Solving the Stochastic Growth Model by Backsolving With a Particular Nonlinear Form for the Decision Rule

Backsolving is a class of methods that generate simulated values for exogenous forcing processes in a stochastic equilibrium model from specified assumed distributions for Euler-equation disturbances. It can be thought of as a way to force the approximation error generated by inexact choice of decision rule or boundary condition into distortions of the distribution of the exogenous shocks in the simulations rather than into violations of the Euler equations as with standard approaches. Here it is applied to a one-sector neoclassical growth model with decision rule generated from a linear-quadratic approximation.     

Clinical Care of Gambling Disorders: Training, Experience, and Competence Among VHA Psychologists

Problem gambling is a common, highly destructive disorder which is often overlooked by clinicians. Levels of clinical training, clinical experience, and professional competence for providing clinical services for problem gambling were examined in a survey of 181 clinical psychologists working in the Veterans Healthcare Administration (VHA). The results suggest that the majority of clinical psychologists have little or no formal training and little or no past or current clinical experience in the treatment of disordered gambling, nor do they see themselves as competent to evaluate or treat patients with disordered gambling. Most have not referred patients for treatment of problem gambling and do not know of a competent provider to whom they can refer. There is an identifiable subgroup, representing 9% of respondents, who do have more training, provide services, and see themselves as competent to provide care for patients with problem gambling. The amount of formal training is positively correlated with care provided and self-ratings of competence. Despite the lack of training and experience, most respondents expressed interest in receiving additional training. These data suggest that to improve rates of diagnosis and treatment of patients with problem gambling in mental health settings, additional training needs to be made available for mental health providers as a group, with specialized training for clinicians interested in specializing in this area.     

Social network capital, economic mobility and poverty traps

This paper explores the role social network capital might play in facilitating poor agents?? escape from poverty traps. We model and simulate endogenous link formation among households heterogeneously endowed with both traditional and social network capital who make investment and technology choices over time in the absence of financial markets and faced with multiple production technologies featuring different fixed costs and returns. We show that social network capital can either complement or substitute for productive assets in facilitating some poor households?? escape from poverty. However, the voluntary nature of costly link formation also creates exclusionary mechanisms that impede some poor households?? use of social network capital. Through numerical simulation, we show that the ameliorative potential of social networks therefore depends fundamentally on the broader socio-economic wealth distribution in the economy, which determines the feasibility of social interactions and the net intertemporal benefits resulting from endogenous network formation. In some settings, targeted public transfers to the poor can crowd-in private resources by inducing new social links that the poor can exploit to escape from poverty.     

Literary perceptions of the aborigine after 1838∗

This paper traces the emergence in nineteenth‐century ethnographic thought of a three‐tiered classification of society and history following the appearance of Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842). Adaptations of Comte's new formula to a variety of historical and social settings in fictional and other prose works paved the way for its eventual use by Achebe as the ground plan for his interpretation of the African past in Things Fall Apart. Works paving the way for this reconstruction include novels and other texts by D. H. Lawrence and various early twentieth and nineteenth century novelists as well as the ethnographic, critical and scholarly work of Matthew Arnold, Sir Edward Tylor, and Jane Harrison. Perceptions of the hunter‐gatherer phase of African social organization and the nineteenth‐century use of the term ‘aborigine’ to designate this ancient condition of society are suggested as the probable origins of a much used, versatile paradigm. Its applicability to the southern African situation in Bessie Head's Maru stems, it is suggested, from the origin of the three‐tiered system itself in early processes of communication between Europe and southern Africa.     

The making of 'Home Improvements - tools for working with families in Aotearoa/ New Zealand'. Reflections on creating a video resource for teaching purposes

In this article, two social work practitioners explore, with all the wisdom of hindsight, the joys and pitfalls of venturing into video production as a medium for creating a teaching and learning resource. Their discoveries are organised under a number of key themes beginning with an idea and leading into commitment to a project involving a crew, a cast and a steep but captivating learning curve on the use of audio visual technology. Other practitioners similarly interested in the potential of this medium but without much experience, will find this article of great benefit in providing practical tips and insights, and demystifying the tasks and terminology associated with video production.     

Are gamblers more likely to commit crimes? An empirical analysis of a nationally representative survey of US young adults

We examine the relationship between gambling and criminal behaviour using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Our data set includes survey responses from 6145 young adults. The results of our empirical analysis are consistent with the gambling literature in which it is suggested that higher gambling losses increase the propensity to commit crime. This study complements the current literature, as our data and empirical analysis allow us to control for many variables that have been neglected in previous studies, including various forms of gambling. Our findings provide useful information on the general relationship between gambling behaviour and criminal behaviour.     

Projective techniques for social science and business research

This paper examines various websites based in the Shetland Islands, on Britain’s northern periphery. These sites focus on local life and culture and, by enabling interactive contribution, provide an extension of the social networks existing in the physical locations of the Islands. So rather than emphasising the separation of the virtual and physical realms, they enable a hybrid space, in which interactions within the virtual space enhance and accentuate the appreciation of physical locations within Shetland, and the social relationships based there. Therefore they focus users’ attention on the Islands as a specific and distinctive community. However, they are also embedded within the wider virtual landscape of the internet. Thus, through the use of these sites, perceptions of the local and peripheral continually oscillate with ideas of the globally connected. They enable users to perceive Shetland as a place that exists at many points on an axis of peripherality and connectedness. Ultimately, they enable a continuation, but also complication of an historical process, in which communal narratives of cultural identity and collective memory have been continually informed and reformed by the dialogue between Shetland communities and the wider world through the structures of mass communication.     

Estimators for the inverse powers of a normal mean

Given a sample from a normal population unbiased estimators are obtained for positive powers of the mean and estimators of almost exponentially small bias are obtained for negative powers of the mean. Simulation studies show superior performance of these estimators versus known ones.     

Class and cuisine in contemporary Britain: the social space,the space of food and their homology

Thirty‐five years ago Pierre Bourdieu asserted that food preferences, as much as any other element of culture, are distributed within a space of difference more or less homologous with the social space of class positions. Plumbing data on annual spends on all manner of food items, he detected two key oppositions – a taste for the light versus a taste for the heavy on the one hand and a taste for rich foods versus a taste for healthy and exotic foods on the other – and located their generative principles in differences of volume of capital and composition of capital respectively. Deploying a correspondence analysis of similar data using the 2010 Living Costs and Food Survey, supplemented by data from the 2008 British Social Attitudes survey and the 2003 Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Survey, we seek to examine whether comparable differences in expenditure and preferences are observable in contemporary Britain and, consequently, to illuminate the current structure of the food space and its homology with class. Ultimately, we conclude that Bourdieu's general model is essentially transposable from 1960s France to the UK at the dawn of the 21st century, though we put additional emphasis on the ethical dimension of food consumption, and reflect on the prevalent instances of symbolic violence it underpins.