A Method for Simulating Multivariate Non Normal Distributions with Specified Standardized Cumulants and Intraclass Correlation Coefficients

Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) are commonly used indices in subject areas such as biometrics, longitudinal data analysis, measurement theory, quality control, and survey research. The properties of the ICCs most often used are derived under the assumption of normality. However, real-world data often violate the normality assumption. In view of this, a computationally efficient procedure is developed for simulating multivariate non normal continuous distributions with specified (a) standardized cumulants, (b) Pearson intercorrelations, and (c) ICCs. The linear model specified is a two-factor design with either fixed or random effects. A numerical example is worked and the results of a Monte Carlo simulation are provided to demonstrate and confirm the methodology.     

Risk Perception and Personality Facets

The present study examined the relationship between personality facets and risk perception using the Big Five model. A broad range of hazards was considered: energy production, pollutants, sex, deviance, addictions, weapons, common individual hazards, outdoor activities, medical care, and psychotropic drugs. Key personality facets that were most predictive of risk perception compared to (or in association with) age, gender, educational level, and personality factors were identified. They were moderation and tranquility (associated with energy production or pollutants), rationality and efficiency (associated with pollutants, sex, deviance, addictions, or weapons), creativity, imagination, and reflection (associated with energy production, pollutants, or common individual hazards), self-disclosure (associated with outdoor activities), and nurturance and tenderness (associated with sex, deviance, addictions, or medical care). These facets may be recommended for use in future studies on risk perception.     

Changing perspectives on the child at risk at the end of the nineteenth century. The Belgian Maritime Hospital Roger de Grimberghe (1884–1914) as a space of inclusion and exclusion

In this historical‐geographical approach to the Belgian Maritime Hospital Roger de Grimberghe space is introduced as a conceptual tool to deconstruct the notion of the child at risk. The starting point for the creation of the maritime hospitals lay in the immediate relationship between the idea of improving children’s welfare with healthy sea air and concern about declining public health at the end of the nineteenth century, together with a need for the moral reclamation of the nation. Within this context particular attention focused on ‘the child at risk’, the ‘abnormal child’ and the ‘mentally retarded child’. This research shows how the maritime hospital can be considered a battlefield on which two different discursive practices about children at risk (the political and the medical) clashed. Both practices and perspectives are characterized by mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.     

The Process of Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Italian Economy

ABSTRACT: Longitudinal analysis of labour flows provides a number of important indications on the characteristics of job creation and job destruction in the Italian economy, and on the role played by small firms in this process. The main indications may be summarized as follows: 1)the ratio of total separations to total work-force is remarkably high, and almost completely independent of the business cycle: one out of four workers leaves his/her position each year in the economy at large. In the small firms sector alone turnover is much higher, with total separations almost approaching 50|X% of employment; 2)as the economy takes a downturn, it is mainly the number of jobs created through expansion of existing firms that follows this cycle, while separations remain roughly constant; 3)the proportion of jobs created via the establishment of new firms is modest compared to that attributable to the expansion of existing plants (16.0-14.491)). Likewise, the proportion of job losses due to closures visi vis employment shedding by contracting firms, is of the same order of magnitude; 4)job creation and destruction is very high in the small firm sector. Employment in firms of dimension (0-19) is 25.8 % of total employment at the beginning of the observation period (1978) and reaches 28% at its end (1984). Yet the proportion of job creation attributable to small firms is approximately 60% of the new positions due to expansion of existing firms in manufacturing, and 68% in the services. The fraction of jobs destroyed by small firms is somewhat lower: about 46% in manufacturing and 59% in the services; 5)he small firms contribution to net job creation appears even more remarkable both in the aggregate, as well as within all sectors of economic activity and geographical areas. In 1978-80 net employment change in manufacturing is 106,000 units per year; correspondingly net job creation by firms (0-19) is alone 222,000. In the services the proportion between net employment change and the share of the small firms is 1:3. In 1981-83, while in manufacturing over 213,000 jobs are destroyed on average each year, net creation by small firms is still positive (+ 48,000); in the services the overall change is very small (+ 3,000), while the net contribution of small firms is + 53,000.     

Entreprise Management in the USSR: is there a Productivity Drive?*

Abstract. According to some neo-institutional economists, the trade-off of perestroika is between the benefits of solving economic problems via institutional changes and the costs of upsetting the nomenklatura. The “sub-institutional” analysis shows instead a series of organizational adjustments of the productive system that can render this dilemma less pressing, provide Western financial aid increases. This aid will ease the social and political tensions of the transition much more than helping the start of a productivity drive in Soviet firms.