Life Expectancy, Schooling Time, Retirement, and Growth

I analyze how changes in life expectancy affect retirement age, education time, and growth rates of economies. I set up a continuous time, overlapping generations model of endogenous growth with externalities in human capital production. I find that increases in life expectancy give rise to first, higher retirement ages and second, higher education spans. A threshold level for life expectancy exists such that per capita growth rates follow an inverted U pattern.     

Three years later: the adaptation process of 1980 (Mariel) Cuban and Haitian refugees in South Florida

In recent years, southern Florida has experienced rapid new inflows of immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean. Since the arrival in 1980 of Mariel (Cuban) and Haitian immigrants to this area, a great deal of speculation has emerged as to the adaptation of these two groups to south Florida and the impact which their presence has wielded on the social and economic arenas of that region. In this paper, we present selected background characteristics of representative samples of both groups and discuss our empirical findings with regard to the labor market experiences, social networks, and educational experiences of the immigrants included in our sample. While the two groups minimally differ from earlier cohorts of their compatriots entering south Florida, their experiences since arriving in Florida have been quite different. Both the Cuban and Haitian immigrants arriving in 1980 demonstrate higher levels of unemployment than their counterparts who arrived earlier; however, the existence of the Cuban economic enclave in Miami did facilitate the entry of a greater number of Cubans than Haitians into the formal labor market. Initial evidence indicates that significant numbers of individuals from both groups participate in the informal labor market, often receiving less than the minimum wage.This study was conducted with the support of the Sociology Program, National Science Foundation (Grant #SES-8215567).     

Portrait of the Scholar: Notes on Irwin Deutscher's What We Say/What We Do

Book Reviews are in this Articles.
What We Say/What We Do: Sentiments and Acts. By Irwin Deutscher.     

Union use of employee pension funds: Introduction and overview

Summary and Conclusions A case can be made that labor unions are seeking to gain control of the financial leverage of employee pension funds as a means of offsetting a secular decline in membership which has occurred over the past twenty years and which has been accelerating. Pension fund assets are now substantial and are growing very rapidly so that even partial or indirect influence over investment policies could have major impacts on the economy. Unions have already achieved success on a limited scale with the pension fund weapon. Their intention to achieve widespread influence through this vehicle is signalled by the establishment in January, 1981, of a monthly newsletter,Labor & Investments which is devoted exclusively to the union use of employee pension funds. In sum, it is clear that the union use of employee pension funds is a very timely and significant topic. The papers that follow may not provide definitive answers to the many questions produced by this new initiative, but they do enhance our understanding of the issues involved.     

Generalized Mixtures of Gamma and Exponentials and Reliability Properties of the Maximum from Friday and Patil Bivariate Exponential Model

The minimum and maximum order statistics from many of the common bivariate exponential distributions are predominantly generalized mixtures of exponentials; however, the maximum from the Friday and Patil bivariate exponential (FPBVE) model is either a generalized mixture of three or fewer exponentials or a generalized mixture of gamma and exponentials. In this article, we obtain conditions based on the weights and parameters of the generalized mixtures of gamma and one or two exponential distributions that yield legitimate probability models. Furthermore, we analyze properties of the failure rate of the maximum from the FPBVE model. This answers a question raised in Baggs and Nagaraja (1996 Baggs , G. E. , Nagaraja , H. N. ( 1996 ). Reliability properties of order statistics from bivariate exponential distributions . Commun. Statist. Stochastic Mod. 12 : 611 – 631 .[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]).     

Stochastic Aging Classes for the Maximum Statistic from Friday and Patil Bivariate Exponential Distribution Family

Friday and Patil bivariate exponential (FPBVE) distribution family is one of the most flexible bivariate exponential distributions in the literature; among others, it contains the bivariate exponential models due to Freund, Marshall–Olkin, Block–Basu, and Proschan–Sullo as particular cases. In this article, we discuss the stochastic aging of the maximum statistic from FPBVE model in according to the log-concavity of its density function, i.e., in the increasing or decreasing likelihood ratio classes (ILR or DLR), and consequently in the IFR and DFR classes. Furthermore, a kind of DFR distributions which are not DLR is derived from our classification.     

Influential observation in complex normal data for problems in allometry

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate how some results related to the complex normal distribution are relevant in size and shape analysis. Our main focus is on the derivation of influential measures. In particular, Cook and Kullback–Leibler distances are combined with their respective asymptotic results as well as to an alternative process of defining cut-off points. Some numerical examples illustrate how these measures are used in practice. We perform an application to simulated and actual data. Results provide evidence that the methodology based on Kullback–Leibler distance outperforms one in terms of the Cook classic distance.     

A plug-in technique in nonparametric regression with dependence

The problem addressed is that of smoothing parameter selection in kernel nonparametric regression in the fixed design regression model with dependent noise. An asymptotic expression of the optimum bandwidth parameter has been obtained in recent studies, where this takes the form h = C ₀ n ^?1/5. This paper proposes to use a plug-in methodology, in order to obtain an optimum estimation of the bandwidth parameter, through preliminary estimation of the unknown value of C ₀.     

Bayesian analysis of non-negative ar(2) processes

A non-negative AR(2) process with exponentially distributed white noise is investigated in the paper. It is assumed that the autoregressive parameters are random variables with a vague prior density. They can be esto,ated by their posterior expectations. Explicit formulas for these estimators are derived and their strong consistency is proved. An approximation to the estimators is proposed which is easier for calculation. The results are illustrated in a simulation study