Addressing the Burden of Education Financing in Low and Lower-Middle-Income Countries: The Role of Savings Accounts,Cash Transfers,and Other Income Sources

Journal of Family and Economic Issues - Cost-sharing between governments and families remains a strategic part of many governments’ post-secondary education funding policies in low-income...     

Infants’ abilities to respond to cues for joint attention vary by family socioeconomic status

The influence of socioeconomic variability on language and cognitive development is present from toddlerhood to adolescence and calls for investigating its earliest manifestation. Response to joint attention (RJA) abilities constitute a foundational developmental milestone that are associated with future language, cognitive, and social skills. How aspects of the family home environment shape RJA skills is relatively unknown. We investigated associations between family socioeconomic status (SES) —both parent education and family percentage of the federal poverty level (FPL)— parent depressive and anxiety symptoms and infant RJA performance in a cross-sectional sample of 173 infants aged 8–18 months and their parents from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. Results suggest that, correcting for age and receptive language, infants in families with greater economic resources respond to relatively less redundant, more sophisticated cues for joint attention. Although parent depressive and anxiety symptoms are negatively correlated with SES, parent depressive and anxiety symptoms were not associated with infant RJA. These findings provide evidence of SES-related differences in social cognitive development as early as infancy, calling on policymakers to address the inequities in the current socioeconomic landscape of the United States.     

Student Loan Decision Making: Experience as an Anchor

Journal of Family and Economic Issues - The purpose of study is to examine the association between one's past borrowing experience and borrowing decisions in a hypothetical survey scenario. A...     

The Competitive Impact of Targeted Television Advertisements Using DVR Technology

Digital video recorders (DVRs) are an emerging technology that is fundamentally changing the competitive landscape in industries that advertise on television. Perhaps the most familiar impact of DVR technology is that it enables consumers to avoid advertisements (ads) by fast forwarding through them. However, this “zipping” of ads is only one aspect of the impact of DVR technology. DVRs also collect a wealth of information at the consumer level that can be used by firms to target their ads more effectively. We examine how this targeting capability moderates the impact of ad avoidance in a competitive setting. Insights are provided on how best to manage this emerging technology in terms of the key managerial decisions of product pricing and advertising efforts, as well as its impact on profits in a competitive (duopoly) marketplace.     

Estimating and comparing adverse event probabilities in the presence of varying follow-up times and competing events

Safety analyses of adverse events (AEs) are important in assessing benefit–risk of therapies but are often rather simplistic compared to efficacy analyses. AE probabilities are typically estimated by incidence proportions, sometimes incidence densities or Kaplan–Meier estimation are proposed. These analyses either do not account for censoring, rely on a too restrictive parametric model, or ignore competing events. With the non-parametric Aalen-Johansen estimator as the “gold standard”, that is, reference estimator, potential sources of bias are investigated in an example from oncology and in simulations, for both one-sample and two-sample scenarios. The Aalen-Johansen estimator serves as a reference, because it is the proper non-parametric generalization of the Kaplan–Meier estimator to multiple outcomes. Because of potential large variances at the end of follow-up, comparisons also consider further quantiles of the observed times. To date, consequences for safety comparisons have hardly been investigated, the impact of using different estimators for group comparisons being unclear. For example, the ratio of two both underestimating or overestimating estimators may not be comparable to the ratio of the reference, and our investigation also considers the ratio of AE probabilities. We find that ignoring competing events is more of a problem than falsely assuming constant hazards by the use of the incidence density and that the choice of the AE probability estimator is crucial for group comparisons.     

Piketty comes to South Africa

One of the most valuable features of Capital and Ideology is its concern to take history seriously and consider how the emergence of different political and economic regimes relate to discourses about fairness and justice across time. This paper pushes this agenda further by acknowledging that the experience of a few developed nations should not be taken as the template for the generalized study of inequality dynamics across time and space. In this paper, we interrogate Piketty's analysis and policy proposals against specificities that are central to understanding the production and reproduction of inequalities within South Africa. We reflect on the South African case, the structure of inequality and its changes since 1994. We review a battery of policy interventions that have been implemented to address inequality in the last 25 years. We emphasize that the long shadow cast by centuries of colonialism and various forms of apartheid strongly affirm Piketty's emphasis on understanding history. But this is both affirmation and critique given the foundational, imbedded impact that this specific legacy has had on post‐apartheid society and its policies. Piketty is aware that the levels of inequality in South Africa are so high that this is “unknown territory.” We map out some of this territory to reveal how these extreme initial wealth and racial inequities inform the reproduction of inequalities in all dimensions and undermine well intentioned policies. We claim that understanding extractive histories, imbedded wealth inequalities, and complex social and political institutions allows us to understand and confront some of the reasons why even in light of progressive policies, many of which are in line with the proposals from Piketty, government interventions have thus far failed to reduce inequality.     

Managing relationships on Facebook: A long-term analysis of leading companies in Germany

The purpose of this study is to investigate how companies manage relationships with publics on social media. Based on the concepts of functional and contingency interactivity, the study examines the long-term implementation of three interactive strategies derived from research on organization-public relationships: dialogic communication, transparent communication, and informal communication. The study sheds further light on relational outputs and outcomes. The results of content analyses of leading German companies’ Facebook pages in 2012, 2015, and 2018 indicate the growing importance of dialogic communication and informal communication. There is a constant relation between dialogic communication and the extent of user interaction, with the analysis suggesting that dialogic communication is used to manage critical user comments. Hence, the long-term study contributes to a deeper understanding of professionalization in corporate social media communication. It provides evidence for PR scholars and professionals that there are effective features on Facebook for managing sustainable relationships.     

The Effects of Competing Verbal Behavior on Performance in a Math Task

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - The purposes of this study were to evaluate the effects of an auditory-distractor stimulus and vocal-blocking task on performance on a math task and measures of...     

The social life of academic articles: some reflections on the making and impact of “Social capital and economic development”

Theory and Society - Our lives are remembered as an assemblage of overlapping stories – some of them prosaic and unremarkable, others more fraught, contingent and consequential...