Male Child Sexual Abuse: A Phenomenology of Betrayal

Being deeply understood relies on the ability of the social work clinician to have authentic and genuine empathy for their client. This phenomenological study sought to understand the lived experience of men sexually abused as boys in their childhood, and what life is like for them as sexual abuse survivors in adulthood. Analyses of fourteen male survivors’ narratives into the abuse they experienced as children, and the meaning they make of that experience today, offer insights for therapists. Findings suggest that therapists have a responsibility to ask male clients about sexual victimization, even when this is not the presenting problem but they exhibit sexual abuse related problems; an obligation to educate one’s self on responding therapeutically to disclosure; a duty to receive training to counsel sexually victimized males; a responsibility to advocate for the development of men’s services; and taking an active role in shifting attitudes towards men’s vulnerabilities.

Business Diversification in the Securities Industry: Implications for the Exchanges

The growth strategies of the listed exchanges affect the morphology of the securities industry as they are focused on the consolidation of trading infrastructures and, on the other hand, on the diversification of the business model. New “conglomeral exchanges” are characterized by a far-reaching production function. Since they integrate product-service lines which are complementary, they potentially herald competitive distorsions limiting the investor’s freedom of choice and prejudicing the interest for the best result from the investment.

Chinese Contract Law and the Economic Reform

China’s previous contract laws had many contradictions and failed to meet the needs of China’s developing market economy. Although some problems still need to be dealt with, the unified contract law is more advanced, systematic and plays an important role in fostering and encouraging transactions.

Credit Constraints and Human Capital Investment in College Education

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study 2001 Human Capital Investment Survey, this article examines the impact of credit market constraints on investment in college education. The effect of family income on college attendance may not be as big as perceived in some previous studies. The interest rates faced by children from middle families are the lowest in the credit market. The research suggests that various government programs aiming to help children from poor families may be effective, but only at the extensive margin—by improving their access to college education. For those who get into college, underinvestment by students from poor families remains a significant problem.

Pathways to the Clinician’s Experience of Empathy in Engaging Single Mothers at Risk for Physical Abuse of their Children

Based upon an analysis of interviews from a qualitative study with twelve agency-based clinical social workers, this paper recounts three “situational pathways” through which these workers were able to experience empathy in the process of engaging low-income single mothers whose presenting picture involved physical aggression toward their symptomatic children who the workers were also seeing for therapy. The paper describes and utilizes self-psychological and intersubjective concepts to understand the therapeutic contexts that may enhance the worker’s potential for experientially understanding the client’s viewpoint. The relevance of the findings for practice and training is discussed.

The response of household parental investment to child endowments

The theoretical and empirical literature on parental investment focuses on whether child-specific parental investments reinforce or compensate for a child’s initial endowments. However, many parental investments, such as neighborhood quality and family size and structure, are shared wholly or in part among all children in a household. The empirical results of this paper imply that such household parental investments compensate for low endowments, as proxied by low birth weight.

Evidence of the Effectiveness of Child Support and Visitation: Examining Food Insecurity among Children with Nonresident Fathers

Over six million children who reside with a single mother and have a father who lives elsewhere are food insecure. This study examines the effectiveness of two aspects of nonresident father involvement, in-person visitation and financial contributions, in reducing food acquisition problems using data from the National Survey of America’s Families. We find that frequent visits by nonresident fathers are related to a reduced likelihood that the resident mother’s household will experience indicators of food insecurity. The effects of child support receipt on reducing food acquisition problems, however, are less consistent. Our results support policies designed to recognize and encourage nonresidential parents to make both monetary and nonmonetary contributions to the lives of their children.

The Monster Within: Countertransference Reflections on a Gay Adolescent’s Struggle with Sexual Identity

This paper concerns the author’s countertransference reflections on her work with a gay adolescent who identifies with powerfully destructive internal objects, including Hitler and the Monster. The author describes her countertransference inquiry through which she experiences her own potential destructiveness in order to help accommodate her adolescent patient’s rejected and disowned self states.

Reduced prizes and increased effort in contests

We study the general class of two-player public-policy contests and specify the asymmetry condition under which a more restrained government intervention that reduces the contestants’ prizes has the “perverse” effect of increasing their aggregate lobbying efforts.

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Cutting Porter’s Last Diamond: Competitive and Comparative (Dis)advantages in the Dutch Flower Cluster

The Dutch are the world’s leaders in the flower business even though they seem to lack comparative advantage in the traditional sense. Comparative advantages played a role in the history of the Dutch flower cluster and they still have a role today. Based on a critic of Porter’s theories, the investigation suggests that the exploitation of comparative advantages is allowed only to those firms and clusters that already possess a competitive advantage, based on technology, logistics infrastructure, innovation and human skills. So that comparative advantages and competitive advantages join in a sort of helix process based on social innovation and collective learning.

Parents’ Beliefs about Emotions and Children’s Recognition of Parents’ Emotions

This study investigated parents’ emotion-related beliefs, experience, and expression, and children’s recognition of their parents’ emotions with 40 parent-child dyads. Parents reported beliefs about danger and guidance of children’s emotions. While viewing emotion-eliciting film clips, parents self-reported their emotional experience and masking of emotion. Children and observers rated videos of parents watching emotion-eliciting film clips. Fathers reported more masking than mothers and their emotional expressions were more difficult for both observers and children to recognize compared with mothers’ emotional expressions. For fathers, but not mothers, showing clearer expressions was related to children’s general skill at recognizing emotional expressions. Parents who believe emotions are dangerous reported greater masking of emotional expression. Contrary to hypothesis, when parents strongly believe in guiding their child’s emotion socialization, children showed less accurate recognition of their parents’ emotions.

The connection between maternal employment and childhood obesity: inspecting the mechanisms

This paper investigates the channels through which maternal employment affects childhood obesity. We use time diaries and interview responses from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics which combines information on children’s time allocation, children’s BMI, and mother’s labor force participation. We find some evidence that supervision and nutrition play significant but small roles in the relationship between maternal employment and childhood obesity. Although the difference in the effect of maternal employment varies by mother’s education, we find few differences in the mechanisms by mother’s education.

Labor market participation in France: an asymptotic least squares analysis of couples’ decisions

This paper examines the interactions between spouses’ decisions to join the labor force. We use the asymptotic least squares method in order to estimate a system of equations with limited dependent variables. We find that when spouse’s decision-making is modeled as simultaneous, this affects primarily the man’s participation equation who appears to be positively influenced by whether the woman works or not, by the number of children and by the birth of a child. The woman’s decision to participate is not affected by whether the man participates or not and depends negatively of the number of children and the birth of a child. This implies that there is a female leadership in decisions to participate in the labor market and that the added-worker effect should be reinterpreted as a function of demography rather than unemployment.

Financial Reciprocity and Elder Care: Interdependent Resource Transfers

A sample from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study was used to examine the influence of parent-to-child financial transfers and economic resources on child-to-parent financial transfers, caregiving, time-help, and coresidence as multiple, interdependent transfers from middle-aged adult children to their elderly parents. There were strong positive effects of prior parent-to-child financial transfers in the models of caregiving, time help, and coresidence but no effect on child-to-parent financial transfers. Coresidence, caregiving, and time-help are complements but there was no interdependence between child-to-parent financial transfers and caregiving or time-help. The effects of parents’ incomes and net worth are interpreted as evidence about motives for transfers to them.

Does Motherhood Affect Productivity, Relative Performance, and Earnings?

The Ladies Professional Golf Association provides a unique setting to examine productivity differences between women with children and women without children. In this paper, productivity is directly observed (e.g., the player’s golf score), unlike most studies that use wage as a proxy for productivity. Therefore, discrimination cannot be a source of observed differences in productivity between mothers and nonmothers, since the earnings of players are strictly determined by relative performance. Using panel data on women professional golfers, I find that motherhood lowers productivity. The productivity of women who eventually become mothers increases in the years before giving birth and then declines thereafter. The results support the human-capital explanation and Becker’s effort hypothesis of the family gap. One further finding is that marriage increases productivity.

Educational Attainment and the Lesbian Wage Premium

This paper provides insight into the wage gap between lesbians and heterosexual women. Using data from the 2000 Decennial Census, we find a lesbian premium that equals approximately 10% for women without a bachelor’s degree, and is nearly non-existent for women with higher levels of education. These findings are consistent with proposition that the gap between lesbians’ and heterosexual women’s commitment to the labor market narrows at higher levels of education. We also find that controls for industry and occupation exert only a small effect on the gap between lesbian and heterosexual women’s wages.

Saving for Children’s College Education: An Empirical Analysis of the Trade-off Between the Quality and Quantity of Children

This paper examines the effect of children’s college expenses on household savings. The theoretical model introduces life-cycle savings into the quality–quantity model of fertility and derives predictions for the impact of expected expenses on parents’ savings. Using the actual amount of parents’ financial support reported in the Survey of Consumer Finances, the empirical model estimates the expected expenditures on children’s college education and investigates the effect of expected expenditures on parents’ savings. The results show that parents’ support for each of their children’s college expenses decreases with the number of children. The results are consistent with the predictions of the life-cycle theory of saving and consumption that households save in advance for expected expenses to smooth their consumption.

Use of Self in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has not traditionally utilized “use of self” to describe the clinician’s role in counseling but much attention has been given to the importance of the therapeutic relationship and the components necessary and appropriate for a strong working alliance. The CBT approach is discussed within the framework of previously articulated five uses of selves. A case example is presented.

Imagined interactions,family money management patterns and coalitions,and attitudes toward money and credit

This study explores the imagined interactions college students have with their parents about money and credit, their attitudes toward credit and money, the ways they say their parents deal with financial decisions, and the communication coalitions regarding finances they perceive existing within their family. Students’ imagined interaction pleasantness is greatest when parents jointly form a plan for paying off credit card debt and lowest when parents argue. When family coalitions exist, students report more frequent imagined interactions. Imagined interaction frequency and pleasantness are related to credit and money attitudes.

On the Receiving End: Women,Caring, and Breast Cancer

Gendered definitions of care influence breast cancer survivors’ coping strategies, sense of entitlement to care, and ultimately their capacity to receive care. Using qualitative data from 60 intensive interviews, this study examines how gendered definitions of care influence women’s experiences as care-receivers. Findings indicate that negotiating gender boundaries to care for the self is both empowering and stigmatizing. Women with breast cancer are required to break gender norms that stress compliance, nurturing, and putting the needs of others first to prioritize their own needs for care. Concurrently, they take on additional nurturing roles to provide support to other women with breast cancer, relinquishing to some degree the individualistic approach to life they found necessary to cope with their illness in the first place.