The Impact of Abuse History and Trauma Symptoms on Successful Completion of a Prostitution-exiting Program

This study examines the trauma symptoms and life experiences of 49 women in a residential prostitution-exiting program and identifies differences among women who complete 90 days of the program and women who drop out of the program prior to completing 90 days. The majority of the women reported childhood abuse, adult abusive relationships, and victimization. Women who completed 90 days of treatment were found to be older than the non-completers. Non-completers were more likely to report clinically significant trauma symptoms including dissociation, poor coping behaviors, sex-related issues, and dysfunctional sexual behavior than completers. These findings suggest the importance of incorporating trauma-focused intervention early in the services provided in the exiting programs as well as the need to address the traumatic symptoms related to childhood and adult trauma histories. Findings also indicate the importance of clinically addressing trauma-related sexual issues, concerns, and behavior.     

Generalized Weibull Linear Models

For the first time, a new class of generalized Weibull linear models is introduced to be competitive to the well-known generalized (gamma and inverse Gaussian) linear models which are adequate for the analysis of positive continuous data. The proposed models have a constant coefficient of variation for all observations similar to the gamma models and may be suitable for a wide range of practical applications in various fields such as biology, medicine, engineering, and economics, among others. We derive a joint iterative algorithm for estimating the mean and dispersion parameters. We obtain closed form expressions in matrix notation for the second-order biases of the maximum likelihood estimates of the model parameters and define bias corrected estimates. The corrected estimates are easily obtained as vectors of regression coefficients in suitable weighted linear regressions. The practical use of the new class of models is illustrated in one application to a lung cancer data set.     

A new mixture model on the simplex

This paper is meant to introduce a significant extension of the flexible Dirichlet (FD) distribution, which is a quite tractable special mixture model for compositional data, i.e. data representing vectors of proportions of a whole. The FD model displays several theoretical properties which make it suitable for inference, and fairly easy to handle from a computational viewpoint. However, the rigid type of mixture structure implied by the FD makes it unsuitable to describe many compositional datasets. Furthermore, the FD only allows for negative correlations. The new extended model, by considerably relaxing the strict constraints among clusters entailed by the FD, allows for a more general dependence structure (including positive correlations) and greatly expands its applicative potential. At the same time, it retains, to a large extent, its good properties. EM-type estimation procedures can be developed for this more complex model, including ad hoc reliable initialization methods, which permit to keep the computational issues at a rather uncomplicated level. Accurate evaluation of standard error estimates can be provided as well.     

Jugend, Politik und Vertrauen: Ein Beitrag zur Bedeutung von Vertrauen für das politische Handeln Jugendlicher

Discussions concerning low trust scores in politics and politicians (both refer to a lack of political interest and activity), increasingly focus attention on how, in particular, adolescents relate trust to political activity. Younger people are said to show a lack of political interest. Nevertheless empirical studies about the determinants of missing political commitment and about the combination of trust and political action are extremely rare. Therefore, this empirical study focuses on the impact of trust on juveniles‘ political involvement. The question which characteristics trustworthy politicians must have in adolescents‘ eyes, and if relevant interindividual differences do exist, is of special regard.     

“Empowerment” as efficiency and participation: gender in responsible agricultural investment principles

Amidst global concern over the state of transnational large-scale agricultural investments, several efforts have been made to set global standards for “responsible agricultural investment.” While these efforts have received mixed reviews from the international community, very little attention has been paid to the gendered language of these principles. Through examining two separate sets of agricultural investment principles – one created by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Bank, and the other by the United Nations Committee on World Food Security – this article finds that, despite different processes and participants in the creation of these principles, they nonetheless share a language of “empowerment” targeted at women and marginalized groups. However, in contrast to early feminist discourses of empowerment, these principles instead perpetuate the notion that empowerment is to be found through efficiency, productivity and participation in land and labor markets. This article takes a critical look at this language of economic empowerment in each set of principles, and points to the dangers of equating efficiency, productivity and participation with feminist empowerment. By not acknowledging the broader gender dynamics of agricultural governance and markets, these discourses risk deepening existing inequalities rather than moving toward meaningful social change.     

BANKS,DEBT AND RISK: ASSESSING THE SPILLOVERS OF CORPORATE TAXES

We find evidence of tax-driven strategic allocation of debt and asset risk across group entities of European banks. We evaluate the effects that establishing tax neutrality between debt and equity finance has on systemic risk, and show that the degree of coordination in implementing the hypothetical tax reform matters. In particular, a coordinated elimination of the tax advantage of debt would significantly reduce systemic losses in the event of a severe banking crisis. By contrast, uncoordinated tax reforms are not equally beneficial precisely because national tax policies generate spillovers through cross-border bank activities. (JEL G21, G28, H25)     

Missing millions: undercounting urbanization in India

Population and Environment - The measurement and characterization of urbanization crucially depends upon defining what counts as urban. The government of India estimates that only 31% of the...     

Effective transfer entropy to measure information flows in credit markets

Statistical Methods & Applications - In this paper we propose to study the dynamics of financial contagion between the credit default swap (CDS) and the sovereign bond markets through effective...