Designs for first-order interactions in paired comparison experiments with two-level factors

For paired comparison experiments involving options described by a common set of two-level factors a new method for generating exact designs is presented. These designs allow the efficient estimation of main effects and first-order interactions and perform better than alternative designs available in the literature.     

Happiness and altruism within the extended family

We propose a direct measure of altruism between parents and adult children, using survey data on happiness from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 2000–2004. The question of altruism within families has policy relevance, for example, to understand whether public transfers crowd out private ones. Previous empirical evidence, based on observed transfer behavior, has failed to establish a clear consensus. Using various cross section, panel data, and instrumental variable estimators, we find a robust association between the happiness of parents and that of their adult children. A 1 standard deviation increase in a child’s happiness is associated with the same increase in own happiness as that of a 20–45% increase in household income, depending on specification.     

Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in a model of fertility choice

We examine the relationship between assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and the microeconomics of fertility choice. Along the way, we develop a model consistent with between-country differences in overall fertility and fertility timing. Our analysis of ART centers around the distinction between biomedical and behavioral effects. While improvements in ART have the biomedical effect of raising fertility, they may cause some women who would otherwise have tried to have children earlier on in life to postpone childbirth to later in life when the conception success probability is lower. This behavioral effect of postponement may reduce the fertility rate.     

How Is Power Shared in Africa?

Is African politics characterized by concentrated power in the hands of a narrow group (ethnically determined) that then fluctuates from one extreme to another via frequent coups? Employing data on the ethnicity of cabinet ministers since independence, we show that African ruling coalitions are surprisingly large and that political power is allocated proportionally to population shares across ethnic groups. This holds true even restricting the analysis to the subsample of the most powerful ministerial posts. We argue that the likelihood of revolutions from outsiders and coup threats from insiders are major forces explaining allocations within these regimes. Alternative allocation mechanisms are explored. Counterfactual experiments that shed light on the role of Western policies in affecting African national coalitions and leadership group premia are performed.     

Archival or perceived measures of environmental uncertainty? Conceptualization and new empirical evidence

Environmental uncertainty is a major determinant in many managerial decisions and evaluations. Yet, there is no consensus what constitutes a valid measure of uncertainty to which executives can respond. This paper explicates conceptual and methodological differences between Archival Environmental Uncertainty (AEU) and Perceived Environmental Uncertainty (PEU).     

Measuring serial dependence in categorical time series

The analysis of time-indexed categorical data is important in many fields, e.g., in telecommunication network monitoring, manufacturing process control, ecology, etc. Primary interest is in detecting and measuring serial associations and dependencies in such data. For cardinal time series analysis, autocorrelation is a convenient and informative measure of serial association. Yet, for categorical time series analysis an analogous convenient measure and corresponding concepts of weak stationarity have not been provided. For two categorical variables, several ways of measuring association have been suggested. This paper reviews such measures and investigates their properties in a serial context. We discuss concepts of weak stationarity of a categorical time series, in particular of stationarity in association measures. Serial association and weak stationarity are studied in the class of discrete ARMA processes introduced by Jacobs and Lewis (J. Time Ser. Anal. 4(1):19–36, 1983). An intrinsic feature of a time series is that, typically, adjacent observations are dependent. The nature of this dependence among observations of a time series is of considerable practical interest. Time series analysis is concerned with techniques for the analysis of this dependence. (Box et al. 1994p. 1)     

Erste Ergebnisse faktischer Anonymisierung wirtschaftsstatistischer Einzeldaten

Summary: This paper presents first results of the project Factual anonymization of business microdata. The project aims at creating and providing scientific–use files of business data. For this, appropriate anonymization strategies and methods are created. The anonymization procedures are judged by whether they can guarantee the factual anonymity of company and operating data without limiting their potential value for statistical analysis. As an example the survey of German cost structure in the processing industry is considered. Here, both the impact of different anonymization methods on the potential use of the data as well as their effect on the re–identification risk is examined.

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Zusammenfassung: Mit diesem Beitrag werden erste Ergebnisse des Projektes Faktische Anonymisierung wirtschaftsstatistischer Einzeldaten vorgestellt. Ziel des Projektes ist es, die Grundlagen für die Erstellung von Scientific–use–files im Bereich der Unternehmens– und Betriebsdaten zu legen. Hierzu werden entsprechende Anonymisierungsverfahren und –strategien entwickelt. Die Anonymisierungsverfahren müssen danach beurteilt werden, ob sie die faktische Anonymität von Unternehmens– und Betriebsdaten sicherstellen können, ohne das Analysepotenzial über Gebühr einzuschränken. Am Beispiel der Kostenstrukturerhebung im Verarbeitenden Gewerbe werden erste Ergebnisse vorgestellt. Dabei wird sowohl untersucht, wie sich verschiedene Anonymisierungsmaßnahmen auf das Analysepotenzial der Daten auswirken, als auch welche Effekte sie auf das Re–Identifikationsrisiko haben.

     

Values and Democracy in Imperial Germany

The relationship between societal values and political, particularly democratic development has been of interest to many students of politics. This paper reports data on the values of German society before WW I. An instrument to measure value orientations on the basis of Action Theory is described and its underlying assumptions as well as those pertaining to the use of fiction as a source on values in historical periods are discussed. Findings are reported concerning Prussians and Southerners, two major groups in German society. The data show that Germany was characterized by high value heterogeneity of its population, a factor which contributed to the lack of national democratic development before WW I.