Does family policy affect fertility?

From the mid-1960s to around 1980, Sweden extended its family policies that provide financial and in-kind support to families with children very quickly. The benefits were closely tied to previous work experience. Thus, women born in the 1950s faced markedly different incentives when making fertility choices compared to women born only 15–20 years earlier. This paper examines the evolution of completed fertility patterns for Swedish women born in 1925–1958 and makes comparisons to women in neighbouring countries where the policies were not extended as much as in Sweden. The results suggest that the extension of the policy raised the level of fertility, shortened the spacing of births, and induced fluctuations in the period fertility rates, but it did not change the negative relationship between women’s educational level and completed fertility.     

Religious Values and Environmental Concern: Harmony and Detachment*

Objective. The thought that environmental concern is rooted in religious beliefs and values has been raised by many writers. Different claims have been made about whether the nature of this relationship is positive or negative, and empirical evidence is mixed. In line with research on attitudes and values, this study examines the hypothesis that unless religious values are mentally accessible, they will not affect judgments of environmental issues. Method. Two environmental issues, genetically modified crops and more traditional environmental issues, for example, air pollution from traffic, are chosen to represent accessibility and nonaccessibility, respectively. A two‐wave data set from a national survey is analyzed. Results. The findings support the suggestion that religious values will affect the judgment of environmental threats of the first, but not the second, issue. Conclusion. These findings suggest that situational cues partly determine which values embodied in religion will influence environmental attitudes.     

Context Effects as an Illustration of Response Uncertainty –A Cautionary Tale

Many years of experience make it difficult to believe that survey answers are mostly unambiguous. For example, by going through accessible studies, a lot of problems concerning memory can be identified in the field of living conditions and in other domains. Consequently, it may be claimed that facts are seldom stored in an easily accessible manner. It is probably not the case that people – when answering questions – respond promptly and automatically. Rather, some sort of thinking activity is initiated. Accordingly, the answers may be dependent on the occasion when the questions are asked, which background information is given, how familiar the respondents are with the phenomenon in question, how much time there is for reflection, and so on. We have had the opportunity to compare answers to the same questions asked in different contexts. The results clearly indicate the existence of context effects. At the same time, the results give some clues to how these effects can be interpreted, and even avoided. Problems may be minimized if questions are more precisely formulated, if their focus is on strictly limited aspects, and if they are only about things to which people have devoted a lot of interest and thought.     

Exact rational expectations,cointegration, and reduced rank regression

We interpret the linear relations from exact rational expectations models as restrictions on the parameters of the statistical model called the cointegrated vector autoregressive model for non-stationary variables. We then show how reduced rank regression [Anderson, T.W., 1951. Estimating linear restrictions on regression coefficients for multivariate normal distributions. Ann. Math. Statist. 22, 327–351] plays an important role in the calculation of maximum likelihood estimators of the restricted parameters.     

Production and inventory control at ABB Motors and Volvo Wheel Loaders,two examples of MRP in practical use

The paper presents the main routines of production and inventory control at ABB Motors, Västerås and Volvo Wheel Loaders, Eskilstuna. The primary interest is to present how Material Requirements Planning (MRP) is used in these two companies. If the number of end items is large, the company assembles-to-order or makes-to-order then additions to pure MRP seem to be necessary. ABB Motors and Volvo Wheel Loader use: planning bills, a normal bill of materials with 'adding bills of materials', a master production schedule planning system with an available-to-promise function and a home-made 'system' for modules available-to-promise. One important measure for the both companies is the accumulative lead-time. An increase of the Master Production Schedule in a shorter time than the accumulative lead-time is avoided, because it will lead to suggestions of purchase in past time periods and therefore most probably to future material shortages.     

Asymptotic Likelihood Based Inference for Co-integrated Homogenous Gaussian Diffusions

In this paper we consider inference for a multivariate Gaussian homogenous diffusion which is co-integrated, i.e. admits a representation in terms of stable relations (ergodic diffusions) plus Brownian motions. We show that inference on co-integration rank (the number of stable relations) in continuous time can be based on existing asymptotic distributions from discrete time co-integration analysis. Likewise the asymptotic distributions of the co-integration parameters are shown to be mixed Gaussian. Special attention is given to the parametrization of the drift terms. It is shown that the asymptotic distribution of the co-integration rank test statistic does not depend on the level of the process as a result of the chosen parametrization.