Welfare measurement in labour supply models with nonlinear budget constraints

This paper is concerned with the measurement of individual welfare in labour supply models which allow for the impact of income taxation and income support schemes on labour supply decisions. The paper is motivated by the concern over the need to have measures which can be interpreted easily, which can be compared with net income, and which can be meaningfully aggregated. To illustrate the issues we use estimates of a discrete choice model of labour supply for United Kingdom lone mothers to compute alternative welfare measures which might be considered as having intuitive appeal to policy-makers. We compute welfare change based on these measures arising from a recent reform of the child support payments system. Received: 25 February 1997/Accepted: 12 March 1998     

Returns to returning

We examine the labor market performance of return migrants using the Hungarian Household Panel Survey. Two distinct selection issues are considered in the estimation of the earnings equation; we implement a natural method using MLE. The result that there is a “premium” to work experience abroad for women is robust across the models we considered. For men, the return to working abroad is not generally significant. Received: 4 June 1998/Accepted: 16 April 1999     

近20年来中国人口老龄化的区域差异及其演化

文章借助各省区人口老龄化的演变过程及其与本地区经济的发展相关程度变化,来判别中国是否出现"未富先老"、"城乡倒置"或"人口红利"消失阻滞经济发展以及区域差异化演变等问题。通过一系列的数据分析发现:(1)中国各省区的人口老龄化演变阶段差异很大,但基本没有出现"未富先老",人口老龄化并没有妨碍经济发展,这既与经济转型、开放经济等有关,也符合全球人口老龄化演化的一般规律;(2)勾画中国各省区人口老龄化演变特征,可将其划分成四类不同的人口老龄化类型,其演变历程的地域推移与地域集聚现象十分明显。就目前的演变过程来看,中国人口老龄化与地区经济发展有明显相关性,经济发展成为中国人口老龄化的重要推动因素之一。     

Adjusting for centre heterogeneity in multicentre clinical trials with a time‒to‒event outcome

Conducting a clinical trial at multiple study centres raises the issue of whether and how to adjust for centre heterogeneity in the statistical analysis. In this paper, we address this issue for multicentre clinical trials with a time?to?event outcome. Based on simulations, we show that the current practice of ignoring centre heterogeneity can be seriously misleading, and we illustrate the performances of the frailty modelling approach over competing methods. A special attention is paid to the problem of misspecification of the frailty distribution. The appendix provides sample codes in R and in SAS to perform the analyses in this paper. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Funding for Social Movements

Funding is critical for social movements. Our understanding of the relationship between social movements and funders has been shaped by broader theories used to understand movement dynamics. This review examines our changing understanding of the role of funding for movements, paying particular attention to the relative costs and benefits of funding from different groups of actors, such as constituents, foundations, governments, and corporations. While these groups provide critical resources to movements, they can also potentially alter movements by channeling them into less contentious actions and more bureaucratized forms. I explore three current debates in the area of social movement funding. First, current work assesses the relationships of funding, particularly how the interactions between funders and funded groups shape the types of actions in which social movements can engage. Second, social movement funding is embedded within a larger context, and current work is attempting to better understand the role of this context by engaging in comparative research. Finally, debates surrounding the rising importance of corporate funding for movements focus on how these new streams of revenue could help (or hinder) social movement activities.     

Are Population and Land Use Changes Perceived as Threats to Sense of Place in the New West? A Multilevel Modeling Approach

The Intermountain West's rapid changes in population growth and land use may be welcome to some, but others perceive such changes as threats to sense of place. The objective of this study is to assess whether New West and Old West contextual variables predict how agricultural landowners view threats to agricultural lifestyles and sense of place. We analyze survey data collected from 2,270 agricultural landowners in Colorado and Wyoming utilizing a multilevel regression model (MLM). We posit that this analytical approach is effective for evaluating hierarchal New West or Old West economic configurations that may otherwise be difficult to observe. Our study specifically examines whether population pressures threaten agricultural lifestyles in the amenity‐based New West or in Old West economic regimes with proclivity toward large‐scale agricultural production. Our results show that landowners in farming‐dependent counties and in high‐amenity areas express greater concern than other landowners surveyed about increases in population growth that could threaten an agricultural way of life. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these perceptions relate to whether individuals reside in New West or Old West counties. In summary, some of the contextual variables of New West and Old West economic structures predict whether individuals perceive population growth and land use changes as threats to sense of place.     

A Laplace transform inversion method for probability distribution functions

This paper introduces a new Laplace transform inversion method designed specifically for when the target function is a probability distribution function. In particular, we use fixed point theory and Mann type iterative algorithms to provide a means by which to estimate and sample from the target probability distribution.