Employer Incentives for Providing Informal On-the-job Training in the Presence of On-the-job Search

We analyze the provision of informal general training in a frictional labor market in which employers cannot commit to training levels and workers cannot commit to stay. We demonstrate that employers’ training decisions are driven by both an investment motive, to improve productivity, and a compensation motive, to increase employee retention. The investment motive decreases with higher wages, while the compensation motive increases. In our calibration exercises, the former dominates, which creates a negative relationship between wages and training. Furthermore, in contrast to recent studies missing the compensation motive, lessening the search frictions raises overall training levels due to enhanced compensation motives, approaching Becker’s result for a frictionless labor market.     

Residents’ preferred policy actions for shrinking cities

Cities facing a continued and prolonged process of population decline require innovative urban regeneration policies complementary to growth-oriented policies. Losing inhabitants involves a decrease in economic activity and social capital. Therefore citizens’ participation in defining policies to cope with population decline is being increasingly advocated. This research focused on four shrinking cities of Portugal to capture residents’ knowledge about the strengths and weaknesses of their city of residence as well as the policies and actions they prioritized for dealing with the population decline. The responses from 701 questionnaires show that economic revival policies as well as safety and accessibility policies were preferred. To put these policies into action, the recovery of industrial activity, the creation of business incubators, an improvement in law enforcement, and public lighting were ranked as top priorities. Rank-ordered logistic regression models were used to understand which variables influenced the residents’ rankings. We found that the evaluation of the city's characteristics impact the ranking of the policies and actions. Hence, residents show a high level of coherence when engaging in a discussion at the level of policy-making. Therefore, the findings support residents’ involvement in decision-making processes regarding urban regeneration in shrinking cities.     

When having many children pays: a case study from Taiwan

The objective of this paper is to investigate the direct financial cost and benefit of raising children during a demographic transition in Taiwan, and to examine whether fertility decline is consistent with Caldwell??s wealth flow theory, which states that fertility decline is caused by reduced benefits of children. The paper describes a method of estimating the average economic returns of children over the entire parental lifecycle, using a 42-year span of Taiwanese household and individual economic pseudo-panel data. Results show that returns to children may turn positive and are not highly negative all the time, as found in the previous literature.     

Inequality in voting power

This paper deals with the assessment of inequality in the distribution of voting power. Voting power is evaluated through a general concept of power measurement based on both the voting rule and the probability distribution over vote configurations. This general concept includes as particular cases the most usual power indices and other extensions of this traditional concept. Thus no particular power index is privileged in our approach. An inequality index over the class of all power profiles with a given number of voters generated by this general measure is then singled out by requiring reasonable properties. In order to compare profiles with different numbers of voters, two alternative principles are considered, which extend the said index consistently in two ways.Previous versions of this work were circulated under different titles. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under the Ramón y Cajal programme and under projects PB96-0247 and BEC2000-0875; from the European Commission under the Training and Mobility of Researchers programme (contract FMRX - CT966-0055); and from the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas. We also thank two anonymous referees for their comments.2 October 2001     

The impact of urbanization on family structure: the experience of Sarawak, Malaysia

This paper argues that women and men encounter the processes of migration and urbanization in very gendered ways. It examines state development policies and their role in accelerating the pace of urbanization, Using material from a recently concluded study on single mothers in the lower socio-economic strata, this paper explores the impact of these wider processes on the structure of the family and women from this strata specifically.     

On the performance of two clustering methods for spatial functional data

The performance of two clustering strategies for spatially correlated functional data based on the same measure of spatial dependence is examined and compared. In particular, the role of the spatial dependence computed by the trace-variogram function is analyzed. The main features of both procedures is shown through a simulation study based on a variety of practical scenarios easily encountered in the analysis of spatial functional data. An application on real data based on salinity curves is also presented.     

New compactly supported spatiotemporal covariance functions from SPDEs

Potential theory and Dirichlet’s priciple constitute the basic elements of the well-known classical theory of Markov processes and Dirichlet forms. This paper presents new classes of fractional spatiotemporal covariance models, based on the theory of non-local Dirichlet forms, characterizing the fundamental solution, Green kernel, of Dirichlet boundary value problems for fractional pseudodifferential operators. The elements of the associated Gaussian random field family have compactly supported non-separable spatiotemporal covariance kernels admitting a parametric representation. Indeed, such covariance kernels are not self-similar but can display local self-similarity, interpolating regular and fractal local behavior in space and time. The associated local fractional exponents are estimated from the empirical log-wavelet variogram. Numerical examples are simulated for illustrating the properties of the space–time covariance model class introduced.     

Improved inference for MCP-Mod approach using time-to-event endpoints with small sample sizes

The Multiple Comparison Procedures with Modeling Techniques (MCP-Mod) framework has been recently approved by the U.S. Food, Administration, and European Medicines Agency as fit-for-purpose for phase II studies. Nonetheless, this approach relies on the asymptotic properties of Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimators, which might not be reasonable for small sample sizes. In this paper, we derived improved ML estimators and correction for their covariance matrices in the censored Weibull regression model based on the corrective and preventive approaches. We performed two simulation studies to evaluate ML and improved ML estimators with their covariance matrices in (i) a regression framework (ii) the Multiple Comparison Procedures with Modeling Techniques framework. We have shown that improved ML estimators are less biased than ML estimators yielding Wald-type statistics that controls type I error without loss of power in both frameworks. Therefore, we recommend the use of improved ML estimators in the MCP-Mod approach to control type I error at nominal value for sample sizes ranging from 5 to 25 subjects per dose.     

COVID Health Structure Index: The Vulnerability of Brazilian Microregions

Social Indicators Research - Many developing countries have highly unequal health systems across their regions. The pandemic of COVID-19 brought an additional challenge, as hospital structures...     

Can sample size in qualitative research be determined a priori?

There has been considerable recent interest in methods of determining sample size for qualitative research a priori, rather than through an adaptive approach such as saturation. Extending previous literature in this area, we identify four distinct approaches to determining sample size in this way: rules of thumb, conceptual models, numerical guidelines derived from empirical studies, and statistical formulae. Through critical discussion of these approaches, we argue that each embodies one or more questionable philosophical or methodological assumptions, namely: a naïve realist ontology; a focus on themes as enumerable ‘instances’, rather than in more conceptual terms; an incompatibility with an inductive approach to analysis; inappropriate statistical assumptions in the use of formulae; and an unwarranted assumption of generality across qualitative methods. We conclude that, whilst meeting certain practical demands, determining qualitative sample size a priori is an inherently problematic approach, especially in more interpretive models of qualitative research.