Jewish Geopolitics: Nationalism and the Ties between the State and the Land

Professor Yosseph Shilhav's article in this issue of National Identities entitled ‘Jewish Territoriality between Land and State’ is an important addition to the literature on territoriality and national sovereignty. His carefully researched and insightful study of the religious affinity between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is especially timely because of the urgency that the present intifada has given to the debate within Israel over the political future of the West Bank and Gaza. What is most provocative, as well as innovative, is Dr Shilhav's thesis that the clash of opinion within Israel over the solution to the Occupied Territories is not, as commonly understood, a political debate between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’, but is rooted in differences of religious interpretation concerning the ‘sanctity of the Land’. It is with this thesis that I take issue.     

An Examination of Generalized-Conditioned Reinforcers in Stimulus Preference Assessments

Generalized-conditioned reinforcers (GCRs) are advocated for by practitioners when possible because of their ability to function as reinforcers across a wide array of motivative operations. In organizational behavior management 2 common GCRs are praise and money. Although many studies have demonstrated their usefulness, no prior study has compared relative preferences for GCRs (specifically money) and other potentially reinforcing items. A total of 24 direct care employees from a group home setting completed assessments for potential reinforcers. All participants in the current study identified items other than money as high-preference items, suggesting that some items may serve as alternatives to money in terms of preference.     

Measurement biases in user involvement research

Considerable research has been conducted to demonstrate user involvement's effect on information system success. User involvement and system success typically have been measured by asking users for their perceptions of these variables. This paper reports on a field study conducted to investigate the possibility that this approach to measuring study variables tends to overstate the benefits of user involvement. The link of user involvement to user satisfaction is found to be significantly weaker when user involvement is assessed by systems analysts than when it is self reported. Further, this difference is found to be greater for systems with few users than for systems with many users. The findings suggest that common method variance and self-serving bias may have overstated the apparent benefits of user involvement in past research on information systems. Suggestions for future research are presented.     

Estimation with truncated inverse binomial sampling

Consider truncated samples taken from an infinite population with a fixed uumber n of observations recorded. A randon number X of items must be sampled in order to observe after trunca-tion. adified maximun liicel.ihooa estimators of X (assumed un-'mown) and of the population parameters are develo~cd, and a computing scheme is given for the exponential distribution. On the basis of asymptotu ,operties, some estimators are singled out and compared with the usual maximum likelihood estimators.     

DISCOUNTING,COGNITION, AND FINANCIAL AWARENESS: NEW EVIDENCE FROM A CHANGE IN THE MILITARY RETIREMENT SYSTEM

The choice given military personnel between an immediate cash payment of $30,000 or a more generous retirement pension permits us to estimate individuals' personal discount rates (PDRs). The resulting PDRs, about 7% for enlisted personnel and 2%–4.3% for officers, are precise and are correlated with a variety of other financial behaviors. The PDR is negatively related to educational attainment and the Armed Forces Qualification Test, but cognition seems to operate through channels other than being better informed; better‐informed individuals were not always measured to be more patient. (JEL D91, D14)     

Punishing Children for Caring: The Hidden Cost of Young Carers

SUMMARY. This paper examines the lives, experiences and needs of children who care - those children under the age of 18 who provide primary care for a sick, disabled or elderly adult in the home. It presents data from a recent study into the lives of these children, their responsibilities, their commitments, their pain and their fears. It paints a picture of neglect both by professionals paid to care as well as by other family members. It suggests that child carers are effectively punished for caring. The paper goes on to examine the implications for child carers of the Community Care Act, finally implemented on 1 April 1993, to raise a number of critical questions about the rights of children who care, and to suggest a number of innovative ways forward, based upon the expressed needs of young carers.     

The effect of divorce on intergenerational transfers: New evidence

This paper draws on new data on intergenerational transfers of time and money that were collected in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We use these data to examine the effects of divorce on these transfers. We find that the timing of divorce is critical. Fathers and mothers involved in late divorces have similar levels of transfers with their adult children, while divorce during a child’s childhood years increases transfers with mothers and sharply lowers them with fathers. Somewhat surprisingly, we find no evidence that divorced fathers who paid child support are more likely to be involved in intergenerational transfers than those who did not pay child support.