Left-censored dementia incidences in estimating cohort effects

Lifetime Data Analysis - We estimate the dementia incidence hazard in Germany for the birth cohorts 1900 until 1954 from a simple sample of Germany’s largest health insurance company....     

Knowledge,Risk Perceptions,and Xenophobic Attitudes: Evidence from Italy During the Ebola Outbreak

The purposes of the current study were twofold: (1) to investigate affective and cognitive responses and social‐contextual factors related to Ebola and their intercorrelations in a developed country without widespread Ebola transmission; and (2) to examine the relationships among risk perception of Ebola, levels of knowledge about Ebola, and (blatant and subtle) prejudice toward African immigrants. Between January 2015 and March 2015, an anonymous cross‐sectional survey was conducted among a convenience sample of 486 Italian adults. Results showed that most participants were not particularly concerned about Ebola and did not feel at risk of acquiring the virus. Cognitive dimensions of risk perception of Ebola (i.e., perceived severity of illness, perceived personal impact, perceived coping efficacy, and likelihood of infection), affective response (or worry) to Ebola, and social‐contextual factors (i.e., perceived preparedness of institutions, family members’ and friends’ levels of worry) were interrelated. Prejudice toward African immigrants was positively related to risk perception of Ebola and negatively related to levels of knowledge about Ebola even when controlling for sociodemographic variables including political preference.     

Three-dimensional virtual reality: Applications to the 12 grand challenges of social work

Abstract

The American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW) identified 12 Grand Challenges of Social Work to unify the profession with focused research, practice and policy applications for the most pressing social issues. Virtual Reality (VR), specifically three-dimensional immersive computer-generated environments, has a history of research and applications to address social and behavioral problems. VR is becoming more readily available, as the technology is becoming more common in mainstream platforms such as mobile technology. While social work interventions are often tailored for vulnerable populations that may not have access to VR computing, it appears that virtual reality is gaining accessibility with these advances. Within the framework of the 12 Grand Challenges of Social Work, researchers from three social work virtual reality laboratories in the United States, Texas State University, the University of Houston, and the University of Alabama, review applications previously tested and currently in development to focus future research and intervention in social work practice.     

Bayesian significance test for discriminating between survival distributions

An evaluation of FBST, Fully Bayesian Significance Test, restricted to survival models is the main objective of the present paper. A Survival distribution should be chosen among the tree celebrated ones, lognormal, gamma, and Weibull. For this discrimination, a linear mixture of the three distributions is an important tool: the FBST is used to test the hypotheses defined on the mixture weights space. Another feature of the paper is that all three distributions are reparametrized in that all the six parameters are written as functions of the mean and the variance of the population been studied. Some numerical results from simulations with some right-censored data are considered.     

Landslide Risk Models for Decision Making

This contribution presents a quantitative procedure for landslide risk analysis and zoning considering hazard, exposure (or value of elements at risk), and vulnerability. The method provides the means to obtain landslide risk models (expressing expected damage due to landslides on material elements and economic activities in monetary terms, according to different scenarios and periods) useful to identify areas where mitigation efforts will be most cost effective. It allows identifying priority areas for the implementation of actions to reduce vulnerability (elements) or hazard (processes). The procedure proposed can also be used as a preventive tool, through its application to strategic environmental impact analysis (SEIA) of land-use plans. The underlying hypothesis is that reliable predictions about hazard and risk can be made using models based on a detailed analysis of past landslide occurrences in connection with conditioning factors and data on past damage. The results show that the approach proposed and the hypothesis formulated are essentially correct, providing estimates of the order of magnitude of expected losses for a given time period. Uncertainties, strengths, and shortcomings of the procedure and results obtained are discussed and potential lines of research to improve the models are indicated. Finally, comments and suggestions are provided to generalize this type of analysis.     

Field of Study and University Graduates' Early Employment Outcomes in Italy during 1995–2004

Abstract. In a period of expanding higher education, the field of study becomes a key determinant of university graduates' labour market success. In this paper, by means of multivariate analyses of the quality of graduates' early employment outcomes, we first describe how the effect of different fields of study on the university‐to‐work transition changed between 1995 and 2004 in Italy. Second, we put forward some alternative hypotheses to interpret the changes observed over time and assess which ones seem to be more consistent with the data.     

VOLUNTARY ACTIVITIES AND DAILY HAPPINESS IN THE UNITED STATES

This article analyzes differences in daily happiness between those individuals in the United States who perform voluntary activities during the day and those who do not. Using the Well‐Being Module of the American Time Use Survey 2010, we find that those who devote any time to voluntary activities during the day report higher levels of daily happiness than those who do not. Comparing the happiness obtained from a range of activities, we find that volunteering is among the most enjoyable, indicating that time spent on voluntary activities is utility‐enhancing. We document that the effect of voluntary activities on the experienced utility of individuals can be decomposed into a “time‐composition” effect and an “activity” effect, with the latter explaining between 11% and 46% of the observed difference. (JEL D13, J16, J22)     

Month of Birth and Dementia Late in Life

Dementia is one of the most common, still incurable diseases of old age, with high costs for the patient, the family and the society. Scholars of dementia have identified important risk factors in mid-life but little attention has been devoted to the earliest period in life. This article extends the research about risk factors of dementia to the time around birth. We start by discussing the influential theories of fetal programming and of the thrifty phenotype, and briefly contrast these theories with life-course approaches and the theory of the accumulation of advantage or disadvantage over the life course. Our own empirical study is based on an exogenous indicator of the early life environment, namely the month of birth. We present the theoretical background of using this indicator and discuss others such as famines, epidemics, and macro-economic fluctuations. Using data from the largest public health insurer in Germany we explore the relationship between the month of birth and dementia and find that the winter-born have the lowest risk of developing dementia. We present the pros and cons of using claims data in the study of dementia and discuss research findings that may shed light on the biological mechanisms underlying our finding.     

Marginal distribution of Markov-switching VAR processes

We make available simple and accurate closed-form approximations to the marginal distribution of Markov-switching vector auto-regressive (MS VAR) processes. The approximation is built upon the property of MS VAR processes of being Gaussian conditionally on any semi-infinite sequence of the latent state. Truncating the semi-infinite sequence and averaging over all possible sequences of that finite length yields a mixture of normals that converges to the unknown marginal distribution as the sequence length increases. Numerical experiments confirm the viability of the approach which extends to the closely related class of MS state space models. Several applications are discussed.