Consanguinity and Other Marriage Market Effects of a Wealth Shock in Bangladesh

This paper uses a wealth shock from the construction of a flood protection embankment in rural Bangladesh coupled with data on the universe of all 52,000 marriage decisions between 1982 and 1996 to examine changes in marital prospects for households protected by the embankment relative to unprotected households living on the other side of the river. We use difference-in-difference specifications to document that brides from protected households commanded larger dowries, married wealthier households, and became less likely to marry biological relatives. Financial liquidity-constrained households appear to use within-family marriage (in which one can promise ex-post payments) as a form of credit to meet up-front dowry demands, but the resultant wealth shock for households protected by the embankment relaxed this need to marry consanguineously. Our results shed light on the socioeconomic roots of consanguinity, which carries health risks for offspring but can also carry substantial benefits for the families involved.     

Lerne die Regeln um sie zu verändern! Die Rolle der Organisationslogik in Veränderungsprozessen

In this article we introduce the concept of the firm’s organizational logic and how it influences organizational change processes. Characteristics and the essence of the organizational logic are explained and then illustrated by mean of a real-world case. Depending on the level of organizational change – whether it leads to single-loop, double-loop or deutero learning – we provide different implications for change agents to make use of the organizational logic to steer organizational change successfully.     

CULTURAL STUDIES IN AUSTRIA

One of the two main lines of argumentation of this text turns around the idea of ‘intellectual practices’. This idea is used here to criticize the hegemony that both academic institutions and publishing industries have been exerting on representations of the idea of ‘the intellectual’. In ­addition, the idea of ‘intellectual practices’ is useful to make more visible the diversity of forms in which intellectual work informs current social practices, as well as to show that this work assumes forms not limited to writing practices. The other line of argumentation turns around the conceptual pair ‘culture and power’. This pair, explicitly or implicitly used by many intellectuals, allows the formerly mentioned reflection to be grounded in a relatively more limited universe of practices. Moreover, the reference to this pair highlights the importance of the particular set of practices that explicitly or implicitly relate to it. These practices may be characterized as simultaneously involving a cultural approach (focusing on socio-symbolic dimensions) of issues of power, and a political approach (focusing on relations of power) of the cultural (socio-symbolic) dimensions of social processes. Finally, this article also presents a critic of the idea of ‘Latin American cultural studies’, which fundamentally criticizes a de-contextualized and de-contextualizing application of certain representations of the idea of cultural studies in Latin America, as well as studies about Latin America from abroad. Such de-contextualization impoverishes the critical impulse of such an intellectual perspective, and at the same time diminishes the visibility of other significant practices in culture and power developed in Latin America.     

An online estimation scheme for a Hull–White model with HMM-driven parameters

This paper considers the implementation of a mean-reverting interest rate model with Markov-modulated parameters. Hidden Markov model filtering techniques in Elliott (1994, Automatica, 30:1399–1408) and Elliott et al. (1995, Hidden Markov Models: Estimation and Control. Springer, New York) are employed to obtain optimal estimates of the model parameters via recursive filters of auxiliary quantities of the observation process. Algorithms are developed and implemented on a financial dataset of 30-day Canadian Treasury bill yields. We also provide standard errors for the model parameter estimates. Our analysis shows that within the dataset and period studied, a model with two regimes is sufficient to describe the interest rate dynamics on the basis of very small prediction errors and the Akaike information criterion.     

Max-stable processes for modeling extremes observed in space and time

Max-stable processes have proved to be useful for the statistical modeling of spatial extremes. For statistical inference it is often assumed that there is no temporal dependence; i.e., that the observations at spatial locations are independent in time. In a first approach we construct max-stable space–time processes as limits of rescaled pointwise maxima of independent Gaussian processes, where the space–time covariance functions satisfy weak regularity conditions. This leads to so-called Brown–Resnick processes. In a second approach, we extend Smith’s storm profile model to a space–time setting. We provide explicit expressions for the bivariate distribution functions, which are equal under appropriate choice of the parameters. We also show how the space–time covariance function of the underlying Gaussian process can be interpreted in terms of the tail dependence function in the limiting max-stable space–time process.     

Logistic Regression Models with Unspecified Low Dose–Response Relationships and Experimental Designs for Hormesis Studies

Hormesis refers to a nonmonotonic (biphasic) dose–response relationship in toxicology, environmental science, and related fields. In the presence of hormesis, a low dose of a toxic agent may have a lower risk than the risk at the control dose, and the risk may increase at high doses. When the sample size is small due to practical, logistic, and ethical considerations, a parametric model may provide an efficient approach to hypothesis testing at the cost of adopting a strong assumption, which is not guaranteed to be true. In this article, we first consider alternative parameterizations based on the traditional three‐parameter logistic regression. The new parameterizations attempt to provide robustness to model misspecification by allowing an unspecified dose–response relationship between the control dose and the first nonzero experimental dose. We then consider experimental designs including the uniform design (the same sample size per dose group) and the $c$‐optimal design (minimizing the standard error of an estimator for a parameter of interest). Our simulation studies showed that (1) the $c$‐optimal design under the traditional three‐parameter logistic regression does not help reducing an inflated Type I error rate due to model misspecification, (2) it is helpful under the new parameterization with three parameters (Type I error rate is close to a fixed significance level), and (3) the new parameterization with four parameters and the $c$‐optimal design does not reduce statistical power much while preserving the Type I error rate at a fixed significance level.     

Constructing the New Economy: A Discursive Perspective

The rise and fall of the 'New Economy' at the turn of the millennium, most visibly evidenced by the stellar rise and subsequent collapse of the Nasdaq composite index of technology stocks, represents one of the most significant business phenomena in recent times. This paper examines the 'New Economy' phenomenon as a culturally embedded discourse through an analysis of 133 print advertisements collected from the UK edition of the Financial Times between February and December 2000. It investigates the social construction of the concept 'New Economy' in a rapidly changing business environment. The contribution of the paper lies in the empirical study of discursive phenomena in late capitalist societies. From a discursive perspective, the 'New Economy' can be seen as a signifier that points to itself, whose form is its very content. The paper suggests the 'New Economy' must be understood in terms of its ability to accommodate multiple meanings, and it is this very ability which is profoundly ideological, in that it allows essentially socio-historical obsessions and anxieties (e.g. about novelty and change) to appear as seemingly 'natural' or logical behaviour.     

Social capital and women's reduced vulnerability to HIV infection in rural Zimbabwe

Social capital—especially through its “network” dimension (high levels of participation in local community groups)—is thought to be an important determinant of health in many contexts. We investigate its effect on HIV prevention, using prospective data from a general population cohort in eastern Zimbabwe spanning a period of extensive behavior change (1998–2003). Almost half of the initially uninfected women interviewed were members of at least one community group. In an analysis of 88 communities, individuals with higher levels of community group participation had lower incidence of new HIV infections and more of them had adopted safer behaviors, although these effects were largely accounted for by differences in socio-demographic composition. Individual women in community groups had lower HIV incidence and more extensive behavior change, even after controlling for confounding factors. Community group membership was not associated with lower HIV incidence in men, possibly refecting a propensity among men to participate in groups that allow them to develop and demonstrate their masculine identities—often at the expense of their health. Support for women's community groups could be an effective HIV prevention strategy in countries with large-scale HIV epidemics.     

National Income and Income Inequality,Family Affluence and Life Satisfaction Among 13 year Old Boys and Girls: A Multilevel Study in 35 Countries

Adolescence is a critical period where many patterns of health and health behaviour are formed. The objective of this study was to investigate cross-national variation in the relationship between family affluence and adolescent life satisfaction, and the impact of national income and income inequality on this relationship. Data from the 2006 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children: WHO collaborative Study (N = 58,352 across 35 countries) were analysed using multilevel linear and logistic regression analyses for outcome measures life satisfaction score and binary high/low life satisfaction. National income and income inequality were associated with aggregated life satisfaction score and prevalence of high life satisfaction. Within-country socioeconomic inequalities in life satisfaction existed even after adjustment for family structure. This relationship was curvilinear and varied cross-nationally. Socioeconomic inequalities were greatest in poor countries and in countries with unequal income distribution. GDP (PPP US$) and Gini did not explain between country variance in socioeconomic inequalities in life satisfaction. The existence of, and variation in, within-country socioeconomic inequalities in adolescent life satisfaction highlights the importance of identifying and addressing mediating factors during this life stage.