Labor Market Search and Optimal Retirement Policy

A popular and long‐standing view is that social security is a means for young, unemployed people to “purchase” jobs from older workers. Can social security, by encouraging retirement and hence creating job vacancies for the young, improve the allocation of workers to jobs? Maybe, according to a standard model of labor market search, but public retirement programs currently pay the elderly substantially more than their jobs are worth. An important effect is that retirement reduces the value of other vacant jobs. Our results imply that recent reforms aimed at reducing retirement incentives are likely to improve labor market efficiency.     

Adaptive trading rules for commodity futures

This paper extends and refines an adaptive filtering model utilizing entropy-based decision rules. The initial adaptive model chose filter sizes by considering both current profitability and previous forecasting success, where forecasting success is measured by a statistic derived from information theory. Alternative specifications of the historical information vector are employed to examine the sensitivity of various components of the model. Although the original adaptive model was a substantial improvement over existing models, it lacked stability; that is, there was more stability in the underlying information of the process than there was in the net profits produced by the adaptive model. Hence this further study.The information-based adaptive model we developed was run on a large data base composed of 15 years of soybean and wheat data. Our results allow us to reject the Martingale hypothesis of commodity price movement.     

Status Roles and Recall of Nonverbal Cues

In two experiments, interpersonal status was experimentally manipulated by assigning one dyad member to be the owner of a mock art gallery and the other to be the owner's assistant. Without forewarning, participants were asked immediately following the interaction to recall their partner's hand gestures, self-touch, gazing, smiling, and nodding. Accuracy of recall was determined by comparing these ratings to their partners' behavior as coded from the videotape. In both experiments, assistants were more accurate at recalling the amount of owners' self-touch than vice versa, but there was little evidence of an accuracy difference in recall of the other nonverbal cues. When accuracy was defined as the correlation between a participant's ratings of the partner's behaviors and the partner's actual behaviors, there was evidence that assistants were more accurate than owners when a combined p-value was calculated across both studies.     

Teaching Note—Challenges in the Classroom on LGBTQ Topics and Christianity in Social Work

This article provides guidance in facilitating the development of culturally sensitive skills for working with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) populations that take into account power and privilege. Social work faculty and students have an ethical obligation to be competent and aware of privilege. When working with LGBTQ populations, this means addressing personal and social values and beliefs about gender and sexuality. Faculty may not feel prepared to address the influence of Christianity, the dominant religion in the United States, on social forces affecting LGBTQ populations and on social workers’ religious feelings when working with these individuals. This article describes pedagogical techniques and provides guidance for developing faculty and student competence and awareness when working with LGBTQ populations.     

Beyond Clinical Complexity: Nonmedical Barriers to Nursing Home Care for Rural Residents

We conducted a qualitative content analysis of barriers to nursing home admission for rural residents. Data came from semi-structured interviews with 23 rural hospital discharge planners across five states (Georgia, Idaho, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). From those, we identified four themes around nonmedical barriers to rural nursing home placement with particular salience in rural areas: financial issues, transportation, nursing home availability and infrastructure, and timeliness. We also identified policy and programmatic interventions across four themes: loosen bureaucratic requirements, improve communication between facilities, increase rural long-term care capacity, and address underlying social determinants of health.     

Frustrated Fertility: Infertility and Psychological Distress Among Women

Using a random sample of 580 Midwestern women, we test the hypothesis that women who have experienced infertility report higher psychological distress. Approximately one third of our sample reports having experienced infertility sometime in their lives, although the majority of the infertile now have biological children. Drawing hypotheses from identity and stress theories, we examine whether roles or resources condition the effects of infertility or whether its effects are limited to childless women. Infertility combined with involuntary childlessness (including biological and social) is associated with significantly greater distress. For women in this category, the risk of distress is substantial.     

Comprehensive college student suicide assessment: application of the BASIC ID

Whether one knows someone who is thinking of suicide, has attempted suicide, or has completed suicide, nearly all individuals who encounter suicide are affected. The influence and residual affects of suicide are further amplified as the issue reaches across communities such as college or university campuses. College and university staff must improve their response to suicidal ideation with comprehensive assessment and intervention. The authors discuss risk factors and basic screening methods for suicide risk. They present Lazarus' BASIC ID tool (ie, Behavior, Affective Responses, Sensations, Images, Cognitions, Interpersonal Relationships, and Drugs or Biological Influences) as a method for conducting a comprehensive suicide assessment. The authors demonstrate assessment procedures through a case vignette.