Income distribution,economic growth and European integration

In this paper I discuss recent theories on the relationship between growth and inequality, and ask whether the two move together or not. Output growth can be due to increases in physical capital, human capital, employment or the level of technology, and I argue that each of these represents a mechanism that relates our two variables of interest. The European integration process has represented a major policy change that has affected not only the opportunities for growth but also the constraints faced by national governments. We can then ask whether such integration has had an effect on inequality, and to what extent it has resulted in a conflict between productive efficiency and distributive considerations.     

Criteria for the detection of outliers in the multinomial model

We propse methods for the detection of outliers in structured populations in the multinomial model under different working hypotheses.     

Project Employ: engineering hope and breaking down barriers to homelessness

The homeless population in the US has dramatically increased in the past two decades. People who are homeless often lack skills sets such as stress management and social skills, independent living skills, and skills for vocational and leisure engagement. Best practice vocational education and training programs for individuals who are homeless recognize that success in the worker role often hinges on a person's capacity to manage day-to-day living. Life skills and pre-employment training are essential components of vocational programs but no more important than interpersonal skill development including anger management, developing self esteem and motivation, building goal setting capacity, and skills for money management, personal budgeting and self-advocacy. These areas of performance have all been traditionally included in occupational therapy's domain of practice. This article describes Project Employ, a grant funded supportive employment program that has grown out of collaboration between Duquesne University's Department of Occupational Therapy and Bethlehem Haven, an emergency shelter and residential recovery program and primary service provider for homeless people in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The purpose of this article is to describe the history, structure and outcomes of Project Employ.     

Measuring Quality of Life in Small Areas Over Different Periods of Time

The purpose of this paper is todescribe an index methodology for measuringquality of life, understood multidimensionally,in a set of very different municipalities,units of measurement, and time periods.Although certain technical problems arise whensmall areas (municipalities) are considered,cross and serial comparison is completed. Themethodology was applied in 314 municipalitiesof the province of Barcelona (Spain).     

Classification of Poverty Condition Using Natural Language Processing

Social Indicators Research - This work introduces a methodology to classify between poor and extremely poor people through Natural Language Processing. The approach serves as a baseline to...     

Optimum design-based ratio estimators of the distribution function

The ratio method is commonly used to the estimation of means and totals. This method was extended to the problem of estimating the distribution function. An alternative ratio estimator of the distribution function is defined. A result that compares the variances of the aforementioned ratio estimators is used to define optimum design-based ratio estimators of the distribution function. Different empirical results indicate that the optimum ratio estimators can be more efficient than alternative ratio estimators. In addition, we show by simulations that alternative ratio estimators can have large biases, whereas biases of the optimum ratio estimators are negligible in this situation.     

From Rags to Riches? Immigration and Poverty in Spain

This article for first time explores the relationship between immigration and poverty in Spain. Using recent Spanish household surveys, it is found, first, that both moderate and severe poverty are more acute among immigrants than among nationals and social transfers play no substantial role in reducing monetary deprivation in the case of foreign-born population; in the second place, we perform an econometric analysis that shows that the different poverty risk faced by local and immigrant households is not driven by differences in basic household and demographic characteristics.     

Fast and robust estimators of variance components in the nested error model

Usual fitting methods for the nested error linear regression model are known to be very sensitive to the effect of even a single outlier. Robust approaches for the unbalanced nested error model with proved robustness and efficiency properties, such as M-estimators, are typically obtained through iterative algorithms. These algorithms are often computationally intensive and require robust estimates of the same parameters to start the algorithms, but so far no robust starting values have been proposed for this model. This paper proposes computationally fast robust estimators for the variance components under an unbalanced nested error model, based on a simple robustification of the fitting-of-constants method or Henderson method III. These estimators can be used as starting values for other iterative methods. Our simulations show that they are highly robust to various types of contamination of different magnitude.     

Lights and shadows on sustainability rating scoring

Many organizations currently publish sustainability ratings that quantify the sustainability of firms by aggregating scores. These organizations analyze companies in economic, social, environmental and corporate governance terms. However, some of these scores are associated with problems of how positive and negative assessments are offset. This work proposes a methodology for using fuzzy logic in the design of a comprehensive sustainability rating for firms. This technique for measuring sustainability addresses the complexity of the concept and enables the incorporation of expert knowledge into the system of assessment. This approach is applied to organizational information taken from the 2008 Accountability Rating and corrects one of the weaknesses revealed by methodologies based on the aggregation of scores—the offset effect—enabling decision-maker to manage it. This is considered an important research topic because of the growth of social responsible financial markets, and the fact that investors are demanding more accurate information.