Employment effects of a German workfare programme at the establishment level

We examined the impact of a German workfare programme for hard‐to‐place welfare recipients, the so‐called ‘€1‐jobs’, on staff in public and non‐profit establishments. We applied static and dynamic panel models using IAB Establishment Panel data from 2005 to 2013. To account for regional influences, we linked the establishment data to indicators at the district level. We identified a positive complementary effect on high‐skilled workers and a negative substitution effect on low‐skilled workers. We interpreted these findings as follows: In that €1‐jobs require highly skilled staff for management, instruction, qualification and support, this indicates that the programme generates jobs for skilled workers within the welfare‐to‐work industry. The negative effect that we found for low‐skilled workers suggests substitution effects between the programme participants and regular low‐skilled workers; although in this study, both effects were relatively small.     

The Transition to a Coresidential Partnership: Who Moves and Who Has the Partner Move In?

Population Research and Policy Review - Moving into a joint household is an important step in the process of union formation. While a growing body of literature investigates differences between...     

International business thought: A 50-year footprint

As international business marks 50 years of its establishment as a distinct domain of academic research, discussions on both the major contributions of the field and its future research directions have drawn great interest in the current literature. The arrival at a clear consensus on these issues, however, has been set back by the lack of resolution in the search for a unifying, integrative framework of international business. Drawing on theories of knowledge organisation and on extant reviews of international business research, this paper proposes an emergent international business research framework anchored around four unifying themes expressed as broad international business research questions. A content analysis of 1689 studies in the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) from its maiden issue in 1970 to 2008 and studies classified as international business in nature done prior to 1960 confirms the trajectories of international business research along the four themes. It is suggested that these major research themes serve as the main research pillars that define the international business domain, framing research done so far, and driving future research in the field. Areas of research intensity and opportunity are identified along with implications for international business research and theory-building.     

Career Management in Uncertain Times: Challenges and Opportunities

The beginning years of the 21st century have witnessed the confluence of a host of environmental factors that have dramatically altered employment relationships and upended long‐standing approaches to career management for workers in the United States and around the world. The authors critically examine these environmental changes, focusing on the implications for career choice and decision making. On the basis of these findings, they address how individuals, working with career counselors and professionals, can enhance their contemporary careers in response to the challenges and uncertainties brought on by rapid environmental change.     

Reliability,Validity, and Variability of the Subjective Well-Being Questions in the 2010 American Time Use Survey

Part of a wider range of investigations to produce generally acceptable standards for measuring affective well-being, time diary surveys have tested several approaches to measuring subjective well-being during diary days. As an alternative to the standard approach of asking a single question about each activity reported in time diary surveys, the 2010 module of the American Time Use Survey asked six emotion questions about three activities. The perception questions captured how happy, meaningful, sad, tired, stressed, or in pain respondents felt on a 7-point scale. To evaluate this approach, our research examined the reliability and validity of the six emotion questions, and assessed their variability across activities. Using principal component analysis, we assessed the associations among items and obtained two activity-level components with Cronbach’s alphas of 0.68 and 0.59 and two respondent-level components with Cronbach’s alphas of 0.74 and 0.65. To test validity, we regressed self-rated health on the underlying components and socio-demographic controls. Both of the respondent level components were significantly associated with better health (odds ratio 1.81, 1.27). Using each of the perceptions individually, we found that happiness, meaningfulness, and lack of fatigue, stress, and pain were related to better health, but none as strongly as the first component. Finally, we examined the coefficients of variation to assess the variability in the well-being measures across activities. Measurement implications and limitations of this study are discussed.     

Statistical analysis of an endemic disease from a capture–recapture experiment

There are a number of statistical techniques for analysing epidemic outbreaks. However, many diseases are endemic within populations and the analysis of such diseases is complicated by changing population demography. Motivated by the spread of cowpox amongst rodent populations, a combined mathematical model for population and disease dynamics is introduced. A Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is then constructed to make statistical inference for the model based on data being obtained from a capture–recapture experiment. The statistical analysis is used to identify the key elements in the spread of the cowpox virus.     

What's in the Drawer?

ABSTRACT

Much current museum theory and practice emphasizes the importance of storytelling and the inclusion of multiple perspectives in richly layered museum interpretations, with a key objective being the elicitation of empathy for the lives and personal interactions of people in other times and places. Yet in the process museum objects themselves can often appear to recede in significance, appearing as little more than illustrations rather than the complex, material entities they actually are. This article explores the power of objects and of active ways of discovering them, in the setting of the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum. Visitors can open glass-topped drawers underneath a number of the display cases and find themselves gazing on artifacts in storage: some with museum labels visible and legible, others not. This discovery of the objects is actively performed and, while objects cannot be removed for handling, facilitates their imagined, non-visual exploration. It is also a process in which, the article suggests, proprioception is of particular interest. Overall the drawers offer, the article submits, the possibility for variously pleasing, alienating, surprising, or reassuring encounters with the potential to enhance the museum experience.     

Maternal Vocal Interactions with Infants: Reciprocal Visual Influences

The present study examined the influence of infant visual cues on maternal vocal and facial expressiveness while speaking or singing and the influence of maternal visual cues on infant attention. Experiment 1 asked whether mothers exhibit more vocal emotion when speaking and singing to infants in or out of view. Adults judged which of each pair of audio excerpts (in view, out of view) sounded more emotional. Face‐to‐face vocalizations were judged more emotional than vocalizations to infants out of view. Moreover, mothers smiled considerably more while singing than while speaking to infants. Experiment 2 examined the influence of video feedback from infants on maternal speech and singing. Maternal vocalizations in the context of video feedback were judged to be less emotional than those in face‐to‐face contexts but more emotional than those in out‐of‐view contexts. Experiment 3 compared six‐month‐old infants’ attention to maternal speech and singing with audio‐only versions or with silent video‐only versions. Infants exhibited comparable attention to audio‐only versions of speech and singing but greater attention to video‐only versions of singing. The present investigation is unique in documenting the contribution of infant visual feedback to maternal vocal emotion in contexts that control for infants’ presence, visibility, and proximity.     

Do Nonresidential Fathers’ Financial Support and Contact Improve Children’s Health?

Nonresidential father investment of time and money has been shown to ameliorate the negative consequences of family dissolution on children’s behavior and achievement; however, no research has shown whether this investment also has positive effects on child health. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey, Kindergarten cohort, this research uses a two-wave cross-lagged model to examine how child support and contact are associated with maternal reports of children’s physical health over time following parental separation. Child support in kindergarten is not associated with child health in third grade. Instead, children who are healthier in kindergarten receive greater financial support from their father. Although contact and child support are positively related, greater contact is not associated with better child health.