The Short and Long-Run Labor Market Effects of Age Eligibility Rules: Evidence from Women’s Professional Tennis

Age is often used in law and public policy as a low-cost proxy for competency, maturity, and ability. Age is also used in numerous sport (and non-sport) labor markets to determine workplace eligibility. We exploit the enactment of the women’s professional tennis minimum age rule (AR) in 1995 to estimate the effects of ARs on short-run and long-run labor market outcomes. We find very limited evidence that the AR has had any systematic beneficial effect on players’ career longevity or success. Our results suggest that sport governing bodies should (re-)evaluate the efficacy and necessity of “one size fits all” age eligibility rules.     

Afraid to care; unable to care: A critical ethnography within a long-term care home

This paper describes the findings of a critical ethnographic research study conducted in an urban long-term care home. While our intention was to learn more about the culture of care, specifically as it relates to mental health care provision, the participants in the study consistently spoke with us about (what we have labeled as) a culture of compliance. In a context where new long-term care legislation is being implemented along with new, standardized resident assessment instruments, gaining a deeper understanding of the (un)intended consequences of government's efforts to ensure a high quality of care is of paramount importance. This research demonstrates how policy-driven structural mechanisms can (re)produce conditions that result in frontline staff being afraid and unable to care, and thus contributes to a better understanding of the lived experience of frontline long-term care staff who find that their caregiving responsibilities are displaced by caregiving accountabilities.     

What Does it Mean to Listen to People with Dementia?

A total of 19 people with dementia were interviewed as part of a study into unmet respite care need amongst caregivers and day-care attenders in Sheffield. Some important contextual debates associated with conducting social research with people with dementia are considered. These include informed consent, competency, and how the interests of caregivers and people with dementia are bound together. A form of process consent was used in conducting semi-structured interviews with day-care attenders. Day-care attenders spoke about 'being here' in a number of ways. These include their initial experiences, their sources of satisfaction and their sense of being in families. These substantive findings and the associated methodological insights suggest day-care attenders have important things to say as service-users if appropriate strategies for listening are employed. Service-providers can collaborate imaginatively with day-care attenders to actively explore how care might be shaped by the experiences of persons with dementia.     

Micro-Political Strategies and Their Implications for Participative Decision Making

Drawing on both organizational behaviour and employee relations perspectives,the paper defines participation as `opportunity to influence decisions,' andconsiders the impact of the micro-political behaviour of organization membersin pursuit of their interests on the development of genuine participation.Three types of micro-political strategy are identified and their implicationsdiscussed: information control, flexibility, and stage-craft. The discussionis illustrated with findings from an international study of decision making,and brief comment is made on international cultural differences as acomplicating factor. It is suggested that the role of participation in enhancing the knowledge baseof the organization has been neglected. If genuine participation is to beinstituted, decision making will become more complex, requiring negotiation,not only of competing interests but also of what is to be accepted as`knowledge' in the organization. This in turn will place greater demands onthe intellectual skills and personal behaviour of participants.     

Optimal Price and Quantity of Refurbished Products

Many retail product returns can be refurbished and resold, typically at a reduced price. The price set for the refurbished products affects the demands for both new and refurbished products, while the refurbishment and resale activities incur costs. To maximize profit, a manufacturer in a competitive market must carefully choose the proportion of returned products to refurbish and their sale price. We model the sale, return, refurbishment, and resale processes in an open queueing network and formulate a mathematical program to find the optimal price and proportion to refurbish. Examination of the optimality conditions reveals the different situations in which it is optimal to refurbish none, some, or all of the returned products. Refurbishing operations may increase profit or may be required to relieve a manufacturing capacity bottleneck. A numerical study identifies characteristics of the new product market and refurbished products that encourage refurbishing and some situations in which small changes in the refurbishing cost and quality provoke large changes in the optimal policy.     

A WHITER SHADE OF PALE: ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF REGULATORY INSTRUMENTS

We consider an intertemporal policy game between changing governments that differ in their attitudes towards a particular feature of market outcomes, exemplified with environmental pollution. When in power, a government will choose policy instruments and set strictness of regulation with a view to influencing the policy of future, possibly different, governments. We demonstrate that a “brown” government favours emission quotas over effluent taxes, as quotas establish property rights that are costly to reverse. Conversely, a “green” government prefers to regulate by taxes, in order to limit the incentives of future brown governments to ease regulations. Strategic behaviour tends to exaggerate policy differences (making green governments greener and brown governments browner) compared to when such strategic considerations were not an issue. (JEL: D81, D9, H23, L51, Q28, Q38)     

The Psychology of Working in Practice: A Theory of Change for a New Era

This article advances the psychology of working theory by developing a parallel change‐based paradigm to guide interventions at the level of individuals (i.e., the psychology of working counseling) and systems (i.e., the psychology of working systemic intervention). The change paradigm presented in this article includes (a) a needs assessment encompassing survival, social connection/contribution, and self‐determination and (b) input on the mobilization of agentic action that includes critical reflection and action, proactive engagement, social support, and community engagement. The needs assessment and agentic action aspects of this approach can be used to foster change in individual counseling, advocacy, and systemic intervention. Case examples reflecting a systemic intervention and an individual counseling vignette are presented along with implications for research, such as explorations of the impact of these change models on client outcomes and systemic change efforts.     

High Culture Orientation and the Attitudes and Values of College Students

Using survey data collected from a sample of college students, the authors explore variability in high culrure orientation. Parent's socioeconomic status, traditionally thought to be predictive of high culture orientation, was not significantly related to it in this sample. Factors found to be associated with high culture orientation include interpersonal experience, occupational orientation, and cultural knowledge and participation.     

The Use of Generalized Estimating Equations for Risk Assessment in Developmental Toxicity

This paper reviews and compares several approaches to fitting dose-response models to developmental toxicity data. The main issue of interest is how to appropriately account for litter effects. Among the approaches reviewed are Beta Binomial models, models that attempt to characterize the litter effect through the use of covariates, and models that avoid the complication of correlated offspring by modeling "affected litter" rather than fetus-specific outcomes. Finally, we discuss our recommended approach, which is to use Generalized Estimating Equations, or quasi-likelihood. We give a number of reasons for preferring the latter and illustrate its application with an example.