“It’s a generosity loop”: Religious and spiritual motivations of volunteers who glean produce to reduce food insecurity

Food insecurity is a common social issue and households look to assistance from food pantries, which often have difficulty supplying fresh or nutritious food. A substantial amount of produce is left in the fields, which can be collected through gleaning. In a focus group with volunteer gleaners at a faith-based nonprofit organization that attempts to fill the gaps of food insecurity, the motivations, challenges, and benefits of volunteering were examined. Volunteering in gleaning generated a sense of collective purpose and community; it addressed deeply held religious and spiritual impulses; and it puts volunteers directly in contact with nature.     

Understanding Membership in a World of Global Migration: (How) Does Citizenship Matter?

This article synthesizes the literature on citizenship and immigration to evaluate the heft of citizenship and theorize why it matters. We examine why citizenship laws vary cross‐nationally and why some immigrants acquire citizenship while others do not. We consider how citizenship influences rights, identities, and participation and the mechanisms by which citizenship could influence lives. We consider frameworks, such as cultural and performative citizenship, that de‐center legal status and the nation‐state. Ultimately, we argue for a claims‐making approach to citizenship, one that is a relational process of recognition, includes actors outside the individual/state dyad, and focuses on claims to legitimate membership.     

Unfair to Me or Unfair to My Spouse: Men's and Women's Perceptions of Domestic Equity and How They Relate to Mental and Physical Health

Research examining the relationship between household labor and health has not sufficiently considered perceptions of domestic equity, physical health, or potential gender differences in these relationships. Using survey data from 1,234 lawyers, we examine how perceptions of domestic equity are related to mental and physical health and whether these relationships differ by gender. The results indicate that perceiving the division of household labor as unfair to oneself is related to poorer mental health, whereas perceiving the division as unfair to one's spouse is related to poorer physical health, regardless of gender. This article demonstrates the importance of treating perceptions of unfairness to oneself and one's spouse as distinct experiences, while also considering the wider context wherein these relationships exist.     

Blurring the lines for learning: the role of out-of-school programs as complements to formal learning

As debates continue over the effectiveness of after-school programs, we need to create stronger links between schools and out-of-school activities. Where do such connections begin? How can we integrate skill-building and academic competence into the out-of-school-time context?     

Where Are the Babies? Labor Market Conditions and Fertility in Europe

Cross-country differences in both the age at first birth and fertility are substantial in Europe. This paper uses distinct fluctuations in unemployment rates across European countries during the 1980s and the 1990s combined with broad differences in their labor market arrangements to analyze the associations between fertility timing and the changing economic environment with close to 50,000 women from 13 European countries. First, it employs time-varying measures of aggregate market conditions in each woman??s country as covariates and second, it adds micro-measures of each woman??s labor market history to the models. High and persistent unemployment in a country is associated with delays in childbearing (and second births). The association is robust to diverse measures of unemployment and to controls for family-friendly policies. Besides moderate unemployment, a large public employment sector (which provides security and benefits) is coupled with faster transitions to all births. Women with temporary contracts, mostly in Southern Europe, are the least likely to give birth to a second child.     

Geometric Ergodicity and Scanning Strategies for Two-Component Gibbs Samplers

In Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis, rapid convergence of the chain to its target distribution is crucial. A chain that converges geometrically quickly is geometrically ergodic. We explore geometric ergodicity for two-component Gibbs samplers (GS) that, under a chosen scanning strategy, evolve through one-at-a-time component-wise updates. We consider three such strategies: composition, random sequence, and random scans. We show that if any one of these scans produces a geometrically ergodic GS, so too do the others. Further, we provide a simple set of sufficient conditions for the geometric ergodicity of the GS. We illustrate our results using two examples.     

A Nonparametric Test for Deviation from Randomness with Applications to Stock Market Index Data

The proposed test detects deviations from randomness, without a priori distributional assumption, when observations are not independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), which is suitable for our motivating stock market index data. Departures from i.i.d. are tested by subdividing data into subintervals and then using a conditional probability measure within intervals as a binomial test. This nonparametric test is designed to detect deviations of neighboring observations from randomness when the dataset consists of time series observations. Simulation results and a comparison with Lo and MacKinlay's (1988 Lo, A. W. and MacKinlay, A. C. 1988. Stock market prices do not follow random walks: Evidence from a simple specification test. The Review of Financial Studies, 1: 41–66. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) variance ratio test showed that our proposed test is a competitive alternative.     

Detecting Randomness: A Review of Existing Tests with New Comparisons

In this article we review and compare a number of existing tests for detecting randomness in time series data, with emphasis on stock market index data. By comparing variance ratio tests with traditional statistical tests, we have the most extensive simulation comparison of such procedures. The investigated tests are compared over a diverse group of distributions, models, and stock market applications. In our stock market data analysis, the choice of data transformation can have a noticeable effect on test results. This study provides the reader with a guide as to which test and transformation is most appropriate for their use.