Ideas versus ideology: The origins of modern labor economics

Starting with its early twentieth century origins, the development of Labor Economics is traced to the present. We describe an intellectual revolution in which an earlier tra-dition that focused primarily on the institution of the labor union has been replaced by a perspective that emphasizes the various roles played by labor markets in an eco-nomic system. That earlier tradition contained very significant ideological elements, whereas its successor deals much more with the world of ideas. In the course of the debate, which still continues, ideas triumphed over ideology and created modern Labor Economics.     

Foster parenting: A developmental model

This paper proposes a developmental framework for foster parents and outlines four distinct growth stages. Such a framework can be of value to program administrators who are required to assess foster parent development during the crucial matching process. To draw a distinction between each developmental stage, specific instrumental tasks and indicators are outlined.     

Psychological Control and Autonomy Granting: Opposite Ends of a Continuum or Distinct Constructs?

This article explores the relationship between parental psychological control and parental autonomy granting, and the relations between these constructs and indicators of adolescent psychosocial functioning, in a sample of 9,564 adolescents from grades 9 to 12. Participants completed a comprehensive parenting questionnaire as well as several measures of psychosocial adjustment. Confirmatory factor analyses of the parenting items revealed discrete factors for psychological control and autonomy granting, suggesting that these are distinct parenting constructs rather than opposite ends of a parental control continuum. Moreover, structural equation modeling showed that these factors were weakly correlated and differentially related to adolescent internalizing symptoms. Findings have implications for future conceptualization and measurement of psychological control and autonomy granting, and for research examining their effects on adolescent development.     

Flipping and ex post aggregation

We show that Bayesian ex post aggregation is unstable with respect to refinements. Suppose a group of Bayesians use ex post aggregation. Since it is a joint problem, each agent's problem is captured by the same model, but probabilities and utilities may vary. If they analyze the same situation in more detail, their refined analysis should preserve their preferences among acts. However, ex post aggregation could bring about a preference reversal on the group level. Ex post aggregation thus depends on how much information is used and may keep oscillating (“flipping”) as one keeps adding more information. Received: 16 April 2002/Accepted: 27 May 2002     

On strategy-proofness and essentially single-valued cores: A converse result

In a general model of indivisible good allocation, S?nmez (1999) established that, whenever the core is nonempty for each preference profile, if an allocation rule is strategy-proof, individually rational and Pareto optimal, then the rule is a selection from the core correspondence, and the core correspondence must be essentially single-valued. This paper studies the converse claim of this result. I demonstrate that whenever the preference domain satisfies a certain condition of `richness', if the core correspondence is essentially single-valued, then any selection from the core correspondence is strategy-proof (even weakly coalition strategy-proof, in fact). In particular, on the domain of preferences in which each individual has strict preferences over his own assignments and there is no consumption externality, such an allocation rule is coalition strategy-proof. And on this domain, coalition strategy-proofness is equivalent to Maskin monotonicity, an important property in implementation theory. Received: 22 February 2000/Accepted: 22 January 2002 I am grateful to Ryo-ichi Nagahisa, Shinji Ohseto, Hiroshi Ono, Tomoichi Shinotsuka and Shigehiro Serizawa for valuable comments. And I am indebted to two anonymous referees for useful suggestions. Especially, I owe the present proof of Lemma 2 to one referee. I also thank Yukihiko Funaki, Atsushi Kajii, Mamoru Kaneko, Eiichi Miyagawa, Tatsuyoshi Saijo, Manimay Sengupta, Yves Sprumont, Yoshikatsu Tatamitani, Manabu Toda, Takashi Ui, Takehiko Yamato, Naoki Yoshihara and the participants of the seminars in Hokkaido University, Kansai University, ISER (Osaka University), Otaru University of Commerce and Tsukuba University. All errors are my own responsiblity.     

Improving the contributions of technology assessment to the health care system of the U.S.A.

Summary Based on 14 case studies of highly effective therapies and the reasons they succeeded less frequently than they could, we propose a variety of steps to improve the health care system of the U.S.A. Whatever proposal emerges from current national debates until innovations are shown to be safe and effective, they should not be supported; when slightly better technologies are much more expensive than other good ones we need to consider appropriate choices carefully; simplified billing and bookkeping would reduce our costs; when a technology is rapidly introduced cautionnary measures may be needed; tracking immunization and repairing their omissions requires a new system; educational programs such as seen effective in hypertension should be applied in other areas such as vaccination; in organ transplantation the nation should consider “presumed consent”; our payment system sometimes creates perverse incentives and therefore needs review; and the preferences of the public in allocation of health resources need to be discovered once the public is informed about the issues. Research supported by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.     

The analysis of incomplete data using stochastic covariates

In the development of many diseases there are often associated random variables which continuously reflect the progress of a subject towards the final expression of the disease (failure). At any given time these processes, which we call stochastic covariates, may provide information about the current hazard and the remaining time to failure. Likewise, in situations when the specific times of key prior events are not known, such as the time of onset of an occult tumour or the time of infection with HIV-1, it may be possible to identify a stochastic covariate which reveals, indirectly, when the event of interest occurred. The analysis of carcinogenicity trials which involve occult tumours is usually based on the time of death or sacrifice and an indicator of tumour presence for each animal in the experiment. However, the size of an occult tumour observed at the endpoint represents data concerning tumour development which may convey additional information concerning both the tumour incidence rate and the rate of death to which tumour-bearing animals are subject. We develop a stochastic model for tumour growth and suggest different ways in which the effect of this growth on the hazard of failure might be modelled. Using a combined model for tumour growth and additive competing risks of death, we show that if this tumour size information is used, assumptions concerning tumour lethality, the context of observation or multiple sacrifice times are no longer necessary in order to estimate the tumour incidence rate. Parametric estimation based on the method of maximum likelihood is outlined and is applied to simulated data from the combined model. The results of this limited study confirm that use of the stochastic covariate tumour size results in more precise estimation of the incidence rate for occult tumours.     

Gender-specific changes in students' sexual behaviors and attitudes at a southeastern university between 1973 and 1988.

This study investigated the gender-specific, self-reported sexual behaviors and attitudes of never-married college students attending a southeastern university in 1973 and 1988. Data were collected by means of a mailed questionnaire that remained essentially unchanged for both years. The authors found that both men and women reported an increase in heterosexual relationships that included sexual intercourse and a decrease in nonsexual relationships with the other gender. The majority of the students perceived themselves as adequately informed about sexuality and satisfied with their relationships, although the proportion of men who reported being satisfied with their relationships declined over the 15 years. The students indicated that sexuality education should focus primarily on information about AIDS and on preparation for marriage.