Indicators of development in Wisconsin counties: 1970

This research focused on the problem of measuring economic and social ‘development’. Existing theories of economic and social change were used to select important indicators of development. For each indicator, principal components analysis was used to collapse several related variables into a single index. The indexes were labeled economic base, economic growth, personal economic opportunity, health inputs, health status, educational inputs, and educational attainment. In each case, selection of variables and indexes were constrained by two factors: (1) the data had to be available from secondary sources; (2) the selection of the indicators, and the procedure, had to be easily understood and cheaply and quickly repeatable by state or local agency personnel. In general the indexes were consistent with each other and the variables enter into the indexes with the expected sign. The high correlation among the indexes suggests that they may indeed measure some underlying attribute, development. There is no rigorous or absolute measure of development against which to check the validity of the indexes. However, the results have been judged ‘reasonable’ measures of development by the state agency staff and local development groups which have utilized the indexes.     

The why, when, and how of immigration amnesties

This paper deals with granting of an amnesty to illegal immigrants. We consider government behavior with respect to allocations on limiting infiltration (border control) and apprehending infiltrators (internal control) and with respect to the granting of amnesties, the timing of amnesties, and limitations on eligibility for those amnesties. We demonstrate the effects of government actions on allocations and the flow of immigrants, and how the interactions between these factors combine to yield an optimal amnesty policy. We also consider two extensions—intertemporal transfers of policing funds and “fuzziness” in declarations regarding eligibility for an amnesty aimed at apprehending and deporting undesirables.     

Break point detection for functional covariance

Many neuroscience experiments record sequential trajectories where each trajectory consists of oscillations and fluctuations around zero. Such trajectories can be viewed as zero-mean functional data. When there are structural breaks in higher-order moments, it is not always easy to spot these by mere visual inspection. Motivated by this challenging problem in brain signal analysis, we propose a detection and testing procedure to find the change point in functional covariance. The detection procedure is based on the cumulative sum statistics (CUSUM). The fully functional testing procedure relies on a null distribution which depends on infinitely many unknown parameters, though in practice only a finite number of these parameters can be included for the hypothesis test of the existence of change point. This paper provides some theoretical insights on the influence of the number of parameters. Meanwhile, the asymptotic properties of the estimated change point are developed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is numerically validated in simulation studies and an application to investigate changes in rat brain signals following an experimentally-induced stroke.     

Health Care in Asia and the Pacific: Increasing the focus on social health insurance

This paper focuses on health insurance reform within the broader frameworks of both social security and health services system development. In most countries in Asia and the Pacific, it is indeed the reform of the health services system, through policy changes in health care financing, that has led to an increased focus on health insurance. The underlying issue in this reform is the shift in responsibility that has taken place in most countries in the region over recent years. In the past, governments were responsible for financing health care for their populations. This shifted to defining, legislating and implementing an appropriate health care financing mechanism, presenting several challenges: to reach universal health insurance coverage through new initiatives for new populations, mainly the informal sector accounting for the majority of the population in almost all these countries; to apply provider payment systems that enable control over costs and the volume of utilization; and to strengthen primary health care as a foundation for rational utilization and more resources for prevention, including prevention of chronic diseases among the ageing population. This approach will require an active partnership between health insurance schemes and government that should reflect the new division of responsibilities to guarantee access to high-quality health care for all.     

A comment on Wong and Waite, “Elder mistreatment predicts later physical and psychological health: Results from a national longitudinal study,” JEAN Issue 29(1), pp. 15–42

Wong and Waite present a longitudinal study of elder abuse and its effects. However, they contend that their data do not support the protective effects of social support, a finding in contrast with virtually all existing research on the topic. Closer inspection of their variables indicates that they misclassify elder abuse insofar as their results are actually in terms of only one type of elder abuse, psychological abuse, ignoring physical and sexual abuse. They also define “elder abuse” using only one question: “Is there anyone who insults you or puts you down?” Finally, they measure social support with the single item: “if they generally feel they can open up to, and rely on, these significant others.” It is not, therefore, surprising that they observed that social support was not protective considering health outcomes.     

‘I’m Black and I’m Proud’: A Majority Ecological Context Protects Affective Aspects of Black Identity Under Stereotype Threat

We provide evidence that stereotype threat, a phenomenon that causes stigmatized individuals to experience group-based evaluative concerns (Steele in Am Psychol 52:613–629, 1997; Whistling Vivaldi and other clues to how stereotypes affect us, W.W. Norton, New York, 2010), impacts affective aspects of Black identity as a function of majority versus minority ecological contexts. Black/African-American students, enrolled in either Africana Studies (Black ecological majority) or Psychology (Black ecological minority), completed private and public regard subscales from the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (Sellers et al. in Pers Soc Psychol Rev 2:18–39, 1998) at baseline (Time 1) and after being randomly assigned to a stereotype threat or no-threat/control condition (Time 2). In threat, participants were introduced to a ‘puzzle’ task as diagnostic of intellectual abilities, whereas in no-threat the same task was introduced as culture fair, such that people from different racial/ethnic groups had performed similarly on this task in the past. In Psychology, students under threat exhibited a simultaneous decrease and increase in private and public regard, respectively, a pattern shown in the literature to be associated with discrimination-based distress and lesser well-being in Black ecological minority environments. In contrast, Africana Studies students’ racial identity under threat remained intact. We discuss the protective effects of Africana Studies on racial identity and implications for educational reform.