Hiring a Gay Man,Taking a Risk?: A Lab Experiment on Employment Discrimination and Risk Aversion

We investigate risk aversion as a driver of labor market discrimination against homosexual men. We show that more hiring discrimination by more risk-averse employers is consistent with taste-based and statistical discrimination. To test this hypothesis we conduct a scenario experiment in which experimental employers take a fictitious hiring decision concerning a heterosexual or homosexual male job candidate. In addition, participants are surveyed on their risk aversion and other characteristics that might correlate with this risk aversion. Analysis of the (post-)experimental data confirms our hypothesis. The likelihood of a beneficial hiring decision for homosexual male candidates decreases by 31.7% when employers are a standard deviation more risk-averse.     

Parental reaction towards radicalization in young people

This paper focuses on radicalization from a parenting perspective; we propose an approach that sees radicalization as a possibility in adolescent development, and as part of the interaction with the adolescent's social environment and socialization. The aim of the study is to discover how parents react when their adolescent develops extreme ideals. Using 55 in‐depth interviews with young people who have extreme ideals and their parents, the parental reactions towards these ideals are explored. Subsequently, the reactions are categorized according to two dimensions (control and support). This study shows how parents struggle when confronted with radicalization and shift to less demanding responses due to powerlessness, dissociation and parental uncertainty.     

Poverty in the Enlarged European Union. A Discussion about Definitions and Reference Groups

The enlargement of the European Union (EU) has stirred discussion about the relevance of the traditional EU poverty indicator which measures poverty in relative and national terms. As a result of diverging living conditions of the poor in the old and new member states, some authors have argued in favour of alternative poverty measures. One line of thought is that the reference groups people use for evaluating their living standard have Europeanised and that a poverty measure should incorporate this evolution. Bowing on the rich literature on the conceptualisation of poverty and reference group theory, we argue that a distinction must be made between privately oriented reference groups and publicly oriented reference groups. Although research has mainly focused on the former type of reference groups, only the latter offers a norm to define the poverty threshold. We conclude with a research proposal to construct poverty lines driven by publicly oriented reference groups.     

The role of employees' OCB and leaders' hindrance stress in the emergence of self-serving leadership

Media reports on self-serving leadership primarily focused on the negative consequences of such behavior for employees. However, much remains to be understood about the antecedents of self-serving behavior of leaders. In the present research we explore the role of employees' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the emergence of self-serving leadership. Using one multi-source field study and three experiments, we showed that employees' OCB towards coworkers (OCBI) negatively impacted self-serving leadership. Moreover, we also examine the underlying mechanism for this relation. Results indicate that employees' OCBI mitigated leaders' hindrance stress, which mediates the relationship between OCBI and self-serving leadership. As such, our findings indicate that self-serving leaders are not necessarily inherently bad and that employees have an important role in shaping leaders' self-serving behavior.     

Multiply robust inference for statistical interactions

A primary focus of an increasing number of scientific studies is to determine whether two exposures interact in the effect that they produce on an outcome of interest. Interaction is commonly assessed by fitting regression models in which the linear predictor includes the product between those exposures. When the main interest lies in the interaction, this approach is not entirely satisfactory because it is prone to (possibly severe) bias when the main exposure effects or the association between outcome and extraneous factors are misspecified. In this article, we therefore consider conditional mean models with identity or log link which postulate the statistical interaction in terms of a finite-dimensional parameter, but which are otherwise unspecified. We show that estimation of the interaction parameter is often not feasible in this model because it would require nonparametric estimation of auxiliary conditional expectations given high-dimensional variables. We thus consider 'multiply robust estimation' under a union model that assumes at least one of several working submodels holds. Our approach is novel in that it makes use of information on the joint distribution of the exposures conditional on the extraneous factors in making inferences about the interaction parameter of interest. In the special case of a randomized trial or a family-based genetic study in which the joint exposure distribution is known by design or by Mendelian inheritance, the resulting multiply robust procedure leads to asymptotically distribution-free tests of the null hypothesis of no interaction on an additive scale. We illustrate the methods via simulation and the analysis of a randomized follow-up study.     

Regranting identity to the outgraced – narratives of persons with learning disabilities: methodological considerations

Good research should be relevant and useful, it may even be enlightening or symbolic, but it can also be emancipatory. Qualitative research can be useful in challenging structures, policies and practices that disempower and marginalize segments of the population. However, could it be that the empowerment of the participant ends where the weakness of the researcher begins? In qualitative studies the researcher seems to have a number of favourite interviews. In a study on the relational and sexual experiences of 46 people with learning disabilities, 12 interviews were withdrawn from the general data on the basis of lack of relevance. It is important to re‐examine why the voice of some people fell out of the in‐depth analysis and whether this was justified. In this article some methodological opportunities and pitfalls to re‐grant identity to these silenced narratives are considered and discussed.     

A Country‐wide Study of Consumer Choice for an Emerging Supermarket Sector: A Case Study of Nicaragua

Studies portraying and quantifying supermarket clientele based on country‐wide survey data are scarce in development economics literature. This article studies the choice of outlet of Nicaraguan consumers in 1998 and 2001 when supermarkets started to emerge and gain in importance. It applies comparative statistics and a multinomial logit model to countrywide data on 4,000 households. The results show an emerging supermarket sector with a slowly growing clientele, especially among the better endowed and more highly educated families. Small grocery shops or pulperias and the daily and weekly markets continue to serve most clients.