Japanese response to an aging labor force

Slowing population growth in Japan has led to concern about aging of the labor force in the context of the seniority wage and lifetime employment systems. There is no question that the labor force will age rapidly in the future. However, Japanese labor force institutions are more flexible than most Western observers have thought, and appropriate response to the changing demographic situation has already begun. The Japanese government and private enterprises are devising innovative policies for accommodating an older labor force.The author thanks the staff of the East-West Population Institute for assistance in the production of this article. In addition, the support of the Nihon University Population Research Institute is gratefully acknowledged.     

Age and parity influences on maternal mortality: United States, 1919–1969

Comparisons of crude and standardized rates of maternal mortality show that changes in age and parity distributions of births had some influence on maternal mortality trends for the years 1919-1969 in the United States. Changes in the age and parity distributions of births for cohorts of U.S. women also influenced crude cohort maternal mortality rates to some extent.     

Still Going: Recent Debates on the Goldschmidt Hypothesis1

Abstract The literature on the Goldschmidt (1978a) hypothesis has passed through distinct stages. This article is a commentary on the present status of the literature and particularly on a recent article by Barnes and Blevins (1992). Our arguments draw in large part from our previous work. Researchers in the 1970s and early 1980s were concerned mainly with replicating Goldschmidt's work. However, these studies had a number of methodological and conceptual limitations that limited closure on the debate. A new generation of research from the mid-1980s onward was premised upon addressing the limitations, including the need to incorporate indicators of nonfarm economic structure, to take spatial or geographic features into account, and to adequately conceptualize farm structure. Barnes and Blevins (1992) disregard these inroads, evident in that their article repeats earlier arguments, offers solutions to problems addressed a decade earlier, and is vulnerable to its own methodological problems. To move inquiry forward, new directions for studies concerned with the broader issues raised by Goldschmidt are suggested.     

Unbiased estimation of the parameter of a selected binomial population

The problem is to estimate the parameter of a selected binomial population. The selction rule is to choose the population with the greatest number of successes and, in the case of a tie, to follow one of two schemes: either choose the population with the smallest index or randomize among the tied populations. Since no unbiased estimator exists in the above case, we employ a second stage of sampling and take additional observations on the selected population. We find the uniformly minimum variance unbiased estimator (UMVUE) under the first tie break scheme and we prove that no UMVUE exists under the second. We find an unbiased estimator with desirable properties in the case where no UMVUE exists.     

Insight into Informant Discrepancies Regarding Psychosexual Functioning of Adolescents with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

The private nature of psychosexual functioning leads adolescents and their parents to have different perspectives, which highlights studying parent–child informant discrepancies in this domain. We investigated informant discrepancy in psychosexual functioning, using the self‐report and parent report versions of the Teen Transition Inventory (TTI), of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; 136 parent–child dyads) compared to adolescents from the general population (GP; 70 parent–child dyads). Significantly larger informant discrepancies exist in ASD dyads than GP dyads in most domains of psychosexual functioning, except for Body image, Sexual behavior, and Confidence in the future. It is important to use and pay attention to both informants, as discrepancies are relevant for both research and clinical practice regarding psychosexual functioning.