Education,wage work,and marriage: Perspectives of Egyptian working women

We explore young working women's perceptions of marriage and work in contemporary Egypt, when an increase in age at marriage was evident from national survey data. Both working conditions and employment opportunities declined significantly for young women even as their educational attainment increased and marriage was delayed. In‐depth interviews were conducted over a 2‐year period between 1998 and 2000 with 27 young women between the ages of 15 and 29 who were from relatively poor families and working in a range of salaried jobs in three locations. The qualitative data indicate that young women have high expectations in terms of marital living standards. They seek to achieve this in part by saving intensively before marriage when they work, and otherwise by ensuring substantial monetary support from their families. We conclude that rising material aspirations and family nucleation rather than change in female labor force participation drive marriage change in contemporary Egypt. The driving force behind this conclusion is that there is a reinforcement of the traditional values associated with the institution of marriage rather than its erosion.     

Three Mexico City Tabloid Newspapers: Some Surprises

Mexico today enjoys one of the most dynamic and varied print media in Latin America. Dating from 1542 when the first news flier came off the press in Mexico City, print journalism has had a lively history culminating in a most favorable situation in the 1980s in which this country's population counts on a daily deluge of newspapers, magazines and other publications. Al Hester concentrates on three tabloids which make up over one-tenth of the total daily circulation of papers in the capital. He examines their textual and pictorial content, sources of news, the importance of news coverage in comparison with advertising space, the general characteristics of the papers in the way they approach their tasks, how the communicators perceive their missions and their readers, and finally what contributions these tabloids make to Mexico City readers. Hester discovers that the tabloids do not fit the traditional picture of sensationalist publicatons but to varying degrees provide hard news, variety, even investigative reporting, and socially conscious types of content.     

A Simple Characterization of Approval Voting

This note provides a characterization of Approval Voting as the only ballot aggregation function satisfying faithfulness, consistency, and cancellation. The proof is simpler than those of the characterizations of Fishburn (Aggregation and revelation of preferences, 1978a; J Econ Theory 19:180–185, 1978b), and also shows that the assumption of Neutrality used there was unnecessary.     

Local Armed Uprisings and the Transnational Image of Claim Making: The Kurds of Turkey and the Zapatistas of Mexico in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore why and how some local armed uprisings are able to go global with a transnational image of ‘social justice’ while others fail to build such image despite becoming transnational. The cases to be analyzed in the article are the pro-Kurdish mobilization in the leadership of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey and the pro-Mayan Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) movement in Mexico. In explaining the relative success of the latter, the study seeks to make connections with the globalization literature in general and the transnational social movement literature in particular. Particularly, the article focuses on the ability of social movements to market their causes in international arena with a good image. Overall, this study lays out several key strategic differences between the two movements such as the holding and the use of arms, duration of armed resistance, and the leadership and organizational structure to unpack why some social movements are more successful to market their causes as a just cause within ‘global civil society’ and why others fail to do so ending with being listed as a terrorist organization.     

Characteristics of men and women who complete or exit from an on‐line internet sexuality questionnaire: A study of instrument dropout biases

This study compared respondents who completed an Internet sexuality questionnaire and those who dropped out before completion. The study was in Swedish and comprised 3,614 respondents over a 2‐week period (53% males, 47% females). There were significant differences between males, of whom 51% dropped out before completion of the 175‐item questionnaire, and females, of whom 43% dropped out. Dropout in both genders followed a curve of negative acceleration. The data suggest that dropout is likely to be significant and gender and demographically biased, and to occur significantly earlier for men than for women. Geography, education, sexual orientation, age, relationship status, living arrangements, and Internet connection speed were related to dropout for men, while only relationship status and living arrangements, which were in the opposite direction from men, were related to dropout in women.     

The Effects of Process and Outcome Similarity on Users' Evaluations of Decision Aids*

Decision aids (DA) used in online shopping contexts have been shown to improve users' product choices. Given that previous research (e.g., Byrne & Griffitt, 1973 ) has demonstrated the positive effects of perceived similarity on an individual's evaluation of others, this study investigates the effects of users' perceived similarity with a DA on their evaluations of that DA. More specifically, we investigate the effect of users' perceptions of the similarity between their own decision process and that followed by the DA to arrive at a recommendation (decision process similarity), as well as the similarity between the recommendations made by the DA and users' initial choices (outcome similarity), on their evaluations of the DA's usefulness and trustworthiness. The results of this study show that perceived process similarity exerts positive and significant effects on users' perceptions of the DA's usefulness and trustworthiness. However, the effects of perceived outcome similarity on trust are completely mediated by perceived process similarity. It is also observed that the level of the user's domain knowledge moderates the effects of perceived decision process similarity on both perceived usefulness and trustworthiness. These results have implications for DA design. It is important that designers consider the process by which users make decisions for themselves and align the DA's decision process with those of the user's, especially for the novice user. The full mediation of the effect of outcome similarity on trust by process similarity highlights how a similar decision process can mitigate some of the negative effects of outcome dissimilarity.     

Government Governance (GG) and Inter-Ministerial Policy Coordination (IMPC) in Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia

This paper focuses on the function of Inter-ministerial Policy Coordination (IMPC) and its critical role in governance. Following a definitional section, the authors give an overview of public sector governance in Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia and discuss the application of governance principles to Inter-Ministerial Policy Coordination in these regions. They conclude with specific examples from the Republic of Macedonia and Central Asia.

Claim Dependence Induced by Common Effects in Hierarchical Credibility Models

In the usual credibility model, observations are made of a risk or group of risks selected from a population, and claims are assumed to be independent among different risks. However, there are some problems in practical applications and this assumption may be violated in some situations. Some credibility models allow for one source of claim dependence only, that is, across time for an individual insured risk or a group of homogeneous insured risks. Some other credibility models have been developed on a two-level common effects model that allows for two possible sources of dependence, namely, across time for the same individual risk and between risks. In this paper, we argue for the notion of modeling claim dependence on a three-level common effects model that allows for three possible sources of dependence, namely, across portfolios, across individuals and simultaneously across time within individuals. We also obtain the corresponding credibility premiums hierarchically using the projection method. Then we derive the general hierarchical structure or multi-level credibility premiums for the models with h-level of common effects.     

Fractionally integrated ARMA for crude palm oil prices prediction: case of potentially overdifference

Dealing with stationarity remains an unsolved problem. Some of the time series data, especially crude palm oil (CPO) prices persist towards nonstationarity in the long-run data. This dilemma forces the researchers to conduct first-order difference. The basic idea is that to obtain the stationary data that is considered as a good strategy to overcome the nonstationary counterparts. An opportune remark as it is, this proxy may lead to overdifference. The CPO prices trend elements have not been attenuated but nearly annihilated. Therefore, this paper presents the usefulness of autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average (ARFIMA) model as the solution towards the nonstationary persistency of CPO prices in the long-run data. In this study, we employed daily historical Free-on-Board CPO prices in Malaysia. A comparison was made between the ARFIMA over the existing autoregressive-integrated moving average (ARIMA) model. Here, we employed three statistical evaluation criteria in order to measure the performance of the applied models. The general conclusion that can be derived from this paper is that the usefulness of the ARFIMA model outperformed the existing ARIMA model.     

Bayesian Estimation for the Exponentiated Weibull Model via Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation

Bayesian estimation for the two unknown parameters and the reliability function of the exponentiated Weibull model are obtained based on generalized order statistics. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are considered to compute the Bayes estimates of the target parameters. Our computations are based on the balanced loss function which contains the symmetric and asymmetric loss functions as special cases. The results have been specialized to the progressively Type-II censored data and upper record values. Comparisons are made between Bayesian and maximum likelihood estimators via Monte Carlo simulation.