Who Stays? Who Goes? Selective Emigration Among the Foreign-Born

We investigate the level and selectivity of emigration from the United States among foreign-born adults. We use the CPS Matching Method (Van Hook et al. 2006) to estimate the probability of emigration among foreign-born adults aged 18–34, 35–64 and 65+ from 1996 to 2009 (N = 92,852). The results suggest higher levels of emigration than used in the production of official population estimates. Also, indicators of economic integration (home ownership, school enrollment, poverty) and social ties in the U.S. (citizenship, having young children, longer duration in the United States) deter emigration. Conversely, having connections with the sending society, such as living apart from a spouse, was associated with emigration, particularly among Mexican men. Health was least strongly related to emigration. Simulations suggest that selective emigration may alter the home ownership and marital status, but not health, composition of immigrant cohorts. The implications for public policy are discussed.     

Evaluation of Laplace distribution-based ANOVA models applied to microarray data

In a microarray experiment, intensity measurements tend to vary due to various systematic and random effects, which enter at the different stages of the measurement process. Common test statistics do not take these effects into account. An alternative is to use, for example, ANOVA models. In many cases, we can, however, not make the assumption of normally distributed error terms. Purdom and Holmes [6 Purdom, E. and Holmes, S. P. 2005. Error distribution for gene expression data. Stat. Appl. Genet. Mol. Biol., 4(1) article 16 [Google Scholar]] have concluded that the distribution of microarray intensity measurements can often be better approximated by a Laplace distribution. In this paper, we consider the analysis of microarray data by using ANOVA models under the assumption of Laplace-distributed error terms. We explain the methodology and discuss problems related to fitting of this type of models. In addition to evaluating the models using several real-life microarray experiments, we conduct a simulation study to investigate different aspects of the models in detail. We find that, while the normal model is less sensitive to model misspecifications, the Laplace model has more power when the data are truly Laplace distributed. However, in the latter situation, neither of the models is able to control the false discovery rate at the pre-specified significance level. This problem is most likely related to sample size issues.     

Cautions on the Use of the SERVQUAL Measure to Assess the Quality of Information Systems Services

The SERVQUAL questionnaire (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1988) is one of the preeminent instruments for measuring the quality of services as perceived by the customer. In a recent Decision Sciences article, Kettinger and Lee (1995) suggested the use of a modified SERVQUAL instrument to assess the quality of the services supplied by an information services provider. However, a number of problems with the SERVQUAL instrument are discussed in the literature. This article provides an illustrative example utilizing data collected from 138 executive and information systems professional customers of a multibillion dollar information services provider in order to examine the validity and reliability of Kettinger and Lee's (1995) modified SERVQUAL instrument. Results of analyses do not confirm the findings of Kettinger and Lee. Moreover, it appears that the use of difference scores in calculating SERVQUAL contributes to problems with the reliability, discriminant validity, convergent validity, and predictive validity of the measure. These findings suggest that caution should be exercised in the use of SERVQUAL scores and that further work is needed in the development of measures for assessing the quality of information services.     

Gender and Promotion in the Academic Labour Market

Several hypotheses are put forward with respect to promotion differentials between males and females on the academic labour market. These hypotheses are tested on the basis of a longitudinal data set of academic staff members at Utrecht University. The methods applied include Poisson regression, Negative Binomial analysis and Probit analysis. Full-time instead of part-time work and a Ph.D. degree prove to be efficient but not sufficient instruments for women on the academic labour market to catch up with men with respect to promotions.     

Unemployment and Endogenous Growth

In this paper we develop a two-sector endogenous growth model with a dual labour market, based on efficiency wages. Growth is driven by intentional R&D performed in the high-tech and high-wage sector. How a change in rivalry among firms affects simultaneously growth and unemployment is examined. On the one hand, an increase of the elasticity of substitution between the product varieties of different high-tech firms reduces market power and leads to higher growth but reduces job prospects. On the other hand, if barriers to entry exist, an increase of the number of rivals in the market (due to removal of entry barriers) leads to lower growth, whereas the effect on aggregate employment is ambiguous.     

It is Hard to Swim Upstream: Dietary Acculturation Among Mexican-Origin Children

Health and immigration researchers often implicate dietary acculturation in explanations of Mexican children of immigrants’ weight gain after moving to the U.S., but rarely explore how diet is shaped by immigrants’ structural incorporation. We used data from the 1999/00-2009/10 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to assess how indicators of Mexican-origin children’s acculturation and structural incorporation influence two outcomes: how healthy and how “Americanized” children’s diets are. Indicators of acculturation were strongly associated with more Americanized and less healthy diets. However, structural incorporation indicators were mostly unrelated to diet outcomes net of acculturation. An exception was that parental education was positively associated with consuming a healthy diet. Finally, children of natives consumed more Americanized, unhealthy diets than children of immigrants and these differences were largely explained by differences in the acculturation. Children of natives would have consumed an even less healthy diet were it not for their higher levels of parental education. Overall, the results suggest that the process of adapting to the U.S. life style is associated with the loss of cultural culinary preferences and less healthy eating behaviors despite improvements in socioeconomic status.     

Partners’ Educational Pairings and Fertility Across Europe

We provide new evidence on the education-fertility relationship by using EU-SILC panel data on 24 European countries to investigate how couples’ educational pairings predict their childbearing behavior. We focus on differences in first-, second-, and third-birth rates among couples with varying combinations of partners’ education. Our results show important differences in how education relates to parity progressions depending on the education of the partner. First, highly educated homogamous couples show a distinct childbearing behavior in most country clusters. They tend to postpone the first birth most and display the highest second- and third-birth rates. Second, contrary to what may be expected based on the “new home economics” approach, hypergamous couples with a highly educated male and a lower-educated female partner display among the lowest second-birth transitions. Our findings underscore the relevance of interacting both partners’ education for a better understanding of the education-fertility relationship.     

Changes in Social Exclusion Indicators and Psychological Distress Among Homeless People Over a 2.5-Year Period

Although homelessness is inherently associated with social exclusion, homeless individuals are rarely included in conventional studies on social exclusion. Use of longitudinal survey data from a cohort study on homeless people in four major Dutch cities (n = 378) allowed to examine: changes in indicators of social exclusion among homeless people over a 2.5-year period after reporting to the social relief system, and associations between changes in indicators of social exclusion and changes in psychological distress. Multinomial logistic regression analysis was applied to investigate the associations between changes in indicators of social exclusion and changes in psychological distress. Improvements were found in various indicators of social exclusion, whereas financial debts showed no significant improvement. Changes in unmet care needs, health insurance, social support from family and relatedness to others were related to changes in psychological distress. This study demonstrated improvements in various indicators of social exclusion among homeless people over a period of 2.5 years, and sheds light on the concept of social exclusion in relation to homelessness.     

On the Output Orientation of the Benefit-of-the-Doubt-Model

While Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) models, as used in the context of composite indicator construction, seek to aggregate outputs only, they are formally equivalent to an input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model in multiplier form. Strictly read, this introduces conceptually ambiguous results, as input adjustments have no real significance in the context at hand. At heart of this ambiguity lies a double interpretation of what is essentially a binding constraint in BoD’s underlying linear-fractional program. Moreover, there is a direct, reciprocal relation between the BoD-model and an earlier output-oriented DEA model introduced by Lovell et al. (Eur J Oper Res 87:507–518, 1995) for similar purposes. Although these models are essentially similar, I also show that there are instances (i.e. when adding additional weight restrictions) in which the results of one alternative are easier to communicate. The models surveyed in this paper are complemented with a short application on human development data for females living in Brussels municipalities.