Perinatal issues for women with high functioning autism spectrum disorder

Problem

Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is an increasingly commonly diagnosed disability. People with ASD commonly report challenges in social interaction and a heightened sensory perception. These challenges may be particularly difficult for women during pregnancy, birthing and beyond.

Translation style and participant roles in court interpreting1

This paper investigates the translation styles of court interpreters in New York City and the styles' social and pragmatic implications for multilingual interactions in court. Interpreters are found to vary between using first or third person to represent the voice of a translated source speaker, thereby varying between adherence to explicit institutional norms that require first person and accommodation to non‐professional interpreting practices that favor the use of reported speech. In a quantitative and qualitative analysis, this variation is shown to be influenced by several pragmatic and social factors, and to index the interpreters' stances towards source speakers and towards the immigrant court users who are the recipients of translations from English. It is argued that translation styles have profound consequences for limited English speakers, as the insistence on institutional norms in translating to them is viewed as a gatekeeping behavior that may impede their full participation in the proceedings.     

STATE TAXES AND LEGISLATIVE TURNOVER IN THE UNITED STATES

Mounting empirical evidence suggests that term limits and, by extension, higher legislative turnover increase the overall size of government and change its spending composition. However, less is known about the turnover's impact on the composition of tax revenues. This study fills this void by exploiting exogenous variation in term limits and redistricting as instruments for legislative turnover, which is found to be positively associated with most state taxes except for the corporate income tax. We hypothesize that the negative association between legislative turnover and corporate income taxes might be influenced by a higher propensity of business owners to enter term-limited state legislatures. (JEL H7, H3)     

Working Hours Flexibility and Timing of Retirement: Findings from Europe

This study investigates how flexibility in working hours affects retirement timing. It tests the assumption that decreasing weekly working hours delays retirement and extends working life. Using data from four waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), we analyze whether a shift from full-time to part-time work delays retirement. Results show that older workers who reduce their working hours retire earlier than those who stay in full-time employment. The effect is stronger in Central and Eastern Europe than in Scandinavian countries. No interaction effects for gender and work strain are found. We conclude that part-time work at the end of the career, as a means to extend working life, should be reevaluated.     

Who Received Informal Social Support During the First COVID-19 Lockdown in Germany,and Who Did Not? The Role of Social Networks,Life Course and Pandemic-Specific Risks

Social Indicators Research - In this article, we study the receipt of informal support during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. The containment measures have had various,...     

Gründe und Formen der freiwilligen Nichtnutzung des Internets

This article examines the voluntary and conscious non-usage of the internet by youth and young adults. The study is based on the conceptual framework of de-mediatization. 30 qualitative interviews and a qualitative content analysis have been conducted to identify deficits and disadvantages in the context of everyday internet usage. Eight distinct sets of problems have been found. Furthermore, strategies users develop to handle those problems were investigated. They can be distinguished into strategies of adjusted continued usage and strategies of voluntary partial non-usage. Those complexes of problems that lead to strategies of voluntary self-restraint are the basis for five potential types of boundaries of online communication.     

Accurate and efficient numerical calculation of stable densities via optimized quadrature and asymptotics

Stable distributions are an important class of infinitely divisible probability distributions, of which two special cases are the Cauchy distribution and the normal distribution. Aside from a few special cases, the density function for stable distributions has no known analytic form and is expressible only through the variate’s characteristic function or other integral forms. In this paper, we present numerical schemes for evaluating the density function for stable distributions, its gradient, and distribution function in various parameter regimes of interest, some of which had no preexisting efficient method for their computation. The novel evaluation schemes consist of optimized generalized Gaussian quadrature rules for integral representations of the density function, complemented by asymptotic expansions near various values of the shape and argument parameters. We report several numerical examples illustrating the efficiency of our methods. The resulting code has been made available online.     

Shrinkage and variable selection by polytopes

Constrained estimators that enforce variable selection and grouping of highly correlated data have been shown to be successful in finding sparse representations and obtaining good performance in prediction. We consider polytopes as a general class of compact and convex constraint regions. Well-established procedures like LASSO (Tibshirani, 1996) or OSCAR (Bondell and Reich, 2008) are shown to be based on specific subclasses of polytopes. The general framework of polytopes can be used to investigate the geometric structure that underlies these procedures. Moreover, we propose a specifically designed class of polytopes that enforces variable selection and grouping. Simulation studies and an application illustrate the usefulness of the proposed method.