The environment as a determinant of child mortality among migrants in frontier areas of Pará and RondÔnia, Brazil, 1980

This article examines child mortality as an indicator of the quality of life among migrants living in Brazilian Amazonia in 1980. I focus on migrants in the frontier states of Pará and RondÔnia, which experienced rapid settlement during the 1970s. The key question here is the effect of settlement location on child mortality rates. While RondÔnia had lower ratios of population per public health establishments and personnel than Pará, RondÔnia nonetheless exhibited a higher malaria prevalence in 1980. I therefore attribute locational differences in child mortality to environmental factors important to malaria transmission rather than to health care infrastructure. The findings from multivariate regression analysis show that net of the effects of human capital, migration history and migrant living standards, settling in Pará rather than RondÔnia resulted in significantly lower rates of child mortality. These findings suggest that environmental factors coinciding with location of frontier settlement had important consequences for the living standards of migrants in the Brazilian Amazon.     

THE DIFFUSION OF MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY: SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS AND POLICY RESEARCH

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how social network analysis can be used to provide information for policy decisions pertaining to physicians' adoption and utilization of new medical technology. Interviews and hospital records were used to obtain data on refenals, consultations, discussions, and on-call coverage; utilization of a computer-based hospital information system; and personal and practice characteristics from 24 physicians who belong to a private group practice. The results of a block-model analysis suggest that the physician's relative position in the network is an important determinant of his/her participation in the diffusion process. A number of policy implications related to the introduction of new medical technology into practice settings are discussed.     

Efficiency and Power: Organizational Economics Meets Organization Theory

The disputes between sociologically informed organization theory and organizational economics revolve around the relative importance of efficiency and power. The concepts of efficiency and power are clarified in this paper, with distinctions being made between subjectivist and essentialist versions of efficiency, and between institutional and processual perspectives on power. Economists have largely ignored sociologists' discussions of power. It is argued that if path dependency is allowed for then organizational economics may well be compatible with an institutional view of power. The main theme of the paper is that efficiency is no less of an ‘essentially contested concept’ than power.     

Contemporary urban culture: how community structures endure in an individualised society

This paper examines the ways in which socio-cultural norms have shifted to accommodate higher levels of autonomy in urban communities. Largely critiquing traditional concepts of community as well as current dystopian perspectives on the fluid and vapid state of social organisation, it will show how individualism has been incorporated into societal norms, producing highly autonomous personalised networks that, when combined with large amounts of social interaction and imaginative cultural appropriation, create the common social and cultural practices emblematic of community structure. It also illustrates how many activities, traditionally viewed as indicative of social decay, are socially productive, in that they go towards generating the common bonds and world-views that unite individuals across urban landscapes. Focusing particularly on the spaces of community interaction, the construction of common identities and common sense of belonging, this paper sets out to explore alternative modes of community creation and enactment in a contemporary urban environment.     

Maximizing Probability Bounds Under Moment-Matching Restrictions

The problem of characterizing a distribution by its moments dates to work by Chebyshev in the mid-nineteenth century. There are clear (and close) connections with characteristic functions, moment spaces, quadrature, and other very classical mathematical pursuits. Lindsay and Basak posed the specific question of how far from normality could a distribution be if it matches k normal moments. They provided a bound on the maximal difference in cdfs, and implied that these bounds were attained. It will be shown here that in fact the bound is not attained if the number of even moments matched is odd. An explicit solution is developed as a symmetric distribution with a finite number of mass points when the number of even moments matched is even, and this bound for the even case is shown to hold as an explicit limit for the subsequent odd case. As Lindsay noted, the discrepancies can be sizable even for a moderate number of matched moments. Some comments on implications are proffered.     

Private Labels: Facilitators or Impediments to Supply Chain Coordination

We consider a retailer’s decision of whether to develop an internally produced, private label version of a national brand and the role that this decision plays in coordinating the supply chain. Our model assumes that the perceived quality of the private label is lower than that of the national brand, and we allow for the two products to have different marginal costs. We further allow for a fixed development cost that the retailer must incur to develop private label capability, and distinguish two types of private labels depending upon whether they would or would not be developed as product line extensions by a vertically integrated supply chain. We refer to these two types as first‐best (FB) and non‐first‐best (NFB) product line extensions, respectively. When the private label can be characterized as a NFB product line extension, its development creates adverse cannibalization effects, yet it also helps to mitigate the effects of double marginalization with respect to the national brand. We characterize the conditions under which the retailer will develop private label capability, and distinguish among the conditions under which this is either beneficial or detrimental to the overall performance of the supply chain.     

How much longer would men work if there were no employment dislocation? Estimates from cause-elimination work life tables

The impact of labor demand on the decline in labor force participation of older males too young to qualify for Social Security is often acknowledged but seldom measured or incorporated into models of retirement. Using data from Current Population Survey March Demographic files and the periodic employment dislocation supplements, a series of cause-eliminated increment–decrement work life tables captures the impact of employment dislocation and early (before age 65) pension receipt on the employment of older males in a simple overall summary measure: expected work life. Employment dislocation and being offered an early pension are two of the most obvious manifestations of shifts in labor demand that can affect the labor force withdrawal of older males. Consistent with earlier research, I find early pension receipt to be an important factor in early labor force withdrawal but, in addition, employment dislocation has a sizeable direct impact on labor force participation. The findings suggest that employment dislocation and other, yet unmeasured, labor demand factors need to be incorporated into models of retirement.     

The Saving for Every Child Program in Israel: an overview of a universal asset-building policy

ABSTRACT

In 2017, the Israeli government implemented a universal child development account programme – the Saving for Every Child Program (SECP) – which establishes a personal savings account for every Israeli child and provides monthly deposits until the child turns 18. The SECP has the potential to provide substantial assets when children reach adulthood, but the benefits depend on parents’ investment choices. The unique programme’s nature presents opportunities to learn from its implementation. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the SECP, its legislative history, early findings from its implementation, and recommendations that may improve programme participation and outcomes across population groups.     

Socioeconomic Status,Gender Inequality and Women's Mental Health: Some Findings from the Canberra Mental Health Survey

Data from the Canberra Mental Health Survey are utilized to answer questions concerning the mental health status of women (especially married women). Using the Langner Scale as the main index it is shown that there is a complex relationship between the socio-economic status of a married woman's occupation, and the status of her husband's job. It is also shown that there is an association between sex, marital status and mental health that runs in the direction of Jessie Bernard's summary ‘marriage is good for men, but not for women’.