Individualism vs Collectivism in Different Cultures: A cross-cultural study

In this study, individualism vs collectivism, in line with the work of Triandis in 1985, was assessed in two groups of male and female students, in Egypt and Germany. The results confirm the effect that cultural background has on individualist vs collectivist orientations in both of these cultures for male and female students. Men and women scored higher on individualism in Germany than in Egypt, whereas collectivism scores were higher in Egypt than in Germany. These findings are discussed in terms of general recommendations for intercultural interventions that discourage viewing people solely in terms of group membership, and instead as distinct individuals.     

Goodness‐of‐fit methods for matched case‐control studies

The authors propose graphical and numerical methods for checking the adequacy of the logistic regression model for matched case‐control data. Their approach is based on the cumulative sum of residuals over the covariate or linear predictor. Under the assumed model, the cumulative residual process converges weakly to a centered Gaussian limit whose distribution can be approximated via computer simulation. The observed cumulative residual pattern can then be compared both visually and analytically to a certain number of simulated realizations of the approximate limiting process under the null hypothesis. The proposed techniques allow one to check the functional form of each covariate, the logistic link function as well as the overall model adequacy. The authors assess the performance of the proposed methods through simulation studies and illustrate them using data from a cardiovascular study.     

Communication of risk: health hazards from mobile phones

Summary. Possible health hazards from mobile phones arise from the use of the phones themselves and via the base stations that relay signals. Except for an increase in traffic accidents induced by the use of mobile phones in cars the evidence for a health hazard is at most indirect, but it cannot be entirely dismissed; the phones have not been widely used for sufficiently long for direct epidemiological studies to have high sensitivity for detecting any induced incidence of cancer, for example. The background and evidence are briefly reviewed and the steps taken in the UK to make information widely available described.     

Parent and Nonparent Perception of the Multimodal Infant Cry

This study examined whether perceivers can detect infant distress in the visual and acoustic signals within the cry. Parent and nonparent perceivers rated distress in 3‐, 6‐, 8‐, and 12‐month‐old infants' cries that were manipulated to separate facial, vocal, and bodily action. Mean perceiver ratings differed for high‐ and low‐distress cries at each infant age on the basis of facial and vocal action, but not bodily movement. Perceivers rated the cry sound as more distressed and the cry face as less distressed with increasing infant age. Parents rated the cries as less distressed overall than did nonparents. The results suggest that information about distress is available for perceivers in the crying infant's face and voice.     

A Bayesian Hierarchical Model for the Evaluation of a Website

Consider a website and the surfers visiting its pages. A typical issue of interest, for example while monitoring an advertising campaign, concerns whether a specific page has been designed successfully, i.e. is able to attract surfers or address them to other pages within the site. We assume that the surfing behaviour is fully described by the transition probabilities from one page to another, so that a clickstream (sequence of consecutively visited pages) can be viewed as a finite-state-space Markov chain. We then implement a variety of hierarchical prior distributions on the multivariate logits of the transition probabilities and define, for each page, a content effect and a link effect. The former measures the attractiveness of the page due to its contents, while the latter signals its ability to suggest further interesting links within the site. Moreover, we define an additional effect, representing overall page success, which incorporates both effects previously described. Using WinBUGS, we provide estimates and credible intervals for each of the above effects and rank pages accordingly.     

A “brer rabbit” case for reverse mandated benefits

Reverse mandated benefits is a government-mandated policy that requires employees to provide their employers with benefits that workers would not provide otherwise. Of course, only those benefits would be mandated that are worth more to employers than they cost, as determined by political authorities. My case for such a policy argues that it is at least as sensible as policies mandating that employers provide benefits to their employees that would not be provided otherwise.     

Glass ceilings or sticky floors? A model of high-income law graduates

Minorities and females are underrepresented in the top-income quintile of law school graduates. Employing a binary logistic regression model, I examine whether this is due to a“glass ceiling” (an invisible barrier erected by third parties) or a“sticky floor” (self-imposed limitations regarding employment). My major finding is that being female, a minority, or disabled did not significantly reduce one's probability of making the top-income quintile once hours of work, experience, and other factors are taken into account. My findings directly contradict the large body of glass-ceiling literature and support the sticky-floor model. I thank the Law School Admission Council for funding this research. Helpful comments and suggestions were received from Robert Nelson of Northwestern University and the American Bar Foundation, Steven Conroy of the University of West Florida, and R. Kim Craft and Douglas Bonzo of Southern Utah University. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions or persons listed above.     

CORPORATE TAX INCIDENCE AND INEFFICIENCY WHEN CORPORATE AND NONCORPORATE GOODS ARE CLOSE SUBSTITUTES

An important deficiency in Harberger's [1962] model of corporate income taxation is its inability to consider both corporate and noncorporate production of the same good. Within-industry substitution has potentially major implications for both the excess burden and incidence of the corporate tax.
We analyze this within-industry substitution using a model in which each industry/sector contains corporate and noncorporate firms (with identical production functions) which produce goods that are close substitutes. The scope for considerable within-industry substitution of noncorporate for corporate capital leads to a very much larger excess burden than that in the Harberger model.