Reintegration upon return: insights from Ecuadorian returnees from Spain

Using the ECM2 survey data on Ecuadorian migrants returning from Spain, we investigate the determinants of reintegration upon return. We study how the migration experience, but also the before‐ and after‐migration characteristics, correlate with migrants’ outcomes upon return. We adopt a broad conception of reintegration, considering jointly labour market‐related outcomes that proxy for structural reintegration and subjective indicators that provide insights on sociocultural reintegration. The determinants of these two types of outcomes appear to be different: reintegration indeed encompasses multiple dimensions which cannot be captured by a single indicator. Our results suggest that return assistance programmes’ efficiency in helping reintegration could be improved by (I) targeting, ex‐ante, returnees who plan to launch their own business, and, ex‐post, the most vulnerable workers (women, older returnees, unemployed), and (ii) facilitating the labour market integration of foreign‐educated returnees. They also call for further research to better understand the consequences of these programmes.     

Estimating likelihoods for spatio-temporal models using importance sampling

This paper describes how importance sampling can be applied to estimate likelihoods for spatio-temporal stochastic models of epidemics in plant populations, where observations consist of the set of diseased individuals at two or more distinct times. Likelihood computation is problematic because of the inherent lack of independence of the status of individuals in the population whenever disease transmission is distance-dependent. The methods of this paper overcome this by partitioning the population into a number of sectors and then attempting to take account of this dependence within each sector, while neglecting that between-sectors. Application to both simulated and real epidemic data sets show that the techniques perform well in comparison with existing approaches. Moreover, the results confirm the validity of likelihood estimates obtained elsewhere using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.     

Adult Problem Solving: Contributor to Parenting and Child Outcomes in Divorced Families

This cross-sectional study extends child outcome models by focusing on factors in the adult social domain as contributors to parenting. The sample included 138 divorced mothers, their focal sons, and their support confidants assessed approximately 5 years after marital separation. The multimethod latent variable analysis tested a hypothesized progression stating observed confidant support would enhance problem solving outcomes achieved by mothers and confidants. Resolving parenting and personal issues for the mother was expected to benefit parenting practices (i.e., monitoring, discipline, and mother/child problem solving), which in turn would predict a macro level measure of child antisocial behavior. Analysis of the simplex model supported the progression. The final model explained 36% of the variance in antisocial behavior, 15% of the variance in parenting, and 53% of the variance in problem solving outcome. Dyads with cohabiting partners scored higher on problem solving outcomes than did dyads with friends or family members. The model is discussed in the context of social interactional and social learning theory.     

Shewhart x-charts with estimated process variance

Properties of the Shewhart X-chart for controlling the mean of a process with a normal distribution are investigated for the situation where the process variance Ó²must be estimated from initial sample data. The control limits of the X-chart depend on the estimate of Ó²and thus, unlike the case when Ó²is known, the X-chart is not equivalent to a sequence of independent tests. When Ó²is estimated the distribution of the run length is not geometric and cannot be characterized simply in terms of the probability of a signal at a given point. The average run length (ARL) for the X-chart is expressed in terms of an integral involving the normal cdf, and it is shown that the chart signals with

probability one, but the ARL may not be finite if the size of the 2 sample used to estimate Ó²is sufficiently small. In addition, certain bounds for the ARL are also derived. Numerical integration is use to show that the effect of using small sample sizes in estimating Ó²is to increase the ARL and the variance of the run length distribution