ftp, email, gopher and web interfaces. The web interface for submissions was engineered into existence in July 1995. A complete and catastrophic machine failure in 1999 caused the loss of EconWPA's email new paper announcment service at which time there were over 15,000 subscriptions with over 8,000 unique email addresses.

I was told that I could keep operating EconWPA (as well as many other services including rfe.wustl.edu, barnett.wustl.edu, and three RePEc servers) but I would receive no support (hardware, software, or anthing else) and (as had been the case) no compensation. At that point, given the apparent low valuation of my activities by the department, and university, it made no sense for me to continue operating EconWPA or other services.
Thanks to all who have supported EconWPA in the past.
A Chinese curse states May you live in intersting times. I have. Bob Parks - Jan 2006