The timing of motherhood: The challenge to social workers

The timing of the first birth has become a critical issue, to be addressed by the social work profession. This paper suggests that women who have timed the birth of their first child at two different stages in adulthood have responded to the challenges of motherhood in divergent ways. In order to work as effectively as possible with mothers and children, social workers need to understand these differences related to the timing of motherhood.Dr. Walter is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Widener University and is in private practice.     

Evaluation of Developmental Toxicity Data: A Discussion of Some Pertinent Factors and a Proposal

There is currently no well-accepted standard method for evaluation of developmental toxicity data. This paper presents one approach to the evaluation of developmental toxicity data. We initially identify some pertinent factors that influence the interpretation of animal data and summarize the literature pertaining to these factors. Such factors include the quality and quantity of data and the relationship between maternal and developmental toxicity. We proceed with a discussion of quantitative assessment of data and propose schemes for qualitative and quantitative developmental hazard assessments.     

Transfers in Kind: Why They Can Be Efficient and Nonpaternalistic – Comment

Bruce and Waldman make an important contribution regarding the Samaritan dilemma: the expectations of inheritance motivates the younger generation at the margin in the direction of welfare reducing behavior. However, these authors misinterpret the standard analysis on this matter as prediction instead of explanation; confuse governmental subsidies with private charitable giving, and uncritically examine Headstart and statist job training programs.     

Redistribution and compensation

In a model where individual incomes depend on the agents' characteristics, we provide characterizations of several redistribution mechanisms. These mechanisms are designed to eliminate the effects of characteristics that are to be considered irrelevant, while preserving the influence of relevant characteristics on individual incomes. The mechanisms discussed here are egalitarian-equivalent and conditionally egalitarian mechanisms, as well as averaging versions of these rules.An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 1994 Canadian Economic Theory Conference in Toronto. We thank John Roemer and a referee for their comments. Financial support through a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged.     

Quality out-of-school care in Aotearoa/New Zealand

The out-of-school-care sector, a reasonably unregulated industry, has grown quickly despite minimal government investment in comparison to early childhood care. In 2006, the New Zealand government released a draft five-year strategic plan committing an extra $17.4 million per year to this area. This article examines the impact on providers, recipients, and quality standards with the influx of resources and attention.     

Sequential design approaches for bioequivalence studies with crossover designs

The planning of bioequivalence (BE) studies, as for any clinical trial, requires a priori specification of an effect size for the determination of power and an assumption about the variance. The specified effect size may be overly optimistic, leading to an underpowered study. The assumed variance can be either too small or too large, leading, respectively, to studies that are underpowered or overly large. There has been much work in the clinical trials field on various types of sequential designs that include sample size reestimation after the trial is started, but these have seen only little use in BE studies. The purpose of this work was to validate at least one such method for crossover design BE studies. Specifically, we considered sample size reestimation for a two-stage trial based on the variance estimated from the first stage. We identified two methods based on Pocock's method for group sequential trials that met our requirement for at most negligible increase in type I error rate.     

COMPETITION AND COLLABORATION IN ONLINE DISTANCE LEARNING

For-profit firms use the internet to offer classes, courses and degree programmes in direct competition with nonprofit and government-supported colleges and universities. At the same time, many firms seek to partner with academic institutions in offering online instruction or distance learning.This paper outlines and discusses alternative models of academic/for-profit collaboration that are being developed in the USA. Collaboration requires the partners to define responsibilities for technology, administrative services, content development, promotion and student selection, instruction, awarding of credits and overall quality control. Firms may want to 'unbundle' the traditional faculty role of both course designer and teacher,and use different professionals for the two functions. Although most collaborations today involve non-degree programmes, many schools of business are working with for-profit firms to offer MBA degrees online. The diversity of higher education in the USA means that many different models will be tried. Collaborations will expand the markets for online distance learning, but a number of difficult issues remain to be resolved.     

Welfarism and information invariance

This paper examines the consequences of imposing general information-invariance conditions in the context of welfarist social-welfare functionals. Dual relationships between invariance axioms for social-welfare functionals and the corresponding properties of the associated social-welfare orderings are established. Unlike most of the literature on information assumptions in social-choice theory, the paper does not restrict attention to invariance conditions that can be defined in terms of admissible utility transformations and, instead, employs a more general approach. Received: 6 October 1997/Accepted: 17 March 1999     

Real Estate Taxation and Commercial Mortgage Underwriting

Recent disclosures about problem commercial real estate loans have exposed the underwriting process to intense scrutiny. This study focuses on mortgage loan underwriters of life insurance companies. After a review of the tax changes that affected commercial real estate from 1969 through 1988, the study tests how loan underwriters reacted to changes in tax benefits. To overcome the interdependent effects of interest rates and capitalization rates, a variation of the Black-Scholes pricing model is used to test the impact of changes in tax benefits. The results indicate that the underwriters do not fully incorporate the value of tax benefits in the underwriting decision. During the period of the largest tax benefits, 1982 to 1986, underwriters became more conservative and increased their equity requirements.