Examining the Association between Hazardous Waste Facilities and Rural “Brain Drain”*

Abstract Rural communities are increasingly being faced with the prospect of accepting facilities characterized as “opportunity‐threat,” such as facilities that generate, treat, store, or otherwise dispose of hazardous wastes. Such facilities may offer economic gains through jobs and tax revenue, although they may also act as environmental “disamenities.” This analysis examines the possibility that the presence of such facilities equates with lower loss of rural human capital, a question as yet unexamined on a national scale within the academic literature. Making use of secondary data from several different sources, we examine the association between age‐ and education‐specific outmigration and 1) the number of hazardous waste facilities, 2) the number of large quantity hazardous waste generators, and 3) the number of hazardous waste landfills and incinerators across rural counties within the 48 contiguous states. Our findings suggest that the presence of hazardous waste facilities does not clearly equate with reductions in rural “brain drain.”     

Selective Mortality During the Khmer Rouge Period in Cambodia

Aspects of the long‐term demographic impact of genocide during the period of the Khmer Rouge (1975–79) in Cambodia are analyzed. Mortality data for siblings from the Cambodia Demographic and Health Survey in 2000 demonstrate that excess mortality was extremely high and heavily concentrated during 1974–80. The study also shows that mortality was highly selective during that period. Adult males were the most likely to die, indicating that violent death played a major role. Individuals with an urban or educated background were more likely to die. Mortality by religious background is also assessed. Infant and early childhood mortality was very high during the period and was as prevalent in urban areas and among children born to educated mothers as in rural areas and among the less educated.     

White Australian Adoptive Mothers' Understandings of Birth Cultures and Families

This paper reports an analysis of interviews conducted with 10 White Australian women who had undertaken intercountry adoption. The paper begins with an overview of how issues of culture play out within discourses of intercountry adoption in general and how this occurs specifically in Australian policy in regard to intercountry adoption. The analysis highlights how the interviewees were in many ways inculcated in broader Australian discourses of intercountry adoption, as much as in some instances there was an attempt to resist this. The paper concludes by discussing how it might be possible for White adoptive mothers in Australia to do other than remain complicit with marginalizing accounts of adoptive children's birth cultures and parents.     

An Empirical Environmental Sustainability Index Derived Solely from Nighttime Satellite Imagery and Ecosystem Service Valuation

Population and Environment - This paper describes a crude yet simple Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) derived solely from the ratio of two classified satellite images with global coverage....     

Inclusion of binary proxy variables in logistic regression improves treatment effect estimation in observational studies in the presence of binary unmeasured confounding variables

We present a simulation study and application that shows inclusion of binary proxy variables related to binary unmeasured confounders improves the estimate of a related treatment effect in binary logistic regression. The simulation study included 60,000 randomly generated parameter scenarios of sample size 10,000 across six different simulation structures. We assessed bias by comparing the probability of finding the expected treatment effect relative to the modeled treatment effect with and without the proxy variable. Inclusion of a proxy variable in the logistic regression model significantly reduced the bias of the treatment or exposure effect when compared to logistic regression without the proxy variable. Including proxy variables in the logistic regression model improves the estimation of the treatment effect at weak, moderate, and strong association with unmeasured confounders and the outcome, treatment, or proxy variables. Comparative advantages held for weakly and strongly collapsible situations, as the number of unmeasured confounders increased, and as the number of proxy variables adjusted for increased.     

Toward an Understanding of the Factors Affecting the Quality of the Audit Process*

The accounting profession has faced increasing pressure from external parties to monitor and improve the quality of the audit process. Similar to other service oriented industries, the accounting profession's ability to meet these pressures has been hampered by the lack of an objective means by which to evaluate process quality. In this research, groups of experienced auditors from two international accounting firms were used to develop and validate a set of key factors influencing the quality of the audit process and a corresponding set of measures for evaluating audit quality. The results support the belief that there exists a consensus among experienced auditors on a set of key audit quality factors which have a significant impact on overall audit quality. The results obtained go beyond those in prior audit quality research, in that the factors identified cover a broader scope and recognize the significant effect of the audit environment on process quality. The consistency between groups in the profession provides support for further use of the nominal group techniques in developing quality measures for processes in other service sector areas.