Disabled people, the reserve army of labour and welfare reform

This paper is concerned with explaining why in contemporary society there has been a number of changes to income maintenance and labour market policy for disabled people. Taking a regulation approach theoretical framework it engages with the debate about whether disabled people can be considered to be part of the reserve army of labour. Rejecting previous broad-brush approaches that seem to suggest that all disabled people are part of the reserve army, it argues that the policy changes have been aimed at reconstructing non-employed disabled people as an important part of the reserve army in a period when labour markets are becoming tighter. In this sense disabled people are crucial to New Labour's regulation of neo-liberal accumulation that is structured through a contradiction between economic stability and increasing participation in paid employment.     

Multiple imputation for gamma outcome variable using generalized linear model

We used a proper multiple imputation (MI) through Gibbs sampling approach to impute missing values of a gamma distributed outcome variable which were missing at random, using generalized linear model (GLM) with identity link function. The missing values of the outcome variable were multiply imputed using GLM and then the complete data sets obtained after MI were analysed through GLM again for the estimation purpose. We examined the performance of the proposed technique through a simulation study with the data sets having four moderate and large proportions of missing values, 10%, 20%, 30% and 50%. We also applied this technique on a real life data and compared the results with those obtained by applying GLM only on observed cases. The results showed that the proposed technique gave better results for moderate proportions of missing values.     

Bigamy: Neither Love nor Marriage,but a Threat to the Nation?

In a computer search of 18 national newspapers over a three-year period (1993–1945) 420 mentions of bigamy were identified. 110 items (or 26 per cent) referred to 26 current criminal cases involving bigamy. Seven cases attracted 70 per cent of the coverage. The comments of the presiding judge were widely reported in five of these cases together with titillating detail. Two other cases included comments by judges. Using Phoenix's (1996) distinction between threats to the nation-state from 'inside' and 'outside', the analysis indicates that two issues of wider socio-political importance – familism and immigration – were central to the judges' comments reported in the press and produced an important counterpoise to the titillating features of these cases. It is argued that the newspaper reporting of bigamy constructs bigamists as being a threat to Britain from 'inside' to the institution of marriage, while the threat from 'outside' is from minority ethnic men marrying female bigamists to gain residential status in Britain. It is the latter challenge which brings the most significant condemnation.     

Paradox found (again): Infant mortality among the Mexican-origin population in the united states

Recent research suggests that the favorable mortality outcomes for the Mexican immigrant population in the United States may largely be attributable to selective out-migration among Mexican immigrants, resulting in artificially low recorded death rates for the Mexican-origin population. In this paper we calculate detailed age-specific infant mortality rates by maternal race/ethnicity and nativity for two important reasons: (1) it is extremely unlikely that women of Mexican origin would migrate to Mexico with newborn babies, especially if the infants were only afew hours or afew days old; and (2) more than 50% of all infant deaths in the United States occur during the first week of life, when the chances of out-migration are very small. We use concatenated data from the U.S. linked birth and infant death cohort files from 1995 to 2000, which provides us with over 20 million births and more than 150,000 infant deaths to analyze. Our results clearly show that first-hour, first-day, and first-week mortality rates among infants born in the United States to Mexican immigrant women are about 10% lower than those experienced by infants of non-Hispanic, white U.S.-born women. It is extremely unlikely that such favorable rates are artificially caused by the out-migration of Mexican-origin women and infants, as we demonstrate with a simulation exercise. Further, infants born to U.S.-born Mexican American women exhibit rates of mortality that are statistically equal to those of non-Hispanic white women during the first weeks of life and fare considerably better than infants born to non-Hispanic black women, with whom they share similar socioeconomic profiles. These patterns are all consistent with the definition of the epidemiologic paradox as originally proposed by Markides and Coreil (1986).     

On approximate least squares estimators of parameters of one-dimensional chirp signal

Chirp signals are quite common in many natural and man-made systems such as audio signals, sonar, and radar. Estimation of the unknown parameters of a signal is a fundamental problem in statistical signal processing. Recently, Kundu and Nandi [Parameter estimation of chirp signals in presence of stationary noise. Stat Sin. 2008;75:187–201] studied the asymptotic properties of least squares estimators (LSEs) of the unknown parameters of a simple chirp signal model under the assumption of stationary noise. In this paper, we propose periodogram-type estimators called the approximate least squares estimators (ALSEs) to estimate the unknown parameters and study the asymptotic properties of these estimators under the same error assumptions. It is observed that the ALSEs are strongly consistent and asymptotically equivalent to the LSEs. Similar to the periodogram estimators, these estimators can also be used as initial guesses to find the LSEs of the unknown parameters. We perform some numerical simulations to see the performance of the proposed estimators and compare them with the LSEs and the estimators proposed by Lahiri et al. [Efficient algorithm for estimating the parameters of two dimensional chirp signal. Sankhya B. 2013;75(1):65–89]. We have analysed two real data sets for illustrative purposes.     

Estimation of hazard of death in vertically transmitted HIV-1-infected children for doubly censored failure times and fixed covariates

This work estimates the effect of covariates on survival data when times of both originating and failure events are interval-censored. Proportional hazards model [16] along with log-linear models was applied on a data of 130 vertically infected HIV-1 children visiting the paediatrics clinic. The covariates considered for the analysis were antiretroviral (ARV) therapy, age at diagnosis, and change in CD4+T cell count. Change in CD4+T cell count was the difference in the last and first count in non-ARV therapy group, while in the ARV therapy group the same was considered after the start of the treatment. Our findings suggest that children on ARV therapy had significantly lower risk of death (p<0.001). We further investigated the effect of age and change in CD4+T cell count on risk of death. These covariates exhibited a possible association with risk of death by both the procedures (p<0.0001). The effect of number of years under ARV therapy with diagnosis year as a confounding factor was directly related to longevity. The results obtained by the two procedures gave reasonable estimates. We conclude that when the lengths of intervals are narrow, we can opt for parametric modeling which is less computationally intensive.     

Employment and Support Allowance,the ‘summer budget’ and less eligible disabled people

In the first UK budget by a Conservative Government for 18 years, £13 billion per annum savings in social security spending by 2020/21 were announced. Of these, 4.9% (£640 million per annum, and up to £900 million in the years after 2020) is to come from the withdrawal from April 2017 of the work-related component of the Employment and Support Allowance. This means that new claimants will be worse off by £29.05 per week (2015/16 figures) than would have been the case had the measure not been introduced. This brief commentary critically analyses this development as the extension of an ideological assault upon the out-of-work benefits for disabled people which has been gathering momentum for about a decade in the hope of forcing such people into competing for wage work in the open market.