Work–home conflict and facilitation across four different family structures in Norway

The purpose of this study was to examine how work–home conflict and facilitation vary among people living in different family structures in Norway, here conceptualized as: two-parent families; single parents; childless couples; and singles. The study used data from a Norwegian study on occupational health (N=2414). We hypothesized that respondents living in two-parent families experience more work–home conflict and facilitation than others due to more complex role expectations. Similarly, we hypothesized that the effect of workload and autonomy on work–home conflict and facilitation would be stronger among this group. The results indicate that conflict between work and home life are more profound among those living in two-parent families and among single parents than among childless couples and singles. Work-to-home facilitation did not vary by family structure, whereas the childless couples reported more home-to-work facilitation. Furthermore, with a few exceptions the effects of workload and autonomy on work–home conflict and facilitation did not differ by family structure.     

Heterogeneity and Unemployment Duration

ABSTRACT: Various unemployment duration models are estimated on a large Norwegian dataset covering labour market history 1.1.1989-31.12.1992 for all persons who became unemployed during October 1990. As many unemployed leave the unemployment register without going directly to a job, two alternative definitions of unemployment are used — register unemployment and joblessness. The problem of heterogeneity is addressed both by partitioning the individuals into four categories by previous unemployment history, and by including a random term in the job hazard. Observed as well as unobserved heterogeneity affects the estimates of expected duration to a great extent. When gamma-distributed unobserved heterogeneity is accounted for, the estimates of duration dependence become more positive relative to models where unobserved heterogeneity is ignored. Among persons who are entitled to unemployment benefit, the duration dependence appears to be significantly positive. Alternative specifications of the baseline hazard hardly affect estimates of the effects of the covariates on duration.     

Nonverbal Deception Abilities and Adolescents' Social Competence: Adolescents with Higher Social Skills are Better Liars

High and low socially-skilled adolescents, ranging in age from 11 to 16 years, were led to be verbally deceptive or truthful about their enjoyment of a drink that either tasted good or bad. Short, silent videotaped samples of the adolescents while they were being deceptive or truthful were shown to a group of judges, who were asked to indicate how much each adolescent actually enjoyed the drink on the basis of their nonverbal behavior. Results indicated that, as predicted, adolescents with higher levels of social competence were generally better at deceiving than adolescents of lower social competence. However, these findings held primarily for younger adolescents. Furthermore, older adolescents were better at being deceptive than younger ones, and younger females were more proficient liars than younger males.     

Transient probability functions of finite birth–death processes with catastrophes

A representation of the transient probability functions of finite birth–death processes (with or without catastrophes) as a linear combination of exponential functions is derived using a recursive, Cayley–Hamilton approach. This method of solution allows practitioners to solve for these transient probability functions by reducing the problem to three calculations: determining eigenvalues of the Q$Q$-matrix, raising the Q$Q$-matrix to an integer power and solving a system of linear equations. The approach avoids Laplace transforms and permits solution of a particular transition probability function from state i$i$ to j$j$ without determining all such functions.     

Why something like socialism is necessary for the transition to something like communism

Conclusion The basic conclusion of the analysis of this article is that for a combination of economic and political reasons, a capitalist road to communism is implausible, and for political reasons a socialist road is more likely to succeed than the mixed road. The pure capitalist road is impossible because capital flight would immediately undermine the economic base of the communism-inducing universal grant proposal, and because even if this problem were solved, the political use of disinvestment would make the system unreproducible. The mixed road, combining elements of capitalist and socialist property relations, is economically feasible, but would be politically precarious. Only in a socialist society would the political conditions for a stable growth of the universal grants be secure enough to make movement along the road to communism likely.This general conclusion is based on what is a largely unargued assumption present thoughout this article, namely that socialism itself is unambiguously compatible with the emergence and development of communism- that collective ownership of the means of production by workers is compatible with a gradual growth in the realm of freedom, in the predominance of distribution according to need. Following VP, I acted as if the only issue were the extent to which capitalism might also be so compatible, and if not, the extent to which certain aspects of capitalism might be compatible in what I have called the mixed road.The assumption that socialism is compatible with the growth of communism rests on two more basic claims: first, that eliminating capitalist property relations does not necessarily produce authoritarian-bureaucratic forms of the state and politics, and, second, that in democratic socialism productivity will continue to increase (for without increasing productivity, expanding the sphere of distribution according to need becomes very problematic). While I will not attempt to defend them here, I believe both of these claims to be true. If either of these assumptions is false, however, then the only feasible road to communism, no matter how precarious it might be politically, may be the quasicapitalist/quasi-socialist mixed road described above, a road that combines elements of substantial state control over investments with capitalist economic rationality.