Hungarian verbal puzzles and the intensity of language contact

Grammaticality judgments of bilingual Hungarians in Slovakia and Ukraine vs. Yugoslavia show that overt objects are much more acceptable in the northern Slavic countries than in Yugoslavia. Two conflicting hypotheses have been advanced to explain this difference. The structural hypothesis claims that Serbian cliticization is responsible, while the socio-historical hypothesis claims that the difference in grammaticality judgments is due to a difference in the duration of Hungarian–Slavic language contact north of and south of present-day Hungary. Data from a seven-country survey (N = 846) show that there is a split between judgments in the northern vs. southern Slavic countries across a wide range of linguistic variables, which discredits the structural explanation for the object pro-drop variable, at least as the sole cause of change. Moreover, statistical analyses of 24 variables provide substantial empirical verification of Thomason and Kaufman's 'two crucial parameters of intensity of contact in a borrowing situation': time and level of bilingualism. It is shown that the 250 years of contact between Hungarian and Serbian has resulted in much smaller contact effects than the thousand-year-old contact of Hungarian with the northern Slavic languages. Bilingual Hungarians who constitute a local minority in the settlements where they live systematically favor the contact-induced variants of variables vis-a`-vis those who constitute a local majority.     

Squaring the welfare circle and government ideology: Greece and Spain in the 1990s

This article examines the "squaring the welfare circle" thesis and its usefulness to our understanding of welfare developments in Greece and Spain in the 1990s. The welfare state in both Greece and Spain was expanded considerably in the early 1980s by the newly elected socialist governments, only to hit the buffers of diminishing resources and rising demands in the late 1980s as well as the hostile neo-liberal welfare ideology. The process of welfare expansion was halted in the 1990s, labour market deregulation was encouraged and containment of welfare expenditure became the dominant aim of government policies. This article concentrates on the actual policies of governments in the 1990s rather than on the rhetoric of political parties. It concludes that governments of both the Left and the Right in both countries attempted to "square the welfare circle" mainly through reductions in the supply of welfare. This general conclusion is country-specific and may not apply to other countries involved in welfare restructuring. While recognizing the significance of institutional factors to welfare reform, the article concentrates on the outcomes of reforms rather than on the political process leading to them.     

Dual class shares,board of directors’ effectiveness and firm’s market value: an empirical study

This study aims to identify whether a relationship exists between the controlling shareholders’ voting power and outside directors’ effectiveness in maximizing firms’ financial performance. We analyze a panel data with 3057 observations for the 2000–2012 period using a random effects model, logit and probit regressions, and the two-stage model of Heckman in the Brazilian stock market. Our findings show that firms whose controlling shareholders use dual class shares to leverage their voting power have less independence from the board and worse financial performance and market value. Further, the percentage of outside directors tends to be ineffective in increasing the firm’s value, and in changing the firm’s chief executive officer (CEO) when (1) the controlling shareholder’s voting power is leveraged, or (2) when the CEO assumes a position on the board of directors simultaneously. We interpreted that these results are in line with the arguments in favor of the existence of a new agency cost, which is related to the undue obedience of board members to authority, such as the largest controlling shareholder or the CEO in Brazilian listed firms.     

Collective risk aversion

In this article we analyze the risk attitude of a group of heterogeneous agents and we develop a theory of comparative collective risk tolerance. In particular, we characterize how shifts in the distribution of individual levels of risk tolerance affect the group’s attitude towards risk. In a model with efficient risk-sharing and two agents an increase in the level of risk tolerance of one or of both agents might have an ambiguous impact on the collective level of risk tolerance; the latter increases for some levels of aggregate wealth while it decreases for other levels of aggregate wealth. For more general populations we characterize the effect of first-order like shifts (individual levels of risk tolerance more concentrated on high values) and second-order like shifts (more dispersion on individual levels of risk tolerance) on the collective level of risk tolerance. We also evaluate how shifts in the distribution of individual levels of risk tolerance impact the collective level of risk tolerance in a framework with exogenous egalitarian sharing rules. Our results permit to better characterize differences in risk taking behavior between groups and individuals and among groups with different distributions of risk preferences.     

Nutrient intake in day workers and shift workers

Abstract

The 24-h dietary intake, nutritional status parameters and psychosomatic factors of two-shift, three-shift and day workers were compared. Estimations of the dietary intake (across a work cycle) were made by use of a nutrient database. No significant differences were found between the groups for a large number of nutritional variables: intake of energy; intake and percentage of energy from protein, fat, total carbohydrates and sucrose; intake of coffee; and intake and density of vitamins and minerals. Only minor differences were found between the groups with regard to the quantitative intake of alcohol and calcium, and with regard to the quality of the diet (percentage of energy from alcohol, density of calcium). The groups differed significantly with respect to attitude towards work hours (three-shift workers being most negative in their attitude) and sleep disturbances (shift workers being most negative). The three-shift workers were more evening-oriented and they had higher concentrations of glucose in their blood. It was concluded that work hours not related to nutritional intake—at least not when total amounts across time are considered. It was also concluded that work hours were not related to Body Mass Index or blood lipids: triglycerides, total cholesterol, LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol and HDL (high-density lipoprotein) cholesterol.     

Children’s Experiences of Completing a Computer‐Based Violence Survey: Ethical Implications

This article aims to contribute to the discussion about the ethics of research on children when studying sensitive issues such as violence. The empirical analysis is based on the accounts given by children (11 377) who completed a computer‐based questionnaire about their experiences of violence (‘The Finnish Child Victim Survey 2008’) and their reflections on the survey. We argue that experiences of violence should not be excluded from the research agenda on children due to ethical reasons, but that a more sophisticated practice should be developed instead to meet the needs and rights of children as informants. © 2010 The Author(s). Journal compilation 2010 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited.     

Demography,Education, and Democracy: Global Trends and the Case of Iran

Reconstructions and projections of populations by age, sex, and educational attainment for 120 countries since 1970 are used to assess the global relationship between improvements in human capital and democracy. Democracy is measured by the Freedom House indicator of political rights. Similar to an earlier study on the effects of improving educational attainment on economic growth, the greater age detail of this new dataset resolves earlier ambiguities about the effect of improving education as assessed using a global set of national time series. The results show consistently strong effects of improving overall levels of educational attainment, of a narrowing gender gap in education, and of fertility declines and the subsequent changes in age structure on improvements in the democracy indicator. This global relationship is then applied to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Over the past two decades Iran has experienced the world's most rapid fertility decline associated with massive increases in female education. The results show that based on the experience of 120 countries since 1970, Iran has a high chance of significant movement toward more democracy over the following two decades.     

On the minimum expected quantity for the validity of the chi-squared test in 2 2 2 tables

A 2 2 2 contingency table can often be analysed in an exact fashion by using Fisher's exact test and in an approximate fashion by using the chi-squared test with Yates' continuity correction, and it is traditionally held that the approximation is valid when the minimum expected quantity E is E S 5. Unfortunately, little research has been carried out into this belief, other than that it is necessary to establish a bound E>E*, that the condition E S 5 may not be the most appropriate (Martín Andrés et al., 1992) and that E* is not a constant, but usually increasing with the growth of the sample size (Martín Andrés & Herranz Tejedor, 1997). In this paper, the authors conduct a theoretical experimental study from which they ascertain that E* value (which is very variable and frequently quite a lot greater than 5) is strongly related to the magnitude of the skewness of the underlying hypergeometric distribution, and that bounding the skewness is equivalent to bounding E (which is the best control procedure). The study enables estimating the expression for the above-mentioned E* (which in turn depends on the number of tails in the test, the alpha error used, the total sample size, and the minimum marginal imbalance) to be estimated. Also the authors show that E* increases generally with the sample size and with the marginal imbalance, although it does reach a maximum. Some general and very conservative validity conditions are E S 35.53 (one-tailed test) and E S 7.45 (two-tailed test) for alpha nominal errors in 1% h f h 10%. The traditional condition E S 5 is only valid when the samples are small and one of the marginals is very balanced; alternatively, the condition E S 5.5 is valid for small samples or a very balanced marginal. Finally, it is proved that the chi-squared test is always valid in tables where both marginals are balanced, and that the maximum skewness permitted is related to the maximum value of the bound E*, to its value for tables with at least one balanced marginal and to the minimum value that those marginals must have (in non-balanced tables) for the chi-squared test to be valid.