Continuous covariate frailty models for censored and truncated clustered data

Using some logarithmic and integral transformation we transform a continuous covariate frailty model into a polynomial regression model with a random effect. The responses of this mixed model can be ‘estimated’ via conditional hazard function estimation. The random error in this model does not have zero mean and its variance is not constant along the covariate and, consequently, these two quantities have to be estimated. Since the asymptotic expression for the bias is complicated, the two-large-bandwidth trick is proposed to estimate the bias. The proposed transformation is very useful for clustered incomplete data subject to left truncation and right censoring (and for complex clustered data in general). Indeed, in this case no standard software is available to fit the frailty model, whereas for the transformed model standard software for mixed models can be used for estimating the unknown parameters in the original frailty model. A small simulation study illustrates the good behavior of the proposed method. This method is applied to a bladder cancer data set.     

The Measurement of Intellectual Influence

This paper examines the problem of measuring intellectual influence based on data on citations between scholarly publications. We follow an axiomatic approach and find that the properties of invariance to reference intensity, weak homogeneity, weak consistency, and invariance to splitting of journals characterize a unique ranking method. This method is different from those regularly used in economics and other social sciences.     

Identification of average marginal effects under misspecification when covariates are normal

A previously known result in the econometrics literature is that when covariates of an underlying data generating process are jointly normally distributed, estimates from a nonlinear model that is misspecified as linear can be interpreted as average marginal effects. This has been shown for models with exogenous covariates and separability between covariates and errors. In this paper, we extend this identification result to a variety of more general cases, in particular for combinations of separable and nonseparable models under both exogeneity and endogeneity. So long as the underlying model belongs to one of these large classes of data generating processes, our results show that nothing else must be known about the true DGP—beyond normality of observable data, a testable assumption—in order for linear estimators to be interpretable as average marginal effects. We use simulation to explore the performance of these estimators using a misspecified linear model and show they perform well when the data are normal but can perform poorly when this is not the case.     

Work histories and workers’ failure to satisfy pension contribution requirements: A comparison of Mexico and Uruguay

Comparing Mexico and Uruguay, this article examines the work history of workers and the challenges they face to satisfy the minimum contribution period for eligibility to receive a contributory old-age pension. Administrative data on work histories is used to formulate a survival model aimed at estimating hazard rates of entering and transitioning out of a given contribution status. This model is then used to perform a Monte Carlo simulation to forecast contribution histories. Results suggest that the hazard rate is negatively associated with the length of a worker’s spell in his or her current status and warn that, both in Mexico and Uruguay, a significant group of workers will find it difficult to gain entitlement to a contributory pension in old age. The manner in which each of these national systems has addressed the challenges associated with low contribution densities may explain the two countries’ very different coverage results.     

‘I open the coffin and here I am’: disability as oppression and education as liberation in the construction of personal identity

This article presents a case study focused on the experiences of Rafael, a resilient young musician. The research is based on 180 records made through interviews, focus groups, observations and documentary collection, involving 190 informants. The data analysis shows that social systems create subordinated and stigmatised conditions of experience for people with disabilities which lead to social exclusion and reification. This understanding of disability as oppression (which is the ‘coffin of the dead’) can be combated by means of education, understood as resistance to inequality. This can be effected by questioning the social order and power relationships, thus striving to produce the possibility of being a subject. In this way Rafael has been able to construct his identity relatively autonomously, challenging social mandates that led him to exclusion and denied his existence as a subject. In his own words: ‘I open the coffin and here I am’.     

School counsellors and cultural diversity management in Spanish secondary schools: the role of relations with other educators and intervention models used in care of immigrant students

During the last 20 years, the influx of immigrant pupils in Spanish schools has taken up much of school counsellors’ agendas. This leads us to reflect upon the status and role of educational guidance in terms of cultural diversity management, particularly focusing on two elements that may potentially help understand the situation: relations with other educational agents and the intervention model applied. The field work for this study was carried out during an academic semester in four secondary schools in Huelva. In addition to the analysis of official school documentation, remarks and field notes, semi-structured interviews were carried out and a discussion group was held with the four counsellors. Counsellors are trying to overcome an intervention model that is mainly therapeutic in nature and make space in their schedules for a way of working that is more focused on prevention and advisory services, incorporating the participation of other educational actors. But this is not an easy task. The possibility of generating changes would encourage better integration of cultural diversity in the life of schools, rather than treating it as a negative/deficit view, as an occasional issue, individual and isolated from the sum of school activities and other members of the education community.     

Through their eyes: seeing experiences of settlement in photographs taken by refugee background youth in Melbourne,Australia

Although ‘refugees’ are frequently represented in visual media, it is predominantly as the central subject matter and rarely are they positioned as the photographers of their own journeys. In this article, we present photographic images that have been taken by refugee background youth portraying their experiences of the first years of settlement in Australia. We consider how, in our longitudinal research conducted with 120 refugee background youth, visual materials can provide equally important yet different insights in comparison to written or spoken narratives on the experiences of refugee settlement. Through an examination of the photograph’s visual content, we explore the ways in which they portrayed their early experiences of external suburban settlement environments and their depictions of interior spaces and home-making practices. We discuss how these visual insights capture an alternative way of seeing the experiences of becoming at home as the youth become emplaced post-resettlement in Australia. We argue that the photographs taken by these refugee background youth illustrate how visual methods and materials can provide equally important but often overlooked insights into early settlement experiences. Importantly, the photographic images offer a way of portraying the people, places and sentiments that are central to the everyday lives of refugee background youths in ways that oral and written narratives cannot.     

Intergenerational mobility of housework time in the United Kingdom

This paper analyzes the relationship between parents’ time devoted to housework and the time devoted to housework by their children. Using data from the Multinational Time Use Study for the UK, we find positive intergenerational correlations in housework for both parents, indicating that the more time parents devote to housework, the more time their children will devote to housework. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, we find that a higher father–mother housework ratio is positively related to a higher child–mother housework ratio, even after allowing for individual fixed-effects. In order to address the potential exacerbation of errors-in-variables arising from the fixed-effects specification, we instrument the father–mother ratio of housework using father’s and mother’s lagged weekly working hours. The Instrumental-Variable estimates fully support the fixed-effects estimates, and suggest that the latter should be regarded as a lower bound. We also present evidence of the link between housework during adolescence and during adulthood, which may indicate that housework time during adulthood depends on the housework time during childhood, which may also be affected by parents’ housework time. Our results contribute to the field of the intergenerational mobility of behaviors.     

Deprived of human rights

Abstract

In June 2018 the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities published a report on the educational system in Spain, in response to some complaints submitted by SOLCOM (Association for Community solidarity and social inclusion of people with functional diversity). The report has had a substantial impact. A few months earlier, in February 2018, people from all over Spain had taken part in a workshop held at the Universidad de Málaga, as part of a research project entitled ‘Emerging Narratives about Inclusive Schools Based on the Social Model of Disability: Resistance, Resilience and Social Change’. The project aims to gather accounts of activist experiences from families and professionals who determinedly struggle to make schools places where all children are recognised through presence, participation, learning and success in the pre-compulsory and post-compulsory education stages. Both the Committee’s report and the statements made by relatives and activists at the workshop illustrated and bore witness to a systematic violation of many children’s right to education solely due to their disability.     

On the welfare loss caused by inequality of opportunity

Based on the ethical principle of equality of opportunity, this paper presents a measure of the welfare loss that is caused by an unfair distribution of a particular outcome (income, health, education, etc). The key idea is that a fair society should produce outcomes that depend on individuals’ effort and not on their external circumstances such as gender, socioeconomic background, etc. We propose measuring inequality of opportunity as the welfare loss attributed to the outcome differences among individuals who exert a similar level of effort. Our results are in line with those aspects of fairness literature that give priority to the ex post compensation approach to equality of opportunity. Finally, we present an empirical application for the measurement of the welfare loss in the income distribution in Europe. We have observed a high degree of heterogeneity among European countries. The welfare loss due to inequality of opportunity ranges in those, from basically zero to almost one fifth of their potential welfare.