Beneficial safety decreases

We construct a model of rational choice under risk with biased risk judgement. On its basis, we argue that sometimes, a regulator aiming at maximising social welfare should affect the environment in such a way that it becomes ‘less safe’ in common perception. More specifically, we introduce a bias into each agent’s choice of optimal risk levels: consequently, in certain environments, agents choose a behaviour that realises higher risks than intended. Individuals incur a welfare loss through this bias. We show that by deteriorating the environment, the regulator can motivate individuals to choose behaviour that is less biased, and hence realises risk levels closer to what individuals intended. We formally investigate the conditions under which such a Beneficial Safety Decrease—i.e. a deteriorating intervention that has a positive welfare effect—exists. Finally, we discuss three applications of our model.     

Does product complexity matter for competition in experimental retail markets?

We describe a first experiment on whether product complexity affects competition and consumers in retail markets. We are unable to detect a significant effect of product complexity on prices, except insofar as the demand elasticity for complex products is higher. However, there is qualified evidence that complex products have the potential to induce consumers to buy more than they would otherwise. In this sense, consumer exploitability in quantities cannot be ruled out. We also find evidence for shaping effects: consumers’ preferences are shaped by past experience with prices, and firms may in principle exploit this to sell more.     

Digit ratios (2D:4D) as predictors of risky decision making for both sexes

Many important decisions involve financial risk, and substantial evidence suggests that women tend to be more risk averse than men. We explore a potential biological basis of risk-taking variation within and between the sexes by studying how the ratio between the length of the second and fourth fingers (2D:4D) predicts risk-taking. A smaller 2D:4D ratio has been linked to higher exposure to prenatal testosterone relative to estradiol, with men having lower ratios than women. In financially motivated decision-making tasks, we find that men and women with smaller 2D:4D ratios chose significantly riskier options. We further find that the ratio partially explains the variation in risk-taking between the sexes. Moreover, for men and women at the extremes of the digit-ratio distribution the difference in risk-taking disappears. Thus, the 2D:4D ratio partially explains variation in financial risk-taking behavior within and between sexes and offers evidence of a biological basis for risk-taking behavior.     

A Diamond-Stiglitz approach to the demand for self-protection

The existing research concerning the relationship between risk aversion and prudence and the demand for self-protection assumes that the loss variable follows a Bernoulli distribution, and that changes in the level of self-protection are mean preserving. The analysis here replaces these two very strong conditions with ones which are more general. When doing this, the method of analysis is also significantly modified. This modification includes representing a change in the level of self-protection using the procedure developed by Diamond and Stiglitz (Journal of Economic Theory 8:337-360, 1974) for representing a change in risk. This alternate representation allows the existing findings to be generalized considerably, and also simplifies the analysis.     

Two-sided intergenerational moral hazard,long-term care insurance,and nursing home use

Two-sided intergenerational moral hazard occurs (i) if the parent’s decision to purchase long-term care (LTC) coverage undermines the child’s incentive to exert effort because the insurance protects the bequest from the cost of nursing home care, and (ii) when the parent purchases less LTC coverage, relying on child’s effort to keep him out of the nursing home. However, a “net” moral hazard effect obtains only if the two players’ responses to exogenous shocks fail to neutralize each other, entailing a negative relationship between child’s effort and parental LTC coverage. We focus on outcomes out of equilibrium, interpreting them as a break in the relationship resulting in no informal care provided and hence high probability nursing home admission. Changes in the parent’s initial wealth, LTC subsidy received, and child’s expected inheritance are shown to induce “net” moral hazard, in contradistinction to changes in child’s opportunity cost and share in the bequest.     

Teacher-Based Racial Discrimination: The Role of Racial Pride and Religiosity Among African American and Caribbean Black Adolescents

This study explored the extent to which private regard and religiosity beliefs serve as protective factors for school bonding among African American and Caribbean black adolescents who experience racial discrimination in school. Findings are drawn from a nationally representative sample of (n = 810) African American and (n = 360) Caribbean black adolescents (52% girls) aged 13–17 (M_age = 15, SD = 1.42) years. Results suggest that perceiving racial discrimination from teachers was associated with lower levels of school bonding for African American and Caribbean black adolescents. For African American adolescents, perceiving more racial discrimination from teachers and reporting lower private regard beliefs was associated with less school bonding. The findings for Caribbean black adolescents revealed that endorsing moderate levels of religiosity and perceiving higher rates of teacher discrimination was associated with less school bonding. The developmental significance and implications for future research are discussed.     

Oppositional Girlhoods and the Challenge of Relational Politics

Over the last five years, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines have problematized the discourse of “adolescent female exceptionalism” (Switzer in Fem Theory 14(3):345–360, 2013, p. 4) popularized by the NIKE Foundation’s Girl Effect. Arriving at similar conclusions, scholars point to the artificial neocolonial divisions between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’ of the world animated by an ‘invest in girls’ logic. This paper endeavors to move beyond the “oppositional girlhoods” (Bent in Sociol Stud Child Youth 16(1):3–20, 2013a, p. 7) bind of girl effects discourse to propose that differentially positioned and experienced girlhoods might be better understood as transnational, relational cultural formations. Drawing from our empirical research with girls in North America and Sub-Saharan Africa, we consider the implications of girls’ increasing global visibility as the ‘saviors of humanity’ from different geopolitical contexts. We then go further to suggest the oppositional girlhoods frame assumes reductive, apolitical, and ahistorical claims of divergence between girlhoods in the Global North and Global South “with highly unequal effects” (Gonick et al. in Girlhood Stud 2(3):1–9, 2009, p. 3). By countering the normative construction of global girlhoods as mutually exclusive forms of personhood and historical experience, our project authorizes a new understanding of girlhoods as mutually constituted and relationally contingent. It is from within this relational framework that we propose new directions for thinking about girlhoods transnationally.     

A log rank type test in observational survival studies with stratified sampling

In randomized clinical trials, the log rank test is often used to test the null hypothesis of the equality of treatment-specific survival distributions. In observational studies, however, the ordinary log rank test is no longer guaranteed to be valid. In such studies we must be cautious about potential confounders; that is, the covariates that affect both the treatment assignment and the survival distribution. In this paper, two cases were considered: the first is when it is believed that all the potential confounders are captured in the primary database, and the second case where a substudy is conducted to capture additional confounding covariates. We generalize the augmented inverse probability weighted complete case estimators for treatment-specific survival distribution proposed in Bai et al. (Biometrics 69:830–839, 2013) and develop the log rank type test in both cases. The consistency and double robustness of the proposed test statistics are shown in simulation studies. These statistics are then applied to the data from the observational study that motivated this research.