Children as Witnesses: Understanding Their Capacities, Needs, and Experiences

Historically the law regarded children as inherently unreliable and made it difficult for them to testify. Since 1975 awareness of child abuse has increased and research has established that children can be reliable witnesses. Governments began to recognize the needs and capacities of children and enacted legal reforms to facilitate prosecutions for child abuse. This paper reports on a survey of victim witness workers and other justice system professionals which reveals some of the continued failings of that system in dealing with children. Although relatively rare, there are cases of false allegations of abuse, usually a result of investigations by poorly trained professionals. Further legal reforms and better human supports are required to ensure that the needs of children are met and their capacities as witnesses are fully appreciated.     

City-wide relationships between green spaces,urban land use and topography

The growing proportion of human populations living in urban areas, and consequent trends of increasing urban expansion and densification fuel a need to understand how urban form and land use affect environmental quality, including the availability of urban green spaces. Here we use Sheffield as a case study of city-wide relationships between urban green space extent, quality (vegetation cover and tree-cover), and gradients in urban form and topography. The total area of buildings and length of the road network are equally strong negative predictors of extent of green space, while the former predictor is a more important negative influence upon green space quality. Elevation positively influences extent of green space but negatively influences tree-cover. In contrast, slope of terrain positively influences green space quality and is the best predictor of tree-cover. Overall housing density is a more important negative predictor of extent of green space and tree-cover than the densities of individual housing types. Nevertheless, the latter are more important influences upon levels of vegetation cover. Threshold effects of densities of different housing types suggest opportunities for optimising green space quality, with implications for housing policy. Variation in ecological quality of green space may partly reflect different historical intensities of industrial activity.     

Trends in the intergenerational transmission of divorce

I use data from the 1973-1996 NORC General Social Survey to examine trends in the intergenerational transmission of divorce, the propensity for the children of divorce to end their own marriages. The rate of divorce transmission declined by almost 50% in the study period. This result was essentially unchanged by statistical controls for various personal and family background differences between respondents.     

Rail infrastructure charging in Hellenic railways

In this paper we consider marginal cost estimation in Greek railways over the period 2000-2004. Marginal cost estimation has been recently an active area of research when disaggregated data by line of operation are available but factor price data are not available. We propose panel data techniques to deal with the problem of statistical efficiency of parameters estimators. Our estimates show that marginal cost in Greek railways is comparable to the estimates in other European countries.     

Exploring Job Satisfaction in Private and Public Employment: Empirical Evidence from Greece

Abstract. This paper analyses subjective job satisfaction (JS) responses by employees in the public and private sectors of the Greek labour market. Panel data covering the period 1995–2001 and a random effects ordered probit model are used for estimation purposes. The results of the econometric estimation show that a substantial JS differential exists between the two sectors, in every JS domain and always in favour of public employment. A typical ordered decomposition analysis indicates that about one‐third of the difference in expected JS can be explained by differences in employee characteristics and two‐thirds by unobserved sector‐specific inbuilt features. The comparison of wage reductions, which a representative employee will be prepared to endure in order to avoid employment in the private sector, reveals that the regularity of working schedules is appreciated more than any other facet of JS. The obtained results enhance the existing apparatus for evaluating government policies in the labour market.     

Taking a "Hands On" Approach to Diversity in Higher Education: A Critical-Dialogic Model for Effective Intergroup Interaction

This article reviews divergent empirical evidence on interracial contact. While research on diversity in higher education provides ample evidence for the educational benefits of engaging with diversity in informal interactions or courses, experimental and naturalistic studies in social psychology on interracial interactions reveal a complicated picture, showing what appear to be both positive and negative effects. Rather than addressing the question of whether or not to promote interracial interactions on campus, we present a critical-dialogic model of intergroup dialogue that centers on communication processes as an avenue toward intergroup relationships, understanding, and collaboration. Prior research and preliminary results from a nine-university research collaboration provide strong empirical support for the proposed model. We conclude with program and policy considerations for higher education institutions interested in promoting meaningful intergroup interaction.     

Bayesian Instrumental Variables: Priors and Likelihoods

Instrumental variable (IV) regression provides a number of statistical challenges due to the shape of the likelihood. We review the main Bayesian literature on instrumental variables and highlight these pathologies. We discuss Jeffreys priors, the connection to the errors-in-the-variables problems and more general error distributions. We propose, as an alternative to the inverted Wishart prior, a new Cholesky-based prior for the covariance matrix of the errors in IV regressions. We argue that this prior is more flexible and more robust thanthe inverted Wishart prior since it is not based on only one tightness parameter and therefore can be more informative about certain components of the covariance matrix and less informative about others. We show how prior-posterior inference can be formulated in a Gibbs sampler and compare its performance in the weak instruments case for synthetic as well as two illustrations based on well-known real data.