Devolution in the U.S. Welfare Reform: Divergence and Degradation in State Benefits

The Journal of Economic Inequality - The passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 devolved responsibility for the design of welfare programs...     

Loading and correlations in the interpretation of principle compenents

Principles compenents (PC) are often interpreted by looking at the loading for each variable. Variable with a small-magnitude loading are ignored and given PC is then approximated by the linear combination involving only the remaining variable. It is argued that this procedure is potentially misleading in various respects. Examples are given alternatives are suggested.     

The lexicographic egalitarian solution on economic environments

This paper considers solutions to distribution problems defined on economic environments. It shows that there is a unique resource-egalitarian and symmetric solution that proposes always Pareto optimal allocations and satisfies Inidivual Restricted Monotonicity; this property requires the poor people of the society to be strictly better-off when social resources increase and the initial outcome is a welfare unequal position. That unique solution is the lexicographic extension of the maxmin criterion.I wish to express my gratitude to Salvador Barberá. I am also very grateful to Hervé Moulin for his encouragement and to Carmen Herrero, Iñigo Iturbe and an anonymous referee for their suggestions. I thank very specially the valuable reading of John Roemer and illuminating conversations with Serge Christophe Kolm. Financial support from Gobierno de Navarra is gratefully acknowledged     

Distortion representations of multivariate distributions

Statistical Methods & Applications - The univariate distorted distributions were introduced in risk theory to represent changes (distortions) in the expected distributions of some risks. Later,...     

Poverty,Psychological Resources And Subjective Well-Being

This study was carried out for the purpose of explaining the mediating effects of a number of psychological variables (strategies for coping with stress, competitiveness, mastery, locus of control, depression and self-esteem) in the relationship between poverty and the well-being of individuals. To carry out the study, a non-probabilistic, stratified sample was used, with the participation of 918 inhabitants of Mexico City from three socioeconomic levels: extremely poor, moderately poor and not poor. A structural model was used for the analysis and treatment of data, and on the basis of that model, it was proven that there are different trajectories (mediations) through which poverty influences subjective well-being. The findings are discussed in light of the literature.     

Four comments for the paper from Liu et al. (2019)

We give comments for the paper from Liu et al. (2019) about the Item Response Theory (IRT) model under consideration, the justification to compute Marginal likelihood, about what we learn with the data analysis performed and finally, about the computational issues in this paper.     

Quantile estimation for a selected normal population

In this paper simultaneous redescending M-estimates for scale and regression parameters are properly defined. The breakdown point of this estimates is derived. It is proved that these estimates are asynlptoticaliy normal and their cavariance matrix is obtained. These results show that simultaneous redescending M-estimates may combine high breakdown point and high asymptotic efficiency Under normal errors.     

Some Relationships Between Skew-Normal Distributions and Order Statistics from Exchangeable Normal Random Vectors

The article explores the relationship between distributions of order statistics from random vectors with exchangeable normal distributions and several skewed generalizations of the normal distribution. In particular, we show that the order statistics of exchangeable normal observations have closed skew-normal distributions, and that the corresponding density function is log-concave when the order statistic is extreme. Special attention is given to the bivariate case, which is related to the univariate skew-normal distribution. The applications discussed focus on the lifetimes of coherent systems.