SAMHSA urges treatment programs to test for HIV

Last month, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) called on public health and substance use disorder (SUD) treatment providers to help make sure patients who are negative for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) stay that way, and that those who are HIV‐positive are tested, receive antiretroviral treatment and stay “adherent” to the treatment. The directive came in the form of a “Dear Colleague Letter” from SAMHSA Director Elinore F. McCance‐Katz, M.D., Ph.D., assistant secretary for mental health and substance use for the Department of Health and Human Services.     

Income taxation and equity: new dominance criteria with a microsimulation application

The Journal of Economic Inequality - This paper addresses the problem of the normative evaluation of income tax systems and income tax reforms. While most of the existing criteria, framed in the...     

A new index of perceived inflation: Assumptions, method, and application to Germany

After the introduction of Euro notes and coins in January 2002, throughout the Economic and Monetary Union member countries a substantial discrepancy was evident between inflation as measured by the official consumer price indices (CPI) and that perceived by the general public. The starting point of this paper is the German case. First, the public controversy in Germany after the Euro changeover is sketched. Then conventional approaches to perceived inflation are reviewed including the many studies published by the German Federal Statistical Office as well as the perceived inflation balance generated within the EU Consumer Survey. In the main part of the paper, a novel approach to measuring perceived inflation is developed, the Index of Perceived Inflation (IPI). First, the hypotheses underlying this index are presented. Then, the IPI is derived. In the forth section the IPI is applied to the German data. The IPI time series for Germany from 1996 through 2005 shows a particularly high perceived inflation around the introduction of Euro notes and coins. In the fifth section the hypotheses of inflation perception underlying the IPI are critically reviewed. The paper closes with a conclusion on the insights gained through computation of the IPI.     

The additional cost of disability: a new measure and its application to sensory impairment

This article introduces a method using consensual budget standards to estimate additional costs incurred by households that include disabled people with specified impairments. The article reports on a first application of this to UK single adults with sensory impairments. Using the Minimum Income Standard method, the research aims to identify the cost of disability by working with groups of disabled people to agree what additions to minimum budgets for non-disabled people are required for someone with a given impairment. This provides a more tangible account of the cost of disability than economic analysis of living standards achieved by disabled and non-disabled people, and adds to surveys of actual spending on additional items, which do not account for unmet need. The research on vision and hearing impairment yields new insights into costs arising from the way disabled people live their everyday lives, not just from spending on adaptations and equipment.     

Matching study areas using Google Street View: A new application for an emerging technology

Google Street View (GSV) can be used as an effective tool to conduct virtual neighborhood audits. We expand on this research by exploring the utility of a GSV-based neighborhood audit to measure and match target and comparison study areas. We developed a GSV-based inventory to measure characteristics of retail alcohol stores and their surrounding neighborhoods. We assessed its reliability and assessed the utility of GSV-based audits for matching target and comparison study areas. We found that GSV-based neighborhood audits can be a useful, reliable, and cost-effective tool for matching target and comparison study areas when archival data are insufficient and primary data collection is prohibitive. We suggest that researchers focus on characteristics that are easily visible on GSV and are relatively stable over time when creating future GSV-based measuring and matching tools. Dividing the study area into small segments may also provide more accurate measurements and more precise matching.     

Multiple imputation for missing edge data: A predictive evaluation method with application to Add Health

Recent developments have made model-based imputation of network data feasible in principle, but the extant literature provides few practical examples of its use. In this paper, we consider 14 schools from the widely used In-School Survey of Add Health (Harris et al., 2009), applying an ERGM-based estimation and simulation approach to impute the network missing data for each school. Add Health's complex study design leads to multiple types of missingness, and we introduce practical techniques for handing each. We also develop a cross-validation based method – Held-Out Predictive Evaluation (HOPE) – for assessing this approach. Our results suggest that ERGM-based imputation of edge variables is a viable approach to the analysis of complex studies such as Add Health, provided that care is used in understanding and accounting for the study design.     

Using occupational structure to measure employability with an application to the Brazilian labor market

We propose measuring individual employability as a weighted average across occupations of a worker’s predicted wage for each occupation. Weights are given by the individual occupational probability distribution. Under this measure, a worker is more employable than another if she has a greater chance to obtain a better paid occupation. After normalization, expected employability corresponds to the population correlation between occupational predicted wages and the chance to obtain employment in these occupations and serves as a measure of the allocative efficiency of labor market. We apply the methodology to Brazil and found that employability increased and became less unequally distributed from 2002 to 2011. We used a decomposition method to investigate the causes of these changes. Although average normalized employability is weakly positive, it has increased for the period, which suggests that there is room for efficiency gains in the allocation of workers to occupations in the Brazilian labor market.     

Developing a new system to measure outcomes in a service coordination program for youth with severe emotional disturbance

This paper presents information on re-developing an outcome evaluation for a state-funded program providing service coordination utilizing wraparound to youth with severe emotional disturbance (SED) and their families. Originally funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kentucky IMPACT program has existed statewide since 1990. Changing data needs and limitations of the original evaluation required revamping the program's data collection system. The new evaluation uses the extant knowledge base to improve: (1) design, (2) measures, and (3) utility. A pre-post design with multiple follow-ups provides the framework for data collection. An ecological framework provides a conceptual structure for selecting measures focusing on both the service recipients and their environment. Data collection via a personal digital assistant (PDA) ensures utility of the data for both consumers and researchers. Issues ranging from conceptualization to implementation of the project as well as lessons learned are discussed.     

Equilibrium in abstract political economies: with an application to a public good economy with voting

Consider an abstract political economy which has a collective choice rule together with strategic interactions among players. We prove that there exists an equilibrium in such an economy by synthesizing an equilibrium existence theorem in generalized games by Shafer and Sonnenschein (1975) and a voting core existence theorem in simple games by Schofield (1984, 1989). The theorem can be applied to a public good economy where public good provisions are determined by a class of voting rule.Thanks are due to David Austen-Smith, Jeffrey Banks, Marcus Berliant, Steve Ching, Ryo-Ichi Nagahisa, Mary Beth Savio, Norman Schofield, and Tomoichi Shinotsuka. Detailed comments from an anonymous referee of the journal are gratefully acknowledged. Errors are, of course, my own.     

Multilevel meta network analysis with application to studying network dynamics of network interventions

In this paper, I introduce new methods for multilevel meta network analysis. The new methods can combine results from multiple network models, assess the effects of predictors at network or higher levels and account for both within- and cross-network correlations of the parameters in the network models. To demonstrate the new methods, I studied network dynamics of a smoking prevention intervention that was implemented in 76 classes of six middle schools in China. The results show that as compared to random intervention (i.e., that targets random students), smokers’ popularity was significantly reduced in the classes with network interventions (i.e., those target central students or students with their friends together). The findings highlight the importance of examining network outcomes in evaluating social and health interventions, the role of social selection in managing social influence, and the potential of using network methods to design more effective interventions.     

Learning in economic theory: a taxonomy with an application to expectations formation

A crucial aspect of the psychology of economic agents is learning. In economic theory learning behavior of human beings occurs, in general, in a rather primitive fashion. Insofar as agents' learning behavior is introduced in formal economic models, it shows up in the form of the adaptation of the values of parameters or variables. The structure of the model employed is considered to be given. In this article a taxonomy of learning is presented, in which the adaptation of parameter and variable values is just one of the manifestations of actual learning behavior of human beings in an economic world. The argument is illustrated with the help of economic theories of expectations formation.     

The structure of a random relation with an application to a nomination network

Stochastic relations frequently occur in the social sciences; however, their statistical properties are not well-known. A random relation can be used to model noise or observational error. This paper characterizes the structure of a random relation by deriving the distribution of the structural vector from Q-analysis and by simulating random relations. We propose a measure of structure and apply these concepts to the nominations of esteemed peers by mathematicians.