Privatization and Public Opinion in Germany

Privatization has been a major issue around the world, but research on public opinion about it has been scarce. The German Social Survey provides an opportunity to compare citizen opinions from a formerly socialist-authoritarian regime with those from a democratic regime, in their opinions about privatizing banks, electrical power, and hospitals. As do citizens in surveys in other nations, Germans support privatization of the services in the order just given. Citizens from the east, where privatization led to sharp increases in unemployment, oppose privatization much more than do westerners. A LISREL analysis indicates that their opposition is not due to their concerns about its economic effects on themselves or the nation (economic pessimism), but more due to perception of the proper role of government (opposition to government spending), and sense of political efficacy. The analysis also reflects on the roles of other variables such as ideology, partisanship, gender, being unemployed, education, and preference for taxes versus public services. We discuss implications for theory and research on public opinion about government policies and services, such as the role of direct economic self-interest versus more symbolic and ideological orientations.     

Tobacco Farming and Public Health: Attitudes of the General Public and Farmers

The tobacco industry remains a formidable influence in thwarting tobacco control efforts, in part because industry leaders have raised policymaker and public concern about how tobacco control might negatively impact tobacco farmers. In this study, we interviewed a random, stratified sample of 528 tobacco farmers in the Southeast and 991 U.S. residents about issues related to tobacco farmers. We found that a majority of the U.S. public expressed the belief that U.S. taxpayers subsidized tobacco farmers. This belief, combined with the strong opposition to tobacco farmer subsidies (15 percent thought there should be subsidies), likely play a role in public attitudes toward tobacco farmers. At the same time, however, we found reasonably strong public support for efforts to help tobacco farmers transition to new enterprises, although the public underestimates tobacco farmer interest in diversification. For example, two of three Americans believe that the government should help farmers make a living other than growing tobacco and over half thought that taxpayers should help pay for such programs. These data illustrate potential common ground for elected officials to consider as they attempt to concomitantly address the needs of farmers and the interests of the public. Ultimately, if the interests of tobacco farmers can be made clearly to the general public, and vice versa, pro-health and pro-farmer policies might well become a reality     

Factors and consequences of a non-functional alary polymorphism inPyrrhocoris apterus (Heteroptera: Pyrrhocoridae)

Functional alary polymorphisms have been studied rather extensively in several insect species. This review article deals with factors controlling wing polymorphism in a flightless species,Pyrrhocoris apterus (L.), and discusses its adaptive significance and mechanisms for their persistence under natural conditions. The macropterous morph is determined by a recessive allele whose penetrance depends on photoperiod and temperature. Natural populations of this species contain a small fraction of flightless macropters. The disadvantages of being a macropter (increase of development time, decrease of fecundity) are minimal, while the benefit may consist in the tendency to prereproductive arrest of ovarian development in teneral females. It prevents establishing a second generation which would mostly die during the next winter. The mechanism of alary morph regulation may be an ancestral trait linkingP. apterus with other polymorphic Heteroptera, while its decreased penetrance may be a derivative character. Variation in fitness due to alary morphs is small compared to the one associated with differences in body size. The latter is environmentally determined, and not linked to the genetic basis of wing polymorphism. In the “mosaic” of phenotypes of various size the significance of the genetic macroptery may be close to neutral.     

Issues, challenges, and solutions in translating study instruments

Cross-cultural adaptation of study instruments is a difficult, time-consuming, but arguably cost-effective process. If conducted properly, it has the advantage that the translated study instruments are accurate, easy to understand, accessible, and culturally appropriate to the target audience and produce reliable and valid data. This article explores issues, challenges, and solutions for translating a set of research instruments used in a randomized, controlled trial for four separate community languages (Chinese, Vietnamese, Greek, Italian).     

Brother correlations in earnings in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden compared to the United States

The correlation in economic status among siblings is a useful “omnibus measure” of the overall impact of family and community factors on adult economic status. In this study we compare brother correlations in long-run (permanent) earnings between the United States, on one hand, and the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) on the other. Our base case results, based on very similar sample criteria and definitions for all countries, show that this correlation is above 0.40 in the United States and in the range 0.14–0.26 in the Nordic countries. Even though these results turn out to be somewhat sensitive to some assumptions that have to be made, we conclude that the family and community factors are more important determinants of long-run earnings in the United States than in the Nordic countries. Received: 27 July 2000/Accepted: 7 March 2001 All correspondence to: Anders Bj?rklund. Comments from two referees, conference participants at ESPE2000 and the Canadian Employment Research Forum, seminar participants in Aarhus, Uppsala, Bonn, and Stockholm are gratefully acknowledged. We thank NOS-S for financial support. The Swedish data collection was also supported by HSFR and SFR. The Finnish data were obtained with support from the Yrj? Jahnsson Foundation. We thank Tom Erik Aab? for preparing the Norwegian data, and Esben Agerbo for computational assistance with the Danish data. Responsible editor: John F. Ermisch.     

Likelihood-based panel cointegration test in the presence of a linear time trend and cross-sectional dependence

This article proposes a new likelihood-based panel cointegration rank test which extends the test of Örsal and Droge (2014 Örsal, D. D. K., Droge, B. (2014). Panel cointegration testing in the presence of a time trend. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 76:377–390.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) (henceforth panel SL test) to dependent panels. The dependence is modelled by unobserved common factors which affect the variables in each cross-section through heterogeneous loadings. The data are defactored following the panel analysis of nonstationarity in idiosyncratic and common components (PANIC) approach of Bai and Ng (2004 Bai, J., Ng, S. (2004). A PANIC attack on unit roots and cointegration. Econometrica 72(4):1127–1177.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and the cointegrating rank of the defactored data is then tested by the panel SL test. A Monte Carlo study demonstrates that the proposed testing procedure has reasonable size and power properties in finite samples.     

An ant colony optimization approach for the proportionate multiprocessor open shop

Multiprocessor open shop makes a generalization to classical open shop by allowing parallel machines for the same task. Scheduling of this shop environment to minimize the makespan is a strongly NP-Hard problem. Despite its wide application areas in industry, the research in the field is still limited. In this paper, the proportionate case is considered where a task requires a fixed processing time independent of the job identity. A novel highly efficient solution representation is developed for the problem. An ant colony optimization model based on this representation is proposed with makespan minimization objective. It carries out a random exploration of the solution space and allows to search for good solution characteristics in a less time-consuming way. The algorithm performs full exploitation of search knowledge, and it successfully incorporates problem knowledge. To increase solution quality, a local exploration approach analogous to a local search, is further employed on the solution constructed. The proposed algorithm is tested over 100 benchmark instances from the literature. It outperforms the current state-of-the-art algorithm both in terms of solution quality and computational time.