Navigating norms and structures: young mothers’ pathways to economic independence

Understanding the complex relationships between childcare, education and work is crucial to acknowledging how young mothers express agency in their pathways to economic independence. Instead of considering them as a policy target group at risk for multiple reasons, this research reverses the perspective by focusing on young mothers’ agency in school and paid employment. The study is set in the Netherlands, where economic independence has become a focal point of social policy and practice, especially for young people. It explores how young mothers navigate norms and structures of education and employment, drawing on 18 months of participant observation and 41 semi-structured interviews with young mothers. Notions of ‘everyday’ and ‘bounded’ agency are used in analysing structural limitations (e.g. irregular working hours in ‘women’s jobs’, a lack of maternity leave at school) and norms (e.g. completing higher education and finding a good job versus being primary caretakers, enjoying children and being role models). School and workplace structures reinforce contradictory discourses of motherhood and economic independence. Young mothers exhibit agency in considering their options around job security, work experience, wages, student loans and spending time with children. In doing so, they navigate structural and normative collisions of economic independence and mothering.     

Symbolic correlation integral

This paper aims to introduce the concept of symbolic correlation integral SC that is extensively used in many scientific fields. The new correlation integral SC avoids the noisy parameter 𝜀 of the classical correlation integral, defined by Grassberger and Procaccia (1983 Grassberger, P., Procaccia, I. (1983). Measuring the strangeness of strange attractors. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena 9(1–2):189–208.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and extensively used for constructing correlation-integral-based statistics, as in the BDS test. Once the free parameter 𝜀 disappears, it is possible to construct a nonparametric powerful test for independence that can also be used as a diagnostic tool for model selection. The symbolic correlation integral is also extended to deal with multivariate models, and a test for causality is proposed as an example of the theoretical power of the new concept. With extensive Monte Carlo simulations, the paper shows the good size and power performance of symbolic correlation-integral-based tests.     

Improved functional portmanteau tests

Functional time series is a popular method of forecasting in functional data analysis. The Box-Jenkins methodology for model building, with the aim of forecasting, includes three iterative steps of model identification, parameter estimation and diagnostic checking. Portmanteau tests are one of the most popular diagnostic checking tools. In particular, they are applied to find if the residuals of the fitted model are white noise. Gabrys and Kokoszka [Portmanteau test of independence for functional observations. J Am Stat Assoc. 2007;102(480):1338–1348.] proposed a portmanteau test of independence for functional observation based on Box and Pierce's statistic. Their statistic is too sensitive to the lag value, specially when the sample size is small. Here, two modifications of Gabrys and Kokoszka statistic are presented, which have superior properties in small samples. The efficiency of the modified statistics is demonstrated through a simulation study.     

Giving (Money) Back To Parents: Racial/Ethnic and Immigrant–Native Variation in Monetary Exchanges During the Transition to Adulthood

Scholars consistently find that parents provide economic support to their young adult children through the transition to adulthood. However, scholars rarely examine whether young adults contribute monetary resources to their parents. To test this proposition, I use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, and the case of “money for living expenses.” Overall, monetary independence is the modal category for all groups. However, when I compare across groups, I find that White young adults with native-born parentage are more likely to report monetary independence, African Americans are more likely to report monetary interdependence and Asian and Latino children of immigrants are more likely to report child-to-parent assistance compared to each other, with SES explaining most, but not all, of these differences. I argue that young adult offspring in non-White families are more likely to provide monetary support to their parents during the transition to adulthood. These transfers may deplete resources for non-White young adults and may exacerbate racial/ethnic inequality during the transition to adulthood.     

Estimation of the marginal expected shortfall under asymptotic independence

We study the asymptotic behavior of the marginal expected shortfall when the two random variables are asymptotic independent but positively associated, which is modeled by the so-called tail dependent coefficient. We construct an estimator of the marginal expected shortfall, which is shown to be asymptotically normal. The finite sample performance of the estimator is investigated in a small simulation study. The method is also applied to estimate the expected amount of rainfall at a weather station given that there is a once every 100 years rainfall at another weather station nearby.     

Max‐infinitely divisible models and inference for spatial extremes

For many environmental processes, recent studies have shown that the dependence strength is decreasing when quantile levels increase. This implies that the popular max‐stable models are inadequate to capture the rate of joint tail decay, and to estimate joint extremal probabilities beyond observed levels. We here develop a more flexible modeling framework based on the class of max‐infinitely divisible processes, which extend max‐stable processes while retaining dependence properties that are natural for maxima. We propose two parametric constructions for max‐infinitely divisible models, which relax the max‐stability property but remain close to some popular max‐stable models obtained as special cases. The first model considers maxima over a finite, random number of independent observations, while the second model generalizes the spectral representation of max‐stable processes. Inference is performed using a pairwise likelihood. We illustrate the benefits of our new modeling framework on Dutch wind gust maxima calculated over different time units. Results strongly suggest that our proposed models outperform other natural models, such as the Student‐t copula process and its max‐stable limit, even for large block sizes.     

Tail asymptotic of discounted aggregate claims with compound dependence under risky investment

This paper considers the tail asymptotic of discounted aggregate claims with compound dependence under risky investment. The price of risky investment is modeled by a geometric Lévy process, while claims are modeled by a one-sided linear process whose innovations further obeying a so-called upper tail asymptotic independence. When the innovations are heavy tailed, we derive some uniform asymptotic formulas. The results show that the linear dependence has significant impact on the tail asymptotic of discounted aggregate claims but the upper tail asymptotic independence is negligible.     

监察委员会人事管理与约束监督刍议

《监察法》的出台标志着监察制度改革的成果在法律层次上的确认,是国家在政治体制上进行顶层设计的一件大事。“一府一委两院”的政治新格局初步形成,深化监察制度改革依然是健全完善国家监督体系的重要路径。监察委员会的出现不同以往政治体制的改革,使行政监察迈向国家监察,监察制度实现了质的飞跃,其人事管理和“超级机关”的潜在威胁是不容忽视的。基于法治建设中具有普适价值的独立性与权力制约两原则,从人才选拔、人事培养到人事考核探索监察委员会的人事管理,从党的领导和外部机关约束监督的视角思量监察委员会的被监督问题。     

Global sensitivity analysis with dependence measures

Global sensitivity analysis with variance-based measures suffers from several theoretical and practical limitations, since they focus only on the variance of the output and handle multivariate variables in a limited way. In this paper, we introduce a new class of sensitivity indices based on dependence measures which overcomes these insufficiencies. Our approach originates from the idea to compare the output distribution with its conditional counterpart when one of the input variables is fixed. We establish that this comparison yields previously proposed indices when it is performed with Csiszár f-divergences, as well as sensitivity indices which are well-known dependence measures between random variables. This leads us to investigate completely new sensitivity indices based on recent state-of-the-art dependence measures, such as distance correlation and the Hilbert–Schmidt independence criterion. We also emphasize the potential of feature selection techniques relying on such dependence measures as alternatives to screening in high dimension.     

Violence and political culture in Mozambique

This article is an attempt at developing a lens through which political culture in Mozambique can be analysed, described and interpreted. It is based on the notion of a political teleology that emerged out of the conditions within which the country fought for its independence. The paper argues that violence in a symbolic and physical form played a central role in the constitution of this political teleology by, on the one hand, allowing the liberation movement to produce an account of Mozambican history which both gave legitimacy to its own struggle while at the same time undermining alternative accounts and, on the other, set the scene for the implementation of a national project that came to be primarily concerned with the reproduction of the claim to power of the liberation movement. Forty years of independence in Mozambique offer an ideal time frame to attempt the construction of such a lens.