Detection of elder abuse: Exploring the potential use of the Elder Abuse Suspicion Index© by law enforcement in the field

There are no known instruments to aid law enforcement officers in the assessment of elder abuse (EA), despite officers’ contact with older adults. This study aimed to identify: 1) officers’ perceptions and knowledge of EA, 2) barriers in detecting EA in the field, 3) characteristics officers value in a detection tool, and to explore 4) the potential for officers to use the Elder Abuse Suspicion Index (EASI)©. Data was collected from 69 Connecticut officers who confirmed that barriers to effectively detecting EA included a lack of EA detection instruments, as well as a lack of training on warning signs and risk factors. Officers indicated that the important elements of a desirable tool for helping to detect EA included ease of use, clear instructions, and information on follow-up resources. Approximately 80% of respondents could see themselves using the EASI© in the field, and a modified version has been developed for this purpose.     

Mindful leadership: mindfulness as a new antecedent of destructive and transformational leadership behavior

Purpose: While previous research has well-examined the stress reducing effects of mindfulness, much less is known, evidentially, about the impact that it might have on working behavior, particularly in the context of leadership. Against this background, the goal of our study was to examine whether mindfulness influences leadership behavior.Design: To answer this question, we used a two-source survey study consisting of 60 teams, examining trait mindfulness of leaders via self-evaluation and their leadership behavior through the eyes of their subordinates. To analyze the given data, we conducted regression analyses.Results: Our findings confirmed the hypothesized relationships. We found a negative relationship between leaders’ mindfulness and destructive leadership, as well as a positive one between leaders’ mindfulness and transformational leadership.Implications: The results of our study underline the importance of mindfulness as a potential tool to optimize leadership quality. In order to prevent destructive and promote transformational leadership, organizations should help to develop leaders’ mindfulness capacities.     

Unemployment Insurance and Entrepreneurship

Based on administrative registers from Norway, we examine how unemployment insurance (UI) and active labor market programs (ALMP) affect the transition rates from unemployment to regular employment and entrepreneurship, as well as subsequent earnings levels. We find that both the employment and entrepreneurship hazards rise sharply in response to UI sanctions and UI exhaustion. On average, transitions to entrepreneurship are more profitable than transitions to regular employment. While employment transitions are highly pro‐cyclical, entrepreneurship transitions are weakly counter‐cyclical. ALMPs targeted at entrepreneurship are rare in Norway, but the few start‐up subsidies that are provided are successful in terms of generating paid work.     

Modelling spatial intensity for replicated inhomogeneous point patterns in brain imaging

Summary.  Pharmacological experiments in brain microscopy study patterns of cellular activ- ation in response to psychotropic drugs for connected neuroanatomic regions. A typical ex- perimental design produces replicated point patterns having highly complex spatial variability. Modelling this variability hierarchically can enhance the inference for comparing treatments. We propose a semiparametric formulation that combines the robustness of a nonparametric kernel method with the efficiency of likelihood-based parameter estimation. In the convenient framework of a generalized linear mixed model, we decompose pattern variation by kriging the intensities of a hierarchically heterogeneous spatial point process. This approximation entails discretizing the inhomogeneous Poisson likelihood by Voronoi tiling of augmented point patterns. The resulting intensity-weighted log-linear model accommodates spatial smoothing through a reduced rank penalized linear spline. To correct for anatomic distortion between subjects, we interpolate point locations via an isomorphic mapping so that smoothing occurs relative to common neuroanatomical atlas co-ordinates. We propose a criterion for choosing the degree and spatial locale of smoothing based on truncating the ordered set of smoothing covariates to minimize residual extra-dispersion. Additional spatial covariates, experimental design factors, hierarchical random effects and intensity functions are readily accommodated in the linear predictor, enabling comprehensive analyses of the salient properties underlying replicated point patterns. We illustrate our method through application to data from a novel study of drug effects on neuronal activation patterns in the brain of rats.     

Estimating functions in indirect inference

Summary.  There are models for which the evaluation of the likelihood is infeasible in practice. For these models the Metropolis–Hastings acceptance probability cannot be easily computed. This is the case, for instance, when only departure times from a G / G /1 queue are observed and inference on the arrival and service distributions are required. Indirect inference is a method to estimate a parameter θ in models whose likelihood function does not have an analytical closed form, but from which random samples can be drawn for fixed values of θ . First an auxiliary model is chosen whose parameter β can be directly estimated. Next, the parameters in the auxiliary model are estimated for the original data, leading to an estimate     . The parameter β is also estimated by using several sampled data sets, simulated from the original model for different values of the original parameter θ . Finally, the parameter θ which leads to the best match to     is chosen as the indirect inference estimate. We analyse which properties an auxiliary model should have to give satisfactory indirect inference. We look at the situation where the data are summarized in a vector statistic T , and the auxiliary model is chosen so that inference on β is drawn from T only. Under appropriate assumptions the asymptotic covariance matrix of the indirect estimators is proportional to the asymptotic covariance matrix of T and componentwise inversely proportional to the square of the derivative, with respect to θ , of the expected value of T . We discuss how these results can be used in selecting good estimating functions. We apply our findings to the queuing problem.     

Return migration of foreign students and non-resident tuition fees

This paper challenges the notion that optimal non-resident tuition fees should necessarily be raised if the return rate of foreign students after graduation increases. The analysis of a host country’s optimal pricing behavior therefore incorporates a specific student migration model. Students usually are aware of the fact that they might return to their home countries after being educated abroad, even if they initially intended to stay on in the host country. With rational expectations, a change in students’ perceptions of the return probability after graduation can affect their first-round decisions whether to study abroad. The optimal adjustment of non-resident tuition fees in the host country has to take this behavioral response into account. Under certain conditions, the behavioral effect is dominant, and a decline in stay rates of students actually requires tuition fee cuts.     

The front-end of projects: a systematic literature review and structuring

Abstract

This paper summarizes the results of a comprehensive systematic literature survey on the front-end of a project, commissioned by the Project Management Institute. The dedicated literature on the front-end is sparse: although the front-end has been shown to be critical to the strategic success of the project, this phase of the lifecycle is not well understood. This paper presents the literature on the concept of the front-end, and defines a temporarily ordered structure of generic processes that form the ‘front-end’ and how these fit together as a coherent whole. These start from the preliminaries to the initiative, then the project purpose (for various stakeholders), the initial analysis and scenario analysis; the analysis of alternatives and choice of project concept; assessment of the project, finishing with setting up project execution. It summarises the recent literature at each of these elements in turn, specifically as they relate to the front-end.     

A Note on Job Tenure and Collective Contracts

Abstract. This paper analyses the relationship between individual tenure and the application of collective contracts at the firm level under the specific institutional settings in Germany. The empirical approach is based on a multilevel model and a linked employer–employee data set for the years 1990, 1995, and 2001. The main result is that elapsed tenure is longer in firms applying collective contracts than in companies with individual wage setting: workers in firms with collective contracts benefit not only from higher wages, but also from higher job stability. Furthermore, we find no significant changes in mean tenure during the 1990s as well as stable differences across wage‐setting regimes.