Have cash transfers succeeded in reaching the poor in Latin America and the Caribbean?

We present original estimates of the quality of targeting of conditional cash transfer (CCT) and non‐contributory pension (NCP) programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our contribution is novel because we use both national and international poverty lines; provide differentiated estimates for urban and rural areas; and compare the CCT and NCP programmes. We show that leakage to the non‐poor coexists with pervasive under‐coverage of all poor, including the extreme poor. On average, the CCTs cover only 50.5% of the extreme poor in households with children under 18 years of age. Similarly, the NCPs cover only 50.9% of the extreme poor in households with elderly members who do not receive a contributory pension. At the same time, 40.4% of CCT beneficiaries and 50.1% of NCP beneficiaries are not poor, highlighting the potential need for re‐targeting and re‐certification. In most countries, re‐targeting could produce a substantial double benefit in terms of poverty reduction and fiscal savings.     

Mental Well-being Among Workers: A Cross-national Analysis of Job Insecurity Impact on the Workforce

Social Indicators Research - Drawing on 2011 and 2016 European Quality of Life Survey data from eight European countries, this paper considers the importance of subjective indicators of employment...     

Urbanization drivers differentially affect ground arthropod assemblages in the city of Turin (NW-Italy)

Urban Ecosystems - Urbanization is a complex process associated with environmental changes affecting many biotic and abiotic ecosystem components, which cause the alteration of biological...     

Some Consequences of Low-Quality Schooling under Asymmetric Information

ABSTRACT: The substantial failure of many public programmes intended to increase job opportunities of youth via better education and training has been ascribed mainly to quantitative factors like mismatching or insufficient funds This paper takes a different perspective and concentrates on qualitative aspects It proposes a simple analytical scheme designed to study the consequences of low quality education on the performance of the policy created educational organisations under asymmetric information The model considers two types of schools (high quality H and low quality B) and asks whether there is any room left for the low quality one It is found that an adverse selection process may start within the pool of applicants to school B even under very favourable demand conditions and that any worsening of these conditions lowers the equilibrium average quality of type B graduates Eventually the market for type B certificates may disappear     

Social Presence, Embarrassment, and Nonverbal Behavior

Nonverbal behaviors in response to viewing slides depicting nude males, nude females, erotic couples and neutral pictures, either alone or in the presence of two unfamiliar individuals, were studied in 22 female and 16 male university students. Participants were unaware of being videorecorded. Results revealed discrepancies between self-reported embarrassment and nonverbal behaviors supposedly expressive of embarrassment. Although self-reported embarrassment was higher when certain types of slides were viewed in the presence of others than when they were viewed alone, we observed significantly fewer lip movements, gaze shifts, face touches, downward gazes, and downward head movements in the presence of unfamiliar individuals than in the alone condition. We also compared behaviors during slide exposure and during the inter-slide intervals. For 9 out of 11 coded behaviors, frequencies were significantly higher during inter-slide intervals than during slide presentation. We argue that this is probably due to the fact that visual attention to the slides inhibited nonverbal behaviors. The results cast doubt on the possibility of inferring the internal state of an emotion such as embarrassment by analyzing nonverbal behaviors without taking account of the social setting in which such observations are made.     

Procedural rationality and happiness

The economics of happiness already recognizes how procedures affect the evaluation of outcomes, although this has only been looked at within the standard framework of substantial rationality. This paper aims to go beyond that kind of approach by linking happiness and procedural rationality, focusing on ‘happiness for choice’ (the individual's perceived satisfaction after the decision-making process). Simon's model shows the need for defining aspirations whose values are adapted to the past experience in a given environment. Some remarks proposed by Scitovsky's allow to extend this idea considering the role of creative representation of the world as a way for trying to go beyond the past. These ideas are tested using data on aspirations and satisfaction expressed by students attending an economic course.     

The influence of familiarization sessions on the stability of ramp and ballistic isometric torque in older adults

Ramp isometric contractions determine peak torque (PT) and neuromuscular activation (NA), and ballistic contractions can be used to evaluate rate of torque development (RTD) and electrical mechanical delay (EMD). The purposes of this study were to assess the number of sessions required to stabilize ramp and ballistic PT and to compare PT and NA between contractions in older adults. Thirty-five older men and women (age 63.7 ± 3.7 yr, body mass 64.3 ± 10.7 kg, height 159.2 ± 6.6 cm) performed 4 sessions of unilateral ramp and ballistic isometric knee extension, 48 hr apart. PT significantly increased (main time effect p < .05) from the first to the third session, with no further improvements thereafter. There was a trend toward higher PT in ballistic than in ramp contractions. No difference between contraction types on EMG values was observed. Therefore, the authors suggest that 3 familiarization sessions be performed to correctly assess PT. In addition, PT, NA, RTD, and EMD can be assessed with ballistic contraction in older adults.     

Life-Spheres,Networks, and Sustained Participation in Social Movements: A Phenomenological Approach to Political Commitment

This article proposes an account of individual participation in social movements that combines structural and cultural factors. It aims to explain why certain activists continue to be involved in social movements while others withdraw. When activists remain embedded in social networks relevant for the protest issues and, above all, when they keep a symbolic linkage between their activism and their personal life-spheres, sustained participation is likely to occur. When these two factors become progressively separated from each other and the process of self-interaction by activists loses its strength, disengagement can be expected. The argument is illustrated with life-history interviews of activists who have kept their strong commitment to a major organization of the Swiss solidarity movement, and others that, in contrast, have abandoned their involvement. The findings support the argument that the interplay of the structural positions of actors and the symbolic meanings of mobilization has a strong impact on commitment to social movements and hence on sustained participation or disengagement. In particular, the interviews show the importance of a sense of coherence and of a holistic view of one's personal life for keeping commitment over time. This calls for a view of individual participation in social movements that draws from social phenomenology and symbolic interactionism in order to shed light on the symbolic (subjective) dimensions of participation, yet without neglecting the crucial role played by structural (objective) factors.     

On S-Convexity and Risk Aversion

The present note first discusses the concept of s-convex pain functions in decision theory. Then, the economic behavior of an agent with such a pain function is represented through the comparison of some recursive lotteries.     

Identification of vector AR models with recursive structural errors using conditional independence graphs

In canonical vector time series autoregressions, which permit dependence only on past values, the errors generally show contemporaneous correlation. By contrast structural vector autoregressions allow contemporaneous series dependence and assume errors with no contemporaneous correlation. Such models having a recursive structure can be described by a directed acyclic graph. We show, with the use of a real example, how the identification of these models may be assisted by examination of the conditional independence graph of contemporaneous and lagged variables. In this example we identify the causal dependence of monthly Italian bank loan interest rates on government bond and repurchase agreement rates. When the number of series is larger, the structural modelling of the canonical errors alone is a useful initial step, and we first present such an example to demonstrate the general approach to identifying a directed graphical model.