Recent Mortality Trend Reversal in Russia: Are Regions Following the Same Tempo?

After several decades of negative trends and short-term fluctuations, life expectancy has been increasing in Russia since 2004. Between 2003 and 2014, the length of life rose by 6.6 years among males and by 4.6 years among females. While positive trends in life expectancy are observed in all regions of Russia, these trends are unfolding differently in different regions. First, regions entered the phase of life expectancy growth at different points in time. Second, the age- and cause-specific components of the gains in life expectancy and the number of years added vary noticeably. In this paper, we apply decomposition techniques—specifically, the stepwise replacement algorithm—to examine the age- and cause-specific components of the changes in inter-regional disparities during the current period of health improvement. The absolute inter-regional disparities in length of life, measured by the population-weighted standard deviation, decreased slightly between 2003 and 2014, from 3.3 to 3.2 years for males, and from 2.0 to 1.8 years for females. The decomposition of these small changes by ages and causes of death shows that these shifts were the result of diverse effects of mortality convergence at young and middle ages, and of mortality divergence at older ages. With respect to causes of death, the convergence is mainly attributable to external causes, while the inter-regional divergence of trends is largely determined by cardiovascular diseases. The two major cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, are currently pioneering mortality improvements in Russia and are making the largest contributions to the inter-regional divergence.     

What’s in a Name? The Negative Implications of Gender Neutrality in the Intimate Partner Violence Prevention and Intervention Literature

Research and interventions for intimate partner violence in current use largely consist of practices aimed at getting victims to leave their abusers, rather than helping perpetrators stop their violence. In the context of parenthood, the focus on programs targeting women experiencing violence has resulted in an emphasis on mothers’ responsibility for mitigating the adverse effects of witnessing violence on children. This has led to insufficient understanding of violent men’s identities as fathers. This narrative review employed content analysis to analyze the discursive constructions of men and women as parents in a selection of peer reviewed articles about the prevention of intimate partner violence during childbearing years that were published between January 2000 and January 2015 (N = 37). A quantitative word count was conducted in order to determine the frequency with which these articles referred to men and women in their parental roles when employing prevention and intervention strategies. Women were consistently identified as mothers in all areas of the literature, while the prevalence of men’s identities as fathers was confined only to the specific, specialized area of the literature that is aimed at men alone. The implications of these findings for future research and practice in the area of prevention and intervention of intimate partner violence specifically in the context of parenthood are discussed.     

Use It or Save It? Migration Background and Parental Leave Uptake in Sweden

Sweden is a welfare state with a family policy that strongly emphasizes equality without distinction by place of birth or gender. In this study, we investigate the differences in uptake of parental leave between native and immigrant mothers, and the connection to labour-market attachment. Sweden represents a unique case study, not only because of the strong effort to combine work and family for all women and men, the high level of fertility and the large presence of immigrants in the country; it also enables a detailed and sophisticated analysis based on the high-quality data derived from its population registers. We find that immigrant mothers use more parental leave benefit the first year after their child’s birth, but then fewer in the second year compared with native mothers. The differences diminish when labour-market activity is controlled for. Additionally, after a time in Sweden, immigrant mothers use leave more similarly to how native mothers do.     

Happy People Have Children: Choice and Self-Selection into Parenthood

There is mixed evidence in the existing literature on whether children are associated with greater subjective well-being, with the correlation depending on which countries and populations are considered. We here provide a systematic analysis of this question based on three different datasets: two cross-national and one national panel. We show that the association between children and subjective well-being is positive only in developed countries, and for those who become parents after the age of 30 and who have higher income. We also provide evidence of a positive selection into parenthood, whereby happier individuals are more likely to have children.     

Quantifying Economic Dependency

In this paper we compare several types of economic dependency ratios for a selection of European countries. These dependency ratios take into account not only the demographic structure of the population, but also the differences in age-specific economic behaviour such as labour market activity, income and consumption as well as age-specific public transfers. In selected simulations where we combine patterns of age-specific economic behaviour and transfers with population projections, we show that in all countries population ageing would lead to a pronounced increase in dependency ratios if present age-specific patterns were not to change. Our analysis of cross-country differences in economic dependency demonstrates that these differences are driven by both differences in age-specific economic behaviour and in the age composition of the populations. The choice of which dependency ratio to use in a specific policy context is determined by the nature of the question to be answered. The comparison of our various dependency ratios across countries gives insights into which strategies might be effective in mitigating the expected increase in economic dependency due to demographic change.     

Dynamic reasoning and time pressure: Transition from analytical operations to experiential responses

Based upon the Decision Field Theory (Busemeyer and Townsend 1993), we tested a model of dynamic reasoning to predict the effect of time pressure on analytical and experiential processing during decision-making. Forty-six participants were required to make investment decisions under four levels of time pressure. In each decision, participants were presented with experiential cues which were either congruent or incongruent with the analytical information. The congruent/incongruent conditions allowed us to examine how many decisions were based upon the experiential versus the analytical information, and to see if this was affected by the varying degrees of time pressure. As expected, the overall accuracy was reduced with greater time pressure and accuracy was higher when the experiential and analytical cues were congruent than when they were incongruent. Of great interest was the data showing that under high time pressure participants used more experiential cues than at other time pressures. We suggest that the dynamic reasoning paradigm has some future potential for predicting the effects of experiential biases in general, and specifically under time pressure.     

A tighter formulation of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">p</Emphasis>-median problem

Given a set of clients and a set of potential sites for facilities, the p-median problem consists of opening a set of p sites and assigning each client to the closest open facility to it. It can be viewed as a variation of the uncapacitated facility location problem. We propose a new formulation of this problem by a mixed integer linear problem. We show that this formulation, while it has the same value by LP-relaxation, can be much more efficient than two previous formulations. The computational experiment performed on two sets of benchmark instances has showed that the efficiency of the standard branch-and-cut algorithm has been significantly improved. Finally, we explore the structure of the new formulation in order to derive reduction rules and to accelerate the LP-relaxation resolution.     

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.