Moving beyond the child care debate toward implications for social and political agendas

Early nonmaternal child care, for at least some portion of the week, is now the reality for most families in the United States. Ongoing debates surrounding what these changes mean for our society have focused on the possible negative consequences of extended nonmaternal care and the potential impact of such arrangements on children's later development. The NICHD-Early Child Care Research Network (ECCRN) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development has made great strides toward addressing methodological limitations in previous research through a series of landmark examinations of child functioning from transition to school through 15 years-of-age. The primary goal of this commentary is to put the child care findings into a broader developmental, social, and political context by reframing the discussion to move beyond the current daycare debate and consider implications for social policy and research agendas. Given that daycare has become a normative social institution, we first consider what the research findings mean for the healthy social–emotional and cognitive growth of children. Second, we articulate the implications of the data for social interventions to improve those outcomes. Finally, we address the issue of what political changes are necessary to produce those improvements.     

Forecasting the Penetration of a New Product—A Bayesian Approach

We adopt a Bayesian approach to forecast the penetration of a new product into a market. We incorporate prior information from an existing product and/or management judgments into the data analysis. The penetration curve is assumed to be a nondecreasing function of time and may be under shape constraints. Markov-chain Monte Carlo methods are proposed and used to compute the Bayesian forecasts. An example on forecasting the penetration of color television using the information from black-and-white television is provided. The models considered can also be used to address the general bioassay and reliability stress-testing problems.     

Sovereign bond holdings and monetary policy operations in the euro area

This paper investigates the relationship between sovereign bond holdings of banks and refinancing operations by the ECB for countries in the euro area. We use data collected by Bruegel as well as a new dataset compiled from the annual statements of national central banks to estimate panel regression models. Our findings support the hypothesis that the ECB’s refinancing operations have increased resident banks’ exposure to domestic sovereign bonds. This is in line with the moral suasion theory advanced in the literature. These results strengthen the case for regulatory changes aimed at reducing the sensitivity of banks to sovereign risk.     

II. „Nicht alles Gute ist auch gleichzeitig zu haben“

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Changing American home life: trends in domestic leisure and storage among middle-class families

This study of middle-class American families draws on ethnography and urban economic history, focusing on patterns of leisure time and household consumption and clutter. We trace how residential life evolved historically from cramped urban quarters into contemporary middle-class residences and examine how busy working families use house spaces. Our ethnographic sample consists of 24 Los Angeles families in which both parents work full time, have young children, and own their homes. Formal datasets include systematically timed family uses of home spaces, a large digital archive of photographs, and family-narrated video home tours. This analysis highlights a salient home-storage crisis, a marked shift in the uses of yards and garages, and the dissolution of outdoor leisure for busy working parents. The UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) is generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program on the Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families. Anthony Graesch assisted with the tables. Additional information about CELF can be found at www.celf.ucla.edu.     

Economically optimal markovian sampling policies for process monitoring

A variable delay process sampling procedure is considered in a Markov chain structure. The paper extends the basic sampling method given in Arnold (1970). Analytic properties of the process are developed for expected sample size and distribution of the sample size. A primary concern in the paper is the development of an objective function to enhance ability to select optimal sampling policies. The objective function involves cost due to sampling and protection costs for detecting undesirable conditions.