Risk-Based Analysis of the Danish Pork Salmonella Program: Past and Future

The Danish pork Salmonella control program was initiated in 1993 in response to a prominent pork-related outbreak in Copenhagen. It involved improved efforts at slaughter hygiene (postharvest) and on-farm (preharvest) surveillance and control. After 10 years, 95 million Euros, significant reductions in seropositive herds, Salmonella positive carcasses, and pork-attributable human cases (PAHC), questions have arisen about how best to continue this program. The objective of this study was to provide some analysis and information to address these questions. The methods used include a computer simulation model constructed of a series of Excel workbooks, one for each simulated year and scenario ( http://www.ifss.iastate/DanSalmRisk ). Each workbook has three modules representing the key processes affecting risk: seropositive pigs leaving the farm (Production), carcass contamination after slaughter (Slaughter), and PAHC of Salmonella (Attribution). Parameter estimates are derived from an extensive farm-to-fork database collected by industry and government and managed by the Danish Zoonosis Centre ( http://www.food.dtu.dk ). Retrospective (1994–2003) and prospective (2004–2013) simulations were evaluated. The retrospective simulations showed that, except for the first few years (1994–1998), the on-farm program had minimal impact in reducing the number of positive carcasses and PAHC. Most of the reductions in PAHC up to 2003 were, according to this analysis, due to various improvements in abattoir processes. Prospective simulations showed that minimal reductions in human health risk (PAHC) could be achieved with on-farm programs alone. Carcass decontamination was shown as the most effective means of reducing human risk, reducing PAHC to about 10% of the simulated 2004 level.     

The Viability of Career Maturity Theory: A Developmental—Contextual Perspective

The critical role of the timing of person—context interactions is important in the conceptualization of the school-to-work transition. It is argued that career maturity, with its focus on the individual and its ties to stage models and notions of age-appropriateness, gives insufficient attention to the particular contexts of time and culture within which it may be observed. The use of recent advances in developmental theory is suggested as a viable alternative for understanding developmental transitions. Findings from the research literature and from a recent study of young adults from former East Germany and former West Germany are cited in support of this proposal. These findings highlight limitations of the construct of career maturity in showing how individual differences and contextual factors contribute to the school-to-work transition in contrasting environments of former East and West Germany.     

Using expletive insertion to pursue and sanction in interaction

This article uses conversation analysis to examine constructions like who the fuck is that—sequence‐initiating actions into which an expletive like the fuck has been inserted. We describe how this turn‐constructional practice fits into and constitutes a recurrent sequence of escalating actions. In this sequence, it is used to pursue an adequate response after an inadequate one was given, and sanction the recipient for that inadequate response. Our analysis contributes to sociolinguistic studies of swearing by offering an account of swearing as a resource for social action.     

Religion und Bildungserfolg im Migrationskontext – Theoretische Argumente,empirische Befunde und offene Fragen

Religion has received extensive attention as a factor influencing immigrants’ integration. This paper examines the role of religion in explaining ethnic educational inequalities in Germany. Due to a general lack of research in this field, the paper provides an overview of existing empirical findings, specifies theoretical arguments on how religious affiliation, belief and participation possibly affect educational achievement among children of immigrants. Using data from the first wave of the “Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in four European Countries” collected in 2010/11 the paper tests key arguments on the influence of religion on the educational attainment among 14-year-old immigrant and non-immigrant students at German schools. Compared to other religious groups, Muslims display lower rates of educational achievement. However, this can be largely explained by their social background and is independent from their levels of individual religiosity. Interestingly, individual religiosity has a positive effect on the educational achievement among Protestant students, whether with or without a migration background.     

Examination and visualisation of the simplifying assumption for vine copulas in three dimensions

Vine copulas are a highly flexible class of dependence models, which are based on the decomposition of the density into bivariate building blocks. For applications one usually makes the simplifying assumption that copulas of conditional distributions are independent of the variables on which they are conditioned. However this assumption has been criticised for being too restrictive. We examine both simplified and non‐simplified vine copulas in three dimensions and investigate conceptual differences. We show and compare contour surfaces of three‐dimensional vine copula models, which prove to be much more informative than the contour lines of the bivariate marginals. Our investigation shows that non‐simplified vine copulas can exhibit arbitrarily irregular shapes, whereas simplified vine copulas appear to be smooth extrapolations of their bivariate margins to three dimensions. In addition to a variety of constructed examples, we also investigate a three‐dimensional subset of the well‐known uranium data set and visually detect the fact that a non‐simplified vine copula is necessary to capture its complex dependence structure.     

DOES A GOOD CENTRAL BANKER MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

The personalities of central bankers moved center stage during the recent financial crisis. Indeed, several central bankers even became “superstars.” In this article, we investigate whether superstar central bankers have an impact on economic performance. We employ school grades given to central bankers by the financial press, defining as superstars those central bankers receiving the top grade. First, we explain the grades in a probit estimation with measures of economic performance, institutional features, and personal characteristics. Second, we employ a matching approach to account for the endogeneity of grading with respect to economic performance. Using entropy balancing, we identify credible counterfactuals for top‐graded central bankers, that is, nonsuperstar central bankers who face similar situations. Comparing the economic performance of both groups, we find that superstars do indeed matter: a top‐graded central banker faces a significantly more favorable output‐inflation tradeoff than his peers. This effect is driven by outstanding central bankers in both advanced and emerging economies and is especially prevalent in the precrisis subsample. (JEL E52, E58)     

Religion und Gesellschaft – Aktuelle Perspektiven

Increasing public attention to religious questions has in the past years re-invigorated the sociology of religion. As an introduction to the present special issue we outline some institutional and intellectual developments of German language sociology of religion since the post-war period. We furthermore highlight five current trends of the subdiscipline that pertain to the concept of religion, to debates over secularization, to methodological questions of sociological explanation, to interdisciplinary research on religions under conditions of globalization, and to the refinement of quantitative as well as qualitative research methods. Having argued that these trends attest to an increasingly global-comparative approach, we conclude with some research perspectives for future sociology of religion.     

Problems related to confidence intervals for impulse responses of autoregressive processes

Confidence intervals for impulse responses computed from autoregressive processes are considered. A detailed analysis of the methods in current use shows that they are not very reliable in some cases. In particular, there are theoretical reasons for them to have actual coverage probabilities which deviate considerably from the nominal level in some situations of practical importance. For a simple case alternative bootstrap methods are proposed which provide correct results asymptotically.