A "C" Grade in Tolerance

There are subjects that it is not considered "comme il faut" to mention in polite society, but that exist in the context of our lives regardless of whether it is acceptable or not. One of these is internationality tolerance or (what is more common) intolerance, attitudes toward other peoples and comparisons of them with our own countrymen.     

Optimal Control and Sensitivity Analysis for Two Risk Models

Two periodic-review models arising in insurance are considered in the framework of cost approach. The first one treats the insurance company performance under assumption of capital injections and reinsurance. The second one deals with assets selling and bank loans. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the method for establishing the optimal control of such applied stochastic models and to study their stability. For this purpose, sensitivity analysis is carried out. Numerical results are also provided.     

Social and Economic Impacts of International Marriages in Europe

The effect of international marriage - a union between a country native and an immigrant - on social and family outcomes is endogenous due to the selection into marriage markets and non-random spousal choice. In this paper we use availability of cheap airline flights as region-specific instrumental variable that increased the probability of intermarriage in Europe. The two-stage least squares analysis applied to 1977–2006 IPUMS International Project Census micro data shows no significant difference in the family size or number of children between intermarried and same-nativity couples. However, it does reveal higher labor force participation rates and much lower marriage rates among mixed nationality couples.     

Measurement and structural invariance of the US version of the Birth Satisfaction Scale-Revised (BSS-R) in a large sample

Background

The 10-item Birth Satisfaction Scale-Revised (BSS-R) is being increasingly used internationally. The use of the measure and the concept has gathered traction in the United States following the development of a US version of the tool. A limitation of previous studies of the measurement characteristics of the BSS-R is modest sample size. Unplanned pregnancy is recognised as being associated with a range of negative birth outcomes, but the relationship to birth satisfaction has received little attention, despite the importance of birth satisfaction to a range of postnatal outcomes.

A distribution-sensitive examination of the gender wage gap in Germany

This paper provides a new examination of the gender pay gap for Germany based on a family of distribution-sensitive indicators. Wage distributions for men and women do not only differ by a fixed constant; differences are more complex. We show that focusing on the bottom of the wage distribution reveals a larger gender gap. Our distribution-sensitive analysis can also be used to study whether the statistical disadvantage of women in average pay might be ‘offset’ by lower inequality. Over a broad range of plausible preferences over inequality, we show however that ‘inequality-adjusted’ estimates of the gap can be up to three times higher than standard inequality-neutral measures in Eastern Germany and up to fifty percent higher in Western Germany. Using preference parameters elicited from a hypothetical risky investment question in our sample, inequality-adjusted gender gap measures turn out to be close to those upper bounds.     

Power and “native” Jews: the Russian imperial bureaucracy and Mountain Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century

The 1880s and 1890s witnessed an intensification of Tsarist policy towards the Jews of the Russian Empire. In 1892, for example, a law directed towards the Jews of Kuban and Cossack areas in the Caucasus was promulgated. In preparing the law, officials failed to notice, either intentionally or accidentally, that alongside European Jews of the Kuban and Terek region resided Mountain Jews. There were, therefore, problems with the implementation of this law especially in relation to Mountain Jews. This led to considerable controversy. This study demonstrates the manner in which officials attempted to solve the Jewish question in the Russian Empire. It focuses on the impact of officialdom at various levels of the Tsarist regime on the lives of Mountain Jews. Its principal sources are drawn from various documents and correspondence between government officials on the matter of the Mountain Jews.1 Research for this paper was generously assisted by a Rothschild Foundation grant.      

Unemployment and education mismatch in the EU before and after the financial crisis

This paper investigates whether general formal education still helps youth avoid situations of unemployment and inactivity in favour of other labour force statuses (dependent employment, self-employment, education) across EU countries over the period 2006–2010. In a second step, we analyse whether the relationship between education and the labour statuses above is affected by different degrees of country-level education mismatch. Our results show that after the outbreak of the crisis and in countries with high educational mismatch there is an additional reduction in unemployment risk for highly educated people that is accompanied by a higher probability of being an employee than of remaining in education.     

The generality and hegemony of self-control theory: A comparison of Russian and US adults

Unique data from residents of Nizhni Novgorod, Russia, are used to address issues about self-control. They provide some support for the generality claims of the theory, that self-control is associated with criminal behavior regardless of the cultural context, but evidence concerning the idea that self-control explains associations between standard predictive variables and crime is mixed. The analyses reveal a general association between self-control and indicators of criminal behavior that is consistent with that shown by the collective body of evidence. However, criminal opportunity (and in most instances deviant peer association) is found to predict the indicators of misbehavior as well as or perhaps better than, and independently of, self-control. Moreover, self-control only partially renders relationships between well known predictive variables and crime spurious. Thus, these results from an unusual cultural context confirm that self-control is at least a modest but persistent predictor of indicators of criminal conduct. However, self-control does not appear to be as potent as the authors of self-control theory contend and it may not even be as important as criminal opportunity, a variable that some have interpreted as a precondition for the operation of self-control in accounting for criminal/deviant behavior, or deviant peer association.