Twenty Years of Research on the Relationship Between Economic and Social Performance: A Meta-analysis Approach

This study examines the role of political efficacy and social networks in rural China to understand the social characteristics that might affect an individual’s disposition to join in public deliberations. A model is developed and empirically tested by Partial Least Squares analysis. This shows active involvement in public deliberation to be positively influenced by political efficacy (with external political efficacy being a partial mediator), high internal or external political efficacy, and a high internal efficacy leading to high external political efficacy. Social networks have a moderating effect, individuals with a high social network status having an enhanced positive internal political efficacy-public deliberation involvement but weakened positive external political efficacy-public deliberation involvement. The research advances the theoretical understanding of complex political psycho-behavior relationships and provided insights into the role of social settings. The findings could also help boost deliberative democracy in such limited democratic societies as China.     

Fiscal Sustainability and Immigration in the Madrid Region

The growing number of immigrants in the Madrid region raises several questions concerning the welfare of future native generations. The debates shift from increasing concern about the congestion of public services like education or healthcare, to how immigration helps to ease tension in relation to financing those services and other benefits to the region's general welfare. In order to evaluate the global effect, our analysis uses a generational accounting method which is applied to different productivity, interest rate and growth scenarios. The results show that the impact of immigrants is positive, with intergenerational distribution towards the currently most active taxpayers.     

Cessation of breastfeeding in association with oxytocin administration and type of birth. A prospective cohort study

Background

Some studies have suggested an association between synthetic oxytocin administration and type of birth with the initiation and consolidation of breastfeeding.

Inter‐organizational Cooperation and Environmental Change: Moderating Effects between Flexibility and Innovation Performance

The paper investigates the moderator effect of inter‐organizational cooperation in the relationship between workplace flexibility and innovation performance. This research question is important because innovation is dependent on the strategic integration of technological knowledge, requiring organizations to acquire new capabilities rapidly or to ensure the presence of knowledge that may be beyond existing internal capabilities. Inter‐organizational cooperation constitutes a relevant mechanism for a firm to increase its knowledge base concerning new products and processes. High‐cooperation firms may have more opportunities to take advantage of flexibility for innovation performance because it facilitates the access and dispersion of knowledge within the firm. We test the research hypotheses in a sample of manufacturing and service firms. The results contribute to the literature on flexibility and innovation because they demonstrate that inter‐organizational cooperation moderates the relationship between flexibility and innovation performance. We discuss the implications of these results for future research and managerial practice.     

Facial Behavior While Experiencing Sexual Excitement

We analyzed the facial behavior of 100 volunteers who video-recorded their own expressions while experiencing an episode of sexual excitement that concluded in an orgasm, and then posted their video clip on an Internet site. Four distinct observational periods from the video clips were analyzed and coded by FACS (Facial Action Coding System, Ekman and Friesen 1978). We found nine combinations of muscular movements produced by at least 5% of the senders. These combinations were consistent with facial expressions of sexual excitement described by Masters and Johnson (Human sexual response, 1966), and they included the four muscular movements of the core expression of pain (Prkachin, Pain, 51, 297–306, 1992).     

Local labour markets delineation: an approach based on evolutionary algorithms and classification methods

In this paper a methodology for the delineation of local labour markets (LLMs) using evolutionary algorithms is proposed. This procedure, based on that in Flórez-Revuelta et al. [13 F. Flórez-Revuelta, J.M. Casado-Díaz, and L. Martínez-Bernabeu, An evolutionary approach to the delineation of functional areas base on travel-to-work flows, Int. J. Autom. Comput. 5(1) (2008), pp. 10–21. doi: 10.1007/s11633-008-0010-6[Crossref] , [Google Scholar],14 F. Flórez-Revuelta, J.M. Casado-Díaz, L. Martínez-Bernabeu, and R. Gómez-Hernández, A memetic algorithm for the delineation of local labour markets, in Parallel Problem Solving from Nature X, Vol. 5199, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, G. Rudolph, T.H. Jansen, S.M. Lucas, C. Poloni, and N. Beume, eds., Springer, Berlin, 2008, pp. 1011–1020. [Google Scholar]], introduces three modifications. First, initial groups of municipalities with a minimum size requirement are built using the travel time between them. Second, a not fully random initiation algorithm is proposed. And third, as a final stage of the procedure, a contiguity step is implemented. These modifications significantly decrease the computational times of the algorithm (up to a 99%) without any deterioration of the quality of the solutions. The optimization algorithm may give a set of potential solutions with very similar values with respect to the objective function what would lead to different partitions, both in terms of number of markets and their composition. In order to capture their common aspects an algorithm based on a cluster partitioning of k-means type is presented. This stage of the procedure also provides a ranking of LLMs foci useful for planners and administrations in decision-making processes on issues related to labour activities. Finally, to evaluate the performance of the algorithm a toy example with artificial data is analysed. The full methodology is illustrated through a real commuting data set of the region of Aragón (Spain).     

Semi-parametric Bayesian Analysis of the Proportional Hazard Rate Model An Application to the Effect of Training Programs on Graduate Unemployment

In this paper, we introduce a semi-parametric Bayesian methodology based on the proportional hazard model that assumes that the baseline hazard function is constant over segments but, by contrast to what is usually assumed in the literature, with the periods at which the function changes not being specified in advance. The methodology is applied to explore the impact of Vocational Training courses offered by the University of Zaragoza (Spain) on the duration of the initial periods of unemployment experienced by graduate leavers. The framework is very flexible and allows us, in particular, to capture the presence of seasonality in the job insertion of graduates.     

Relationships among team's organizational context,innovation speed,and technological uncertainty: An empirical analysis

This study examines the moderating effect of uncertainty on the relationships between three organizational context factors (i.e. top management support, clarity of goals and speed-based rewards) and innovation speed. It considers two aspects of uncertainty: technology novelty and technological turbulence. Findings from 183 new product projects indicate that top management support has a more positive effect on innovation speed under conditions of high technology novelty and high technological turbulence. Clarity of goals is more important to innovation speed under conditions of medium technology novelty and low technological turbulence. The results suggest a curvilinear, positive relationship between speed-based rewards and innovation speed. This is true for all the situations considered in this study, with the exception of environments characterized by high technological turbulence, where a negative curvilinear relationship was found between speed-based rewards and innovation speed.     

Testing and Confidence estimation of the Mean of a multidimensional Gaussian Process

From the sequential observation of a multidimensional continuous time Gaussian process, whose mean vector depends linearly of a multidimensional parameter, we consider the confidential estimation of the parameter value and the testing problem of a simple hypothesis about the parameter, in presence of a nuisance variance parameter. The method is based on a previously obtained [cf. 4] point estimate for the case of a known covariance structure. We first see that this estimate is, in fact, independent of the variance parameter. For the hypotheses testing problem, the invariance under certain groups of transformations and the partial sufficiency allows to construct optimal terminal tests. Furthermore we determine the observation time necessary to control its power function. These testing results may be translated in terms of most accurate confidence sets. If the observation is stopped according to the diameter of the confidence set, under some condition, the confidence level is preserved.     

Influential Observations in the Functional Measurement Error Model

In this work we propose Bayesian measures to quantify the influence of observations on the structural parameters of the simple measurement error model (MEM). Different influence measures, like those based on q-divergence between posterior distributions and Bayes risk, are studied to evaluate the influence. A strategy based on the perturbation function and MCMC samples is used to compute these measures. The samples from the posterior distributions are obtained by using the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and assuming specific proper prior distributions. The results are illustrated with an application to a real example modeled with MEM in the literature.