Active social policies revisited by social workers

Social policies are described as active on the basis of formal legal provisions, or on the grounds of expenditure data. Using the notion, set forth by Lipsky, M. [(1980). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemnas of the individual in public services (2010 ed.). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation] as well as by several subsequent authors, that social workers who implement policies actually play a role in (re)defining them, the present article intends to explore the way in which active social policies are implemented in a Swiss canton. On the basis of an original study, we show that, on the one hand, social workers tend to view activation as a distant perspective – which means they often do no put it into practice right away. And activation, when social workers do deem it to be necessary, takes on different meanings depending on whether they are dealing with young people or with mothers. As a result, the actual meaning of the word activation varies – a fact that scholars who focused solely on formal/legal activation policies were not in a position to observe.     

Une condition nécessaire d'admissibilité et ses conséquences sur les estimateurs à rétrécisseur de la moyenne d'un vecteur normal

Considering exponential families of distributions, we estimate parameters which are not the natural parameters. We prove that the admissible estimators of these parameters are limits of Bayes estimators and can be expressed through a given functional form. An important particular case of this model pertains to the estimation of the mean of a multidimensional normal distribution when the variance is known up to a multiplicative factor. We deduce from the main result a necessry condition for the admissibility of matricial shrinkage estimators.     

SEPARATION, WEAK EXOGENEITY, AND P-T DECOMPOSITION IN COINTEGRATED VAR SYSTEMS WITH COMMON FEATURES

The aim of this paper is to study the concept of separability in multiple nonstationary time series displaying both common stochastic trends and common stochastic cycles. When modeling the dynamics of multiple time series for a panel of several entities such as countries, sectors, firms, imposing some form of separability and commonalities is often required to restrict the dimension of the parameter space. For this purpose we introduce the concept of common feature separation and investigate the relationships between separation in cointegration and separation in serial correlation common features. Loosely speaking we investigate whether a set of time series can be partitioned into subsets such that there are serial correlation common features within the sub-groups only. The paper investigates three issues. First, it provides conditions for separating joint cointegrating vectors into marginal cointegrating vectors as well as separating joint short-term dynamics into marginal short-term dynamics. Second, conditions for making permanent-transitory decompositions based on marginal systems are given. Third, issues of weak exogeneity are considered. Likelihood ratio type tests for the different hypotheses under study are proposed. An empirical analysis of the link between economic fluctuations in the United States and Canada shows the practical relevance of the approach proposed in this paper.     

Extent and sources of occupational stress in university staff

Canadian higher education sector has undergone numerous changes during the past decades. Increased student enrolments, massive cuts in human resources and constant restructuring are changes likely to have had a considerable impact on all employees (e.g., administrative, trades, and faculty). While many studies conducted in different countries have shown that stress in universities is a problem of alarming proportions, to date, no study of the entire staff of a university has been carried out in Canada. This research uses an approach based on the prevention and management of the sources of occupational stress to study 1086 employees of a Quebec university. Data were collected by means of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. It was found that the proportion of individuals who reported a high level of psychological distress was twice as high (40%) than that reported for a Quebec-wide sample (20%). Work overload, the relationship with one's superior and participation in decision making were systematically reported as high risks to employees' health. It was found that human resources management practices have not followed the rapid organizational changes which affected the university in the past years. The results are discussed in light of the risk management approach.     

Goodness-of-Fit Methods for Probabilistic Index Models

A class of semiparametric regression models, called probabilistic index models, has been recently proposed. Because these models are semiparametric, inference is only valid when the proposed model is consistent with the underlying data-generating model. However, no formal goodness-of-fit methods for these probabilistic index models exist yet. We propose a test and a graphical tool for assessing the model adequacy. Simulation results indicate that both methods succeed in detecting lack-of-fit. The methods are also illustrated on a case study.     

Lagrance-multiplier tersts for weak exogeneity: a synthesis

This paper unifies two seemingly separate approaches to test weak exogeneity in dynamic regression models with Lagrange-mulptiplier statistics. The first class of tests focuses on the orthogonality between innovations and conditioning variables, and thus is related to the Durbin-Wu-Hausman specification test. The second approach has been developed more recently in the context of context of cointegration and error correction models, ad concentrates on the question whether the conditioning variables display error correction behaviour. It is shown that the vital difference between the two approaches stems from the choice of the parmeters of interest. A new test is derived, which encompasses both its predecessors. The test is applied to an error correction model of the demand for money in Switzerland.