Modeling interest rate cycles in India

The present study tries to examine the behaviour of various Indian interest rates such as call money rate, and yields on secondary market securities with maturity periods of 15–91 days, 1-year, 5-years and 10-years. In the first stage, the study investigates the determinants of interest rates and finds that although the interest rates depend on some domestic macroeconomic variables such as yield spread and expected exchange rate, they are mainly affected by the movements of international interest rates, although with some lags. The policy variables such as Bank Rate and Federal Funds Rate did not show any significant impact on any of the interest rates. Further, it was found that the interest rates in the very recent period show some cyclical movements similar to that of the developed countries. Future behaviour of interest rates show that the present cycle of each interest rate would peak at different time points. This expected behaviour in domestic interest rates could be due to the integration of the domestic economy with the international money and financial market. This trend may be same in most of the emerging economies of Asia.     

Adolescent grief: relationship category and emotional closeness

Bereaved adolescents (N = 90) who had experienced relatively common death losses (e.g., grandparent, friend) completed the Texas Revised Inventory of Grief and the Emotional Closeness Scale and Continuum. Results indicated that present grief was significantly higher for friend than for grandparent death loss. A MANOVA revealed that those in the high closeness group reported significantly higher mean scores on past and present grief than those in the low closeness group. Finally, in a hierarchal multiple regression, after demographic variables were entered (e.g., age, present at death), emotional closeness added significant variance to the prediction of past and present grief. This research contributes to the understanding of grief intensity following adolescents' most common death losses and highlights the importance of counselors' intentionally and directly assessing bereaved adolescents' perceived emotional closeness to the deceased as part of grief-related counseling.     

HOW LARGE ARE SEARCH FRICTIONS?

This paper shows that we can normalize job and worker characteristics so that, without frictions, there exists a linear relationship between wages on the one hand and worker and job type indices on the other. However, for five European countries and the United States we find strong evidence for a systematic concave relationship. An assignment model with search frictions provides a parsimonious explanation for our findings. This model yields two restrictions on the coefficients that fit the data well. Allowing for unobserved heterogeneity and measurement error, we find that reservation wages are 25% lower than they would be in a frictionless world. Our results relate to the literature on industry wage differentials and on structural identification in hedonic models. (JEL: J210, J300, J600, J230)     

Tests for assessment of agreement using probability criteria

For the assessment of agreement using probability criteria, we obtain an exact test, and for sample sizes exceeding 30, we give a bootstrap-t$t$ test that is remarkably accurate. We show that for assessing agreement, the total deviation index approach of Lin [2000. Total deviation index for measuring individual agreement with applications in laboratory performance and bioequivalence. Statist. Med. 19, 255–270] is not consistent and may not preserve its asymptotic nominal level, and that the coverage probability approach of Lin et al. [2002. Statistical methods in assessing agreement: models, issues and tools. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 97, 257–270] is overly conservative for moderate sample sizes. We also show that the nearly unbiased test of Wang and Hwang [2001. A nearly unbiased test for individual bioequivalence problems using probability criteria. J. Statist. Plann. Inference 99, 41–58] may be liberal for large sample sizes, and suggest a minor modification that gives numerically equivalent approximation to the exact test for sample sizes 30 or less. We present a simple and accurate sample size formula for planning studies on assessing agreement, and illustrate our methodology with a real data set from the literature.     

International adopters and their children: Birth culture ties

This study explores parents’ attitudes toward helping their internationally adopted children develop an appreciation for the cultures of the children’s birth countries and surveys the culture-related activities in which they and their children engage. While most parents believed their child’s primary attachment should be to American culture, they accorded great importance to their child forming ties to his/her birth culture. Both the adopted child’s region of origin and the parent’s gender had an impact on attitudes and activities. Parents who adopted from Asia and mothers generally accorded greater importance to and participated more frequently in cultural activities with their children than parents who adopted from Europe and fathers. Patricia Hanigan Scroggs is a foreign service officer with the U.S. Department of State and the mother of two daughters adopted from China. A specialist in economic affairs, she has served overseas in Mexico, Korea, and Japan and in various Washington assignments for the State Department. She conducted this research while a fellow in the State Department’s Una Chapman Cox Sabbatical Leave Program. She is presently studying Justice, Law, and Society and holds a graduate degree in forensic psychology from John Jay College of Criminal Justice.     

Who Are the Poor?

Here we present the subject of poverty in the United States as one that is central to a concern with social issues and justice and argue that its relative invisibility in psychology reflects the discipline's dominant middle-class standpoint. We describe, first, the articles in this issue, which are focused particularly on the voices of poor women in the United States. Then we examine poverty in terms of its economic indicators as well as its experiential correlates.     

DIALOGUES OF THE NATIONS: Revisiting Visions and Its Critics

Critics of Visions in this symposium raise three general questions. The question of inclusiveness is addressed by linking pertinent criteria to the book's aims; that of justifying national traditions by reviewing pertinent evidence; and that of the viability of dialogue by arguing that responsive communication does not entail full agreement. A number of particular issues the critics raise are addressed by the book's arguments regarding the relation of the discipline of sociology to its philosophical background, the international setting of early sociology, Durkheim's individualism, Weber's distinction between naturalism and interpretability, Marx's treatment of Feuerbach and of nationalism, and the relation between power and knowledge. This response concludes by explicating the proposal that the time may be ripe to rejoin a number of the elements of Aristotelian social science that had been delegated to various national traditions of social theory in the modern era.     

Public relations practice in Japan: an exploratory study

Ninety-four (62%) survey responses in the Japanese language from 151 corporate public relations professionals in Japan were analyzed to investigate how Japanese management styles have changed since the recent economic recession, and how present management styles have impacted public relations practice in Japan. Findings suggest today’s Japanese management styles are not a static system unaffected by the economic pressures, and that current public relations practices in Japan align more closely with mixed models of public relations practiced in Western societies.     

Effects of residential density on sonoran desert nocturnal rodents

We compared nocturnal rodent distributions among residential developments and in adjacent undeveloped native habitat remnants in Tucson, Arizona during October 1994. We trapped rodents in 2 low density (0.5 houses/ha) developments, 2 medium density (7.5 houses/ha) developments, and in 4 adjacent blocks of undeveloped native habitat using trap lines of 50 snap traps spaced at 2 traps every 10 meters. We compared species abundance, species richness, and total abundance among the 4 site types in a contingency table using a 2-tailed Fisher's exact test, and used post-hoc tests where the null hypothesis of no difference among sites was rejected. We encountered 144 individuals representing 5 species of nocturnal rodents in 1200 trap nights. Of 4 native rodent species, none were captured in medium housing density sites. House mice (Mus musculus) were captured only in medium housing density sites. Total rodent abundance was lower in both the medium density residential and the adjacent undeveloped sites than in either low density or adjacent undeveloped sites. Low density housing must be included in the developing matrix if the full complement of native nocturnal rodents is to be retained in Tucson.