Relational and Individual Resources as Predictors of Empathy in Early Childhood

The goal of this study was to examine children's cognitive and language development and social engagement of mother as mediators of the relationship between maternal emotional availability at 15 months and children's empathy at the ages of two and four. Participants were 661 low-income, ethnically diverse mother-child dyads participating in a trial of home visitation in the Denver area. Using home- and lab-based free-play episodes, mothers' emotional availability (15 months) and children's social engagement of mother (21 and 24 months) were assessed. Standardized measures were used to assess children's language development (21 months) and cognitive development (24 months). Empathy was assessed using a simulated injury paradigm at ages two (both 21 and 24 months) and four. The predictive models supported the hypothesis that the child's cognitive and social resources mediate the relationship between maternal emotional availability and children's empathy with respect to empathy at the age of two toward both mothers and an unfamiliar examiner. These results indicate that parental sensitive behavior is not the only important condition for predicting children's empathy, and that children's own internalized resources are a likely mechanism of transmission from parents caring for their children to children learning to care for others.     

Estimating the Size of Street-Dwelling Populations Using Mark-Resighting Counts

Mark-resighting constitutes an advanced technology for estimating animal abundance. Joint hypergeometric maximum likelihood, Minta-Mangel and Bowden estimators are usually adopted with mark-resighting data. In presence of any tendency of animals to aggregate into groups, the Bowden estimator is the sole reliable method, providing that marks are quite evenly distributed among groups. In some cetacean surveys, marking disturbances are avoided through natural marking. Natural marking with Bowden criterion is used to estimate the abundance of street-dwelling populations. The marked individuals are persons identified and recorded in the initial part of the survey and recognizable in subsequent occasions. A simulation helps determine the performance of the Bowden estimator under a wide set of situations, taking into account key features of street-dwelling populations. When marked individuals are evenly distributed among groups, the strategy is efficient.     

Ten steps to developing a national agenda to address financial conflicts of interest in industry sponsored clinical research

Financial liaisons between clinical researchers, research institutions, and industrial sponsors have gained momentum in recent years. In the process, it has been argued by many that trust in the research infrastructure is being eroded by the financial conflicts of interest that emerge from these arrangements. Yet, the financial resources of industry are needed to continue technology transfer from the bench to the bedside. Policy makers and government regulators are currently struggling to determine how to best manage financial conflicts of interest that emerge from these liaisons. Various organizations and government entities have proposed different strategies. This paper explores the limitations of existing measures and recommends that a unified national agenda is needed. We propose 10 steps to develop an agenda to address financial conflicts of interest in industry-sponsored clinical research.     

Calibration of FI‐ISK,an Invasiveness Screening Tool for Nonnative Freshwater Invertebrates

The Freshwater Invertebrate Invasiveness Scoring Kit (FI‐ISK) is proposed as a screening tool for identifying potentially invasive freshwater invertebrates. FI‐ISK was adapted from the Fish Invasiveness Scoring Kit (FISK) of Copp, Garthwaite, and Gozlan, which is an adapted form of the Weed Risk Assessment (WRA) of Pheloung, Williams, and Halloy. Initial assessments using FI‐ISK, which include confidence (certainty/uncertainty) rankings by the assessor to each response, were calibrated to determine the most appropriate score thresholds for classifying nonnative species into low‐, medium‐, and high‐risk categories, using both the original medium‐to‐high risk threshold scores for the WRA (i.e., ≥6) and for FISK (i.e., ≥19). Patterns of the assessor's confidence, when making the responses during the FI‐ISK assessments, were also examined. Using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, FI‐ISK was shown to distinguish accurately (and with statistical confidence) between potentially invasive and noninvasive species of nonnative crayfish (Decapoda: Astacidae, Cambaridae, Parastacidae), with the statistically appropriate threshold score for high‐risk species scores being ≥16. FI‐ISK represents a useful and viable tool to aid decision‐ and policymakers in assessing and classifying freshwater invertebrates according to their potential invasiveness.     

Regulation issues in the Italian local transport system: aligning transactions and governance structures

This paper refers to the concept of public governance in the light of Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). While TCE is well developed and widely applied in the private sector, only a few studies have adopted such framework to investigate the provision of public services. We aim at pointing out the coherence between peculiar typologies of transactions and a given set of governance structures, within Local Public Transport systems. The core of the analysis is the alignment between characteristics of transactions and governance structures. The empirical section addresses these issues referring to three case studies, pointing out an articulated organizational configuration in terms of actors involved and governance structures adopted. The analysis shows an alignment between the choices underlying the design of the local transport system and the outcomes expected in terms of TCE.     

Government Debt and Excess Sensitivity of Private Consumption: Estimates from OECD Countries

This article investigates the role of government debt in the degree of excess sensitivity of private consumption to current disposable income. Because this type of excess sensitivity is generally attributed to liquidity constraints, this amounts to a test of the impact of government debt on the amount of credit extended to individuals. Controlling for financial liberalization we find that, for a panel of OECD countries in the 1990s, a high government debt leads to more excess sensitivity. This result supports the idea that a high government debt induces lenders to tighten credit conditions. Our findings survive several robustness checks.     

Nonmanipulable decision mechanisms for economic environments

In the social choice literature studying the problem of designing institutions for collective decision making, it is customary to (implicitly) assume that each dimension of the social outcome is of public interest (i.e., that each individual's welfare depends on every dimension of the outcome). Thus, the scope of the conclusions obtained is very limited. Here social decision problems with and without that public character are considered and it is shown that the same negative results arise in most cases; namely, that only dictatorial mechanisms are immune to the participants' manipulations. These results are obtained without requiring that the mechanisms produce Pareto optimal outcomes (they must simply be minimally responsive to the participants' preferences), which deepens their pessimistic character.I am deeply grateful to my advisor, Mark Walker, for his continuous guidance and encouragement. I wish also to thank Salvador Barberà, John Weymark, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.