Parental transfers and the labor supply of children

To finance their personal consumption, children may rely on transfers in the form of pocket money made by their parents and on personal resources earned from labor market activities. In this paper that focuses on the interaction between these two sources of income, we consider a model of parental transfer where the child can choose his own income through labor supply. The parent commits to a transfer amount that the child takes as given. For our empirical analysis, we use a cross-sectional French survey that includes detailed information about pocket money from parents to schoolchildren. Using a maximum-likelihood method, we estimate a simultaneous-equations model and find that parental transfers do not significantly influence the child's labor supply.     

Positive and negative preferences in human mate selection

This paper focuses on preferences for specific characteristics in a potential partner using data from 1993 to 1999 provided by a French marriage bureau. We perform an econometric analysis of the various traits either sought or rejected in a potential partner, respectively by men and women. Our results are consistent with investment in marriage. On the one hand, men tend to reject vulgar and unfaithful women, meaning that they are likely to suffer serious fitness costs from infidelity. On the other hand, women dread meeting potential partners who are alcoholic, selfish or violent.     

A parallel multi-population genetic algorithm for a constrained two-dimensional orthogonal packing problem

This paper addresses a constrained two-dimensional (2D), non-guillotine restricted, packing problem, where a fixed set of small rectangles has to be placed into a larger stock rectangle so as to maximize the value of the rectangles packed. The algorithm we propose hybridizes a novel placement procedure with a genetic algorithm based on random keys. We propose also a new fitness function to drive the optimization. The approach is tested on a set of instances taken from the literature and compared with other approaches. The experimental results validate the quality of the solutions and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.     

The Citizenship of Excluded Groups: Challenging the Consumerist Agenda

The language of consumerism suggests that through involvement in consumer processes, consumers can influence policy formation and service provision. This paper examines, as illustrative cases in Australia, how two groups of consumers, people with a mental illness and older people, engage with these consumer processes. It finds they critically evaluate the opportunity offered by consumer processes for inclusion in policy and programmes. Both people with a mental illness and interviewed older people indicated how they acted as "agents involved in interpreting their needs", despite finding that in consumer processes their needs were predefined. Rather than allowing themselves to be constructed as passive objects, they positioned themselves as active citizens, having agency not as individual consumers but through drawing on networks. The responses of both groups go some distance toward dismantling power differences between professionals and "consumers", suggesting that social policy and programmes for both people with mental illness and older people can and sometimes do develop in a context of greater inclusivity.     

Compensation for What? An Analysis of Insurance Strategies for Repairable Assets

We define a repairable asset as an irreplaceable commodity whose quality is at risk, but can be partly restored at a cost. Examples are houses, automobiles and, especially, health, for which standard monetary approaches are oversimplified. To optimize the value of insurance, the insurer and the insured have to agree upon repair strategies (when to fix the asset and how much) and compensation rules (how much money to receive for other goods). We clarify the role of the consumer's preferences in the properties of the contract, and we highlight the relationship between repair strategies and the super- or submodular structure of the repair technology.     

Helpful actions seen through the eyes of parents of children with disabilities

Parents of children with disabilities interact with a wide range of service providers in order to assure appropriate services for their children. While some actions performed by professionals are viewed as helpful, many are viewed as obstructive. Surveys completed by over 120 parents identified past actions perceived to be helpful and those thought to be unhelpful as well as identification of professionals associated with those actions. Using the critical incident technique, narrative responses were based on actual experiences that parents described. Parents were also asked to articulate specific actions they would like professionals to take in the future. Over half of the responses request desired relationships with professionals that focus on respect, collaboration, communication and information sharing. Implications for pre-professional training are discussed.     

Vaginal douching among university women in the southeastern United States

OBJECTIVE: The authors assessed the knowledge, beliefs about, and practices of vaginal douching among women attending 2 universities in the southeastern United States. PARTICIPANTS: There were 416 participants in this study; 46.9% were black and 44.5% were white. METHODS: The authors administered a 30-item questionnaire to women enrolled in health-related and social science courses at 2 southeastern universities. RESULTS: Approximately 38% of participants reported vaginal douching, mostly for hygienic reasons (70.7%). Most women first learned about douching from their mother. Douching was more common and more frequent among black women (48%) than among white women (27%). Age of first douche correlated positively with age of first sexual intercourse and age of first period. CONCLUSION: Women who had been informed not to douche by a healthcare professional were less likely to have douched within the past 6 months than were women who were not given this information. Misconceptions about douching are common and should be addressed by healthcare professionals.     

Effects of government policies on the work of home care personnel and their occupational health and safety

The health sector in Québec (Canada) is dealing with profound macro-economic and macro-organizational changes. This article is interested in the impact of these changes on the work of home health aides (HHAs) and home care nurses and their occupational health and safety (OHS). The study was carried out in the home care services (HCS) of four local community service centres (CLSC) with different organizational characteristics. It is based on an analysis by triangulation of 66 individual and group interviews, 22 observed workdays and 35 observed multidisciplinary or professional meetings, as well as on administrative documents. HHAs are experiencing an erosion of their job because the relational and affective aspects of their work are disappearing. This may be due to an increase in their physical workload, leading to an increase in musculoskeletal problems and, to a lesser extent, in psychological health problems. Nurses are seeing an increase in the volume of invisible work that they have to do, which also has the effect of decreasing the relational aspects of their activity. The increasingly numerous psychological health problems are the consequence of this change in their profession. This study also shows that managers' decisions at the local level can reduce or increase the work constraints of HHAs and nurses. Examples of good practices for HHAs are the stabilization of clienteles and the possibility of organizing their itinerary, while for nurses, it is in how clientele follow-up tools are implemented. This article discusses the effects of government policies and decisions on the work and OHS of home care personnel. To address this subject, we use a specific analysis of the workload of home health aides (HHAs) and nurses. We will show the relationships between managers' organizational choices to respond to governmental constraints and the resulting work changes. We will also look at their consequences on occupational health and safety (OHS) and on the work of different personnel.     

Perception of own death risk

Individuals’ perception of their own road-traffic and overall mortality risks are examined in this paper. Perceived risk is compared with the objective risk of the respondents’ peers, i.e. their own gender and age group, and the results suggest that individuals’ risk perception of their own risk is biased. For road-traffic risk we obtain similar results to what have been found previously in the literature, overassessment and underassessment among low- and high-risk groups, respectively. For overall risk we find that all risk groups underestimate their risk. The results also indicate that men's risk bias is larger than women’s.