Within inequality characteristics and adaptation of immigrants in the United States

Until recently, in works of literature, the assimilation of immigrants had been viewed as an individualistic rather than a community-based process. However, Hatton and Leigh (2011) showed that immigrants integrate to their host country as communities, not as individuals; hence, group characteristics play as much of a role as individual characteristics in terms of adaptation. This paper introduces another dimension to the immigrant adaptation proxies that reflect community-based characteristics. The fundamental assertion of this paper is that inequality can be used as a proxy of adaptation within immigrant groups. Immigrant groups that exhibit income and education distributions similar to those of the natives can be regarded as well-adapted groups, while those who exhibit vastly different distributions should be considered to be groups with limited adaptation. Using the American Community Survey (ACS) 2010 cohort, this paper presents the initial findings of the within-group inequality of immigrants. Then, a cross-sectional regression analysis is employed to analyze the determinants of inequality across these immigrant groups. The results suggest that immigrant community-based characteristics, such as average income, education, and number of years that the immigrants have spent in the US, can indeed explain most of the variation in inequality.     

Fundamental accrued capital gains and the measurement of top incomes: an application to Chile

Most previous studies of income inequality have either ignored capital gains or have used taxable realized capital gains to estimate top incomes. Neither of these approaches is fully satisfactory. We apply for the first time a new methodology that allows us to account for fundamental accrued capital gains as part of the top incomes in a theoretically consistent manner. We estimate the shares of the super-rich in Chile showing that accrued capital gains have a large impact on these estimates. Also, the top income shares estimated using fundamental capital gains appear to exhibit a more stable and presumably more plausible time profile than estimates based on capital gains derived from asset market variations.     

Grow Old With Me! Future Directions of Race,Age, and Place Scholarship

This article reviews current theories of age and place to demonstrate a more inclusive perspective in sociology that considers race, age, and place. Scholars who study age have advanced our knowledge about what place means to old people or how environment operates in an oppressive way to aged bodies. Likewise, race scholars have advanced our knowledge about the ways oppression and White supremacy are rooted in place. Yet the two bodies of literature do not inform one another, and there are potentially dangerous gaps in our knowledge that contribute to oppression. The result is age scholarship about environment that lacks a critical race perspective and race scholarship on place that ignores the oppressive conditions of age. By reviewing these pieces, I argue that scholars must inform themselves of the ways in which we overlook important analyses and may potentially contribute to our own ageism.     

Labor Utilization Effects of Labor Scheduling Flexibility Alternatives in a Tour Scheduling Environment

This study used a factorial experimental design and a new modeling methodology to investigate the impact of a number of labor scheduling flexibility alternatives and labor requirements characteristics on labor utilization within a tour scheduling environment. Break-placement flexibility and shift-length flexibility were found to be extremely effective in improving labor utilization for all labor requirement distributions used. Flexibility with respect to the number of days included in a tour schedule resulted in substantial improvement in labor utilization for all labor requirements distributions exhibiting daily and/or weekly variation. Surprisingly, virtually no improvement in labor utilization was achieved for any labor requirement distribution by the removal of requirements for consecutive days off. In addition, almost no improvement was found by allowing the shift start time to vary across the working days included in tours. High labor requirement amplitude was found to have a strong adverse effect on labor utilization while longer operational days were associated with improved labor utilization for all labor requirement distributions. We discuss the implications of these results for service operations management and provide suggestions for future research.     

Determining Differences in Expert Judgment: Implications for Knowledge Acquisition and Validation*

In knowledge acquisition, it is often desirable to aggregate the judgments of multiple experts into a single system. In some cases this takes the form of averaging the judgments of those experts. In these situations it is desirable to determine if the experts have different views of the world before their individual judgments are aggregated. In validation, multiple experts often are employed to compare the performance of expert systems and other human actors. Often those judgments are then averaged to establish performance quality of the expert system. An important part of the comparison process should be determining if the experts have a similar view of the world. If the experts do not have similar views, their evaluations of performance may differ, resulting in a meaningless average performance measure. Alternatively, if all the validating experts do have similar views of the world then the validation process may result in paradigm myopia.     

Single-Parenthood and Poverty in Great Britain

ABSTRACT This paper examines empirically the relationship between single-parenthood and absolute poverty in Great Britain. Data from two years of the Family Expenditure Survey are used (1968 and 1986). A poverty measure that is additively decomposable with population share weights, and consistent with Sen's axiomatic approach to poverty measurement, is used to decompose the total amount of poverty into the “shares” accruing to different types of households (i.e. female and male single-parents, two-parent households and “other” types of households). Three main conclusions concerning the poverty experience of British single-parents emerge from the analysis. The first is that poverty rates for single-parent households are generally higher than the average for all households. However, this disadvantage is not as large as one might expect, especially when a comparison is made with two-parent households. The second is that single-parent households are over-represented in the ranks of the poor. That is, their “share” of total poverty is greater than their population share. The third is that increasing single-parenthood has had little impact on the overall trend in absolute poverty in the period 1968 to 1986.     

Master Scheduling in Assemble-To-Order Environments: A Capacitated Multiobjective Lot-Sizing Model

Basic characteristics of an assemble-to-order environment make effective master scheduling extremely difficult. Limited resource capacities and dynamic customer end-item demand contribute to the complexity of the master production scheduling problem. To gain flexibility and responsiveness within this system, the master production schedule (MPS) focuses at the component level. This research proposes a master scheduling technique for manufactured components which combines a multiobjective capacitated multi-item/multi-stage lot-sizing model with an interactive multiple objective optimization solution procedure. To evaluate the model's performance as a realistic and practical master scheduling tool, this study focuses on the National Cash Register (NCR) electronics manufacturing facility in Columbia, South Carolina.     

Stochastic and Intransitive Behavior in a State-Preference Model of Asset Choice*

Most models of investor behavior assume a time-state independent utility function and result in a deterministic solution where a given set of inputs uniquely specifies the decision. In contrast, a state preference model using a time-state dependent utility function is derived in this paper. The model allows the investment choice decision to be analyzed in a game theoretic context. The general solution is a mixed strategy which allows for a probabilistic interpretation of the decision. The approach presented in this paper can accommodate anomalies such as intransitivity of preference and satisficing as rational behavior. An example of a possible implementation is given along with interpretations of the outcomes.     

Pearson-Tukey Three-Point Approximations Versus Monte Carlo Simulation

Accuracy of the Pearson-Tukey three-point approximation is measured in units of standard deviation and compared with that of Monte Carlo simulation. Using a variety of well-known distributions, comparisons are made for the mean of a random variable and for common functions of one and two random variables. Comparisons are also made for the mean of an assortment of risk-analysis (Monte Carlo) models drawn from the literature. The results suggest that the Pearson-Tukey approximation is a useful alternative to simulation in risk-analysis situations.