农户的非农参与和农业劳动供给研究——来自中国西部山区的证据

对不完全市场下的农业劳动供给研究,普遍采用不可分性或禀赋依赖假设,即农户的生产决策受消费相关因素的影响,而不是基于利润最大化目标。这种假设只对缺乏非农兼业或市场参与机会的农户成立,故应在决策研究中考虑农户受市场约束的异质性。利用内生选择的切换模型和陕西周至山区的农户调查数据,对农户的非农参与及农业劳动供给决策进行的实证研究表明：金融可及性和人力资本的分布特征决定了农户非农活动的参与及类型,反映了不完全市场对农户的约束状况,进而决定了农业劳动供给决策的影响机制。纯农户的农业劳动供给行为,除了受农户的生计资本影响外,还受其家庭结构等相关因素的影响。     

Homelessness,Public Space and Civil Disobedience

This paper argues that anti-social behaviour, in the context of homelessness, ought to be seen as acts of civil disobedience. Firstly, I identify public space as a hostile space for people experiencing homelessness. Secondly, I detail how this reveals a default interpretation of them as anti-social through their mere presence. Thirdly, I explore how this de-politicises. I go onto define and examine civil disobedience theory, as a counter narrative to anti-social behaviour. I then argue how acts of disruption by people experiencing homelessness in public space can qualify as civil disobedience. I acknowledge this as a wicked problem but claim that flipping the default framing of homelessness in this way has normative gain, undoing the de-politicising othering that anti-social behaviour narratives have caused.     

Children's well-being,adult poverty,and jobs-of-last-resort

This article addresses the failure of the 1996 welfare reform act (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act [PRWORA]) as an anti-poverty program demonstrated by the fact that approximately half of all ‘welfare leavers’ have fallen back into poverty within a year or two of their exit. The proximate cause is that, because of “barriers to work” or insufficient demand, leavers end up working too few hours over the course of a year. To address this failure, we propose a program of jobs-of-last-resort, called Promise of a Job (POJ), based on an examination of the design, costs, and results for a large number of transitional-job and welfare-to-work programs. In this article, we estimate POJ's costs per participant and overall costs of implementation, as well as the impact such a program would have on reducing adult and, particularly, child poverty. We find, in examining past data, that had POJ been applied to just those Americans who were on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1996, it would have raised almost 7 million children above the poverty line. We argue that this result (and similar results from any other program) should appeal across the political spectrum, to conservatives and liberals alike, because of the documented general agreement that child poverty is inconsistent with a widely held American value: the provision of equal opportunity for all.     

“Taking Back a Little Bit of Control”: Managing the Contaminated Body Through Consumption

In this article, we explore the lived experience of avoiding environmental chemicals through safer consumption, such as buying “eco‐friendly” products. Using focus groups and in‐depth interviews involving 50 subjects, we investigate how individuals become aware of environmental chemicals and how they adapt to this awareness. Our participants describe being surprised or alarmed to learn that chemicals are present in food and commodities that they believed were safe. They respond by developing a set of heuristics rendering the “dangerous” consumer landscape into a space that is amenable to personal control. They learn to read an ingredient label and look for organic certification seals on product packaging. We develop the idea of the “contingent boundary” to describe how participants perceive personal control as uneven: they believe they can activate a protective boundary in local and familiar contexts, but outside these contexts, they believe the boundary dissolves. They accept this contingency as normal and describe having to ignore some chemical exposures, for fear of becoming too “crazy.” We conclude that the individuals in our study accept that inverted quarantine (Szasz 2007) is out of reach, and instead try to impose order upon a ubiquitous risk.     

Organisational Factors,Job Satisfaction and Intention to Leave Among Newly Qualified Social Workers in England

Satisfaction with different organisational elements and aspects of work contributes markedly to overall levels of job satisfaction and intention to leave. For newly qualified social workers (NQSWs), especially immediately after graduation, self-perceived competence and their confidence in their educational preparation are also important. This article reports on a longitudinal study following 280 social work students into social work employment in England using data collected as students and six months after graduation. We focus on their experiences as NQSWs, thus only including those working in social work jobs, reporting the relative importance of their satisfaction with different work elements, such as supervision and job engagement. These are used to construct a model of NQSWs' overall satisfaction and intentions of leaving their social work jobs. The model incorporates NQSWs' perceptions of how well their degree courses prepared them for their current social work jobs in addition to personal, organisational and specific role characteristics. Using statistical techniques of factor analysis and regression modelling we highlight the complexities of how job satisfaction is constructed and we argue that the data reveal the importance of team support and self-efficacy in relation to whether social workers are thinking about leaving their current social work jobs.     

From humor to horror: genre and narrative purpose in abortion stories on American television

A recent increase in the number of comedic films and television programs that include abortion stories has prompted a cultural conversation about whether this is an appropriate treatment for such a topic: Can abortions be funny? Are there any genres that should not include plotlines about abortion? Indeed, most prior examinations of abortion on television have focused on dramas and their impact, without explicitly exploring the ways different genres offer a range of types of stories and creative opportunities. Using a comprehensive data-set of abortion plotlines on American television, this analysis provides a historical overview of how varying genres have addressed abortion in the past, as well as closer case studies within each of five genres: drama, soap opera, horror, science fiction, and comedy. This paper provides insight into the different narrative functions of abortion stories, with consideration of how such narratives support (in)accurate and (de)stigmatizing cultural ideas about abortion.     

Evaluation of methods for interval estimation of model outputs, with application to survival models

When a published statistical model is also distributed as computer software, it will usually be desirable to present the outputs as interval, as well as point, estimates. The present paper compares three methods for approximate interval estimation about a model output, for use when the model form does not permit an exact interval estimate. The methods considered are first-order asymptotics, using second derivatives of the log-likelihood to estimate variance information; higher-order asymptotics based on the signed-root transformation; and the non-parametric bootstrap. The signed-root method is Bayesian, and uses an approximation for posterior moments that has not previously been tested in a real-world application. Use of the three methods is illustrated with reference to a software project arising in medical decision-making, the UKPDS Risk Engine. Intervals from the first-order and signed-root methods are near- identical, and typically 1% wider to 7% narrower than those from the non-parametric bootstrap. The asymptotic methods are markedly faster than the bootstrap method.