Work hours,social value of leisure and globalisation

We examine how openness interacts with the coordination of consumption–leisure decisions in determining the equilibrium working hours and wage rate when there are leisure externalities (e.g., due to social interactions). The latter are modelled by allowing a worker's marginal utility of leisure to be increasing in the leisure time taken by other workers. Coordination takes the form of internalising the leisure externality and other relevant constraints (e.g., labour demand). The extent of openness is measured by the degree of capital mobility. We find that: coordination lowers equilibrium work hours and raises the wage rate; there is a U-shaped (inverse-U-shaped) relationship between work hours (wages) and the degree of coordination; coordination is welfare improving; and, the gap between the coordinated and uncoordinated work hours (and the corresponding wage rates) is affected by the extent and nature of openness.     

Demography,Education, and Democracy: Global Trends and the Case of Iran

Reconstructions and projections of populations by age, sex, and educational attainment for 120 countries since 1970 are used to assess the global relationship between improvements in human capital and democracy. Democracy is measured by the Freedom House indicator of political rights. Similar to an earlier study on the effects of improving educational attainment on economic growth, the greater age detail of this new dataset resolves earlier ambiguities about the effect of improving education as assessed using a global set of national time series. The results show consistently strong effects of improving overall levels of educational attainment, of a narrowing gender gap in education, and of fertility declines and the subsequent changes in age structure on improvements in the democracy indicator. This global relationship is then applied to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Over the past two decades Iran has experienced the world's most rapid fertility decline associated with massive increases in female education. The results show that based on the experience of 120 countries since 1970, Iran has a high chance of significant movement toward more democracy over the following two decades.     

The matched pair sign test using bivariate ranked set sampling for different ranking based schemes

Bivariate rank set sample (BVRSS) matched pair sign test is introduced and investigated for different ranking based schemes. We show that this test is asymptotically more efficient and more powerful than its counterpart sign test based on a bivariate simple random sample (BVSRS) for different ranking schemes. The asymptotic null distribution and the efficiency of the test are derived. Pitman’s asymptotic relative efficiency is used to compare the asymptotic performance of the matched pair sign test using BVRSS versus using BVSRS in all ranking cases. For small sample sizes, the bootstrap method is used to estimate P-values. Numerical comparisons are used to gain insight about the efficiency of the BVRSS sign test compared to the BVSRS sign test. Our numerical and theoretical results indicate that using any ranking scheme of BVRSS for the matched pair sign test is more efficient than using BVSRS.     

Higher-order moments,cumulants and spectral densities of the NGINAR(1) process

The motivation for time series with geometric marginal distributions arises from noting that the Poisson distribution is not always suitable for the modeling and analysis of integer-valued time series. The NGINAR(1) process that has been introduced by Risti? et al. (2009) represents a class of such time series. Joint higher-order (factorial) moments and cumulants with some other related statistical measures of the NGINAR(1) process are constructed. Also, the spectral and bispectral density functions of this process are investigated, including their nonparametric estimators, using the multitapering method. A real data example of the nonparametric multitaper spectral estimates is investigated, with a discussion of the results obtained.     

Estimation of the mean of the exponential distribution using moving extremes ranked set sampling

Moving Extremes Ranked Set Sampling (MERSS) is a useful modification of Ranked Set Sampling (RSS). Unlike RSS, MERSS allows for an increase of set size without introducing too much ranking error. The method is considered parametrically under exponential distribution. Maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), and a modified MLE are considered and their properties are studied. The method is studied under both perfect and imperfect ranking (with error in ranking). It appears that these estimators can be real competitors to the MLE using the usual simple random sampling (SRS).     

Effect of Sociocultural Context and Parenting Style on Scholastic Achievement among Iranian Adolescents

School grades, family demographics and responses to the parental authority questionnaire were assessed in 240 eighth‐grade students in the southern, central and northern parts of Tehran, Iran's capital. The result showed that poorer families with traditional values had more authoritarian attitudes toward parenting than richer families with more modern values. In contrast to the studies conducted in East Asian societies, the current study found that authoritative parenting was the style associated with the highest academic outcome. Tests of mediation and moderation effects showed that the relation between parenting style and academic outcome was independent of sociocultural context.     

Adaptive wavelet estimation of a density from mixtures under multiplicative censoring

In this paper, a mixture model under multiplicative censoring is considered. We investigate the estimation of a component of the mixture (a density) from the observations. A new adaptive estimator based on wavelets and a hard thresholding rule is constructed for this problem. Under mild assumptions on the model, we study its asymptotic properties by determining an upper bound of the mean integrated squared error over a wide range of Besov balls. We prove that the obtained upper bound is sharp.