A Noisy Screening Model of Education

Abstract. This paper presents a screening model of education in which students having private information about their innate abilities are noisily tested in school. The aim is to explore the effect of noise on the screening equilibrium. By assuming that labour contracts take the form of reward schedules based on inaccurate academic qualifications, one can show that separating equilibrium turns out to be unique but insufficiently revealing, and both high and low ability types become overeducated. Also, even when separation is uncompleted, we show that a firm could still profitably cream‐skim the market so that no pooling equilibrium exits. As in the non‐noise case, the existence of an equilibrium is assured when the student population is made up mainly of a small proportion of high‐ability individuals, but in that case the fraction required is even lower.     

Goodness‐of‐fit tests for the hyperbolic distribution

The authors give tests of fit for the hyperbolic distribution, based on the Cramér‐von Mises statistic W². They consider the general case with four parameters unknown, and some specific cases where one or two parameters are fixed. They give two examples using stock price data.     

Job bust, baby bust?: Evidence from Spain

The unemployment rate in Spain has been exceptionally high for more than two decades by now. During the same period the fertility rate dropped dramatically reaching the lowest level in the world. In this study we look for evidence of a link between the `unemployment crisis' and the `fertility crisis' in Spain. We examine the factors that affect individuals' ages at marriage and childbirth, focusing on the effects of male employment status. Our results show that spells of non-employment have a strong negative effect on the hazard of marriage. We also find negative (but smaller) effects of part-time or temporal employment on the hazard of marriage. The estimated direct effects of joblessness and part-time work on birth hazards conditional on marriage are smaller and/or not significant for most birth intervals and sample groups. Simulations based on the estimated models confirm the potential for large `delaying' effects of joblessness on marriage. However, the delaying effect is not so large in simulations which control for the actual incidence of non-employment in the sample. Received: 7 January 1999/Accepted: 7 March 2000     

Changes in the Relationship Between Child Support Payments and Educational Attainment of Offspring, 1979–1988

We examine changes over the 1980s in the effect of child support payments on the educational attainment of children age 16 to 19 in the United States, and why child support has a stronger impact than other sources of income. We use 1979 and 1988 Current Population Survey data, covering a period when improvements in enforcement should have increased the proportion of reluctant fathers paying support. We hypothesize and find that the positive effect of child support on education diminished somewhat over this period, both absolutely and in relation to other income.     

The structure of global centrality measures

The aim of this article is to identify and analyse the logic and structure of centrality measures applied to social networks. On the basis of the article by Borgatti and Everett, identifying the latent functions of centrality, we first use a survey of personal networks with 450 cases to perform an empirical study of the differences and correspondences between degree, closeness and betweenness centrality in personal networks. Then, we examine the correspondences between the three global indicators in each type of centrality: the maximum value, the mean value and the hierarchy or centralization. The results provide a better understanding of the centrality indicators of networks and the reality that they express in an empirical context.     

An overview of occupational accidents notification systems within the enlarged EU

This paper describes a comparative analysis of the official forms used for reporting occupational accidents within the EU-27 member states. The comparison is based on two analysis grids (coding schedule) created to that effect, which incorporate a set of evaluation criteria and an interpretation key. The results obtained in the analysis allowed for attention to be drawn to the relevant attributes of such forms in terms of their content and format/structure. It also revealed the main similarities and differences between each country, providing a complete assessment of the 27 member states. The discussion gives account of the level of implementation of the "new" Eurostat variables within the European Statistics of Accidents at Work (ESAW). Furthermore, the study shows that certain formats (structure of information fields) appear to facilitate completeness of the information collected. It has also demonstrated that the European harmonisation process is still far from completion, although the newcomer states seem to be adjusting quickly to the process. The findings of this study may bring useful insights to national authorities and European policy-makers, or to employers/enterprises wishing to implement their internal procedures aligned with the ESAW methodology. The scientific community is another interest group, whose research relies on official statistics, preferably comparable across all countries.     

Estimation of distribution algorithms using Gaussian Bayesian networks to solve industrial optimization problems constrained by environment variables

Many real-world optimization problems involve two different subsets of variables: decision variables, and those variables which are not present in the cost function but constrain the solutions, and thus, must be considered during optimization. Thus, dependencies between and within both subsets of variables must be considered. In this paper, an estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) is implemented to solve this type of complex optimization problems. A Gaussian Bayesian network is used to build an abstraction model of the search space in each iteration to identify patterns among the variables. As the algorithm is initialized from data, we introduce a new hyper-parameter to control the influence of the initial data in the decisions made during the EDA execution. The results show that our algorithm improves the cost function more than the expert knowledge does.

     

Corporate and managerial characteristics as drivers of social responsibility disclosure by state-owned enterprises

The public administration sector, including state owned enterprises (SOEs), has developed various types of information disclosure practice, in response to stakeholders’ demands, in parallel with developments in the private sector. This paper analyses the corporate social responsibility (CSR) information disclosed by SOEs and the influence exerted by the characteristics of the SOEs themselves (size, industry sector, degree of government ownership and number of years in operation) and by those of their managers (age, gender, CSR education profile and CSR responsibilities in the workplace). To do so, an index of CSR information disclosure was created, based on the responses made to a questionnaire in this respect. An empirical regression model was then applied to test and categorise the factors analysed. According to the results obtained, the size and sector of the SOE, together with the manager’s CSR responsibilities, are the factors that most significantly affect the online disclosure of CSR information.