Meta-analysis of the impact of age structure on fertility

The paper uses a meta-analysis to comparatively evaluate the literature addressing the aggregate relationship between a populations age structure and fertility, as hypothesized by Richard Easterlin. The analysis is based on 334 estimated effects retrieved from 19 studies. The results suggest that several factors undermine the empirical support of the Easterlinian age structure/fertility link. These include the neglect of income, the use of relative cohort size to characterize the age structure, mis-specifications of the relevant age-cohorts, as well as the functional form and estimation technique. The results also suggest that the sample of published estimates possibly suffers from two types of publication bias, an under-representation of insignificant effects for small samples, and bias towards supportive effects in the earlier years followed by a bias towards negative effects as the literature matured.All correspondence to: Brigitte Waldorf. The authors appreciate the insightful comments and suggestions from two anonymous reviewers. The research also benefited from discussions with participants of the International Colloquium on Meta-analysis in Economics, Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, December 2002. Finally, we would like to thank David Brown, Meagan Cahill, Angela Donelson, Calvin Farris, and Melaney Seacat from the University of Arizona for their research assistance. Responsible editor: Junsen Zhang.     

Comparability of Health Care Responsiveness in Europe

The aim of this paper is to measure and to correct for the potential incomparability of responses to the SHARE survey on health care responsiveness. A parametric approach based on the use of anchoring vignettes is applied to cross-sectional data (2006–2007) in eleven European countries. More than 7,000 respondents aged 50 years old and over were asked to assess the quality of health care responsiveness in three domains: waiting time for medical treatment, quality of the conditions in visited health facilities, and communication and involvement in decisions about the treatment. Our results suggest that there is reporting heterogeneity across countries and across individuals within countries, and the degree of heterogeneity varies with the health care domain. Although leading countries in terms of health care responsiveness remain among the most successful even after correction for reporting heterogeneity, one may acknowledge many shifts in the ranking of the other countries.     

Coaching für niedergelassene Ärztinnen Ein kognitiv-verhaltenstherapeutischer Ansatz

The article states special aspects for coaching office-based women doctors, because their problems in managing a doctor’s office are originated in their typical female socialisation. First these burdening factors of managing a doctor’s office were collected phenomenologically in women doctors’ perspective, then the underliing cognitions – internalized ?driver and blocker“ – were highlighted and explained by psychoanalysis. To change these gender cognitions a coaching approach based on cognitive behavioral therapy was presented and differentiated from a therapeutical method.     

Intellectual disabilities,violent conflict and humanitarian assistance: advocacy of the forgotten

This article examines the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities in violent conflict who have been neglected in practice and academia. Such invisibility, combined with the disabling impact of society, their low priority, and the nature of their impairments, results in a disproportionately negative impact of conflict on people with intellectual disabilities. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including humanitarian workers, this article examines their experiences and analyses how much consideration has been given to people with intellectual disabilities in humanitarian assistance policy and practice in light of their increased need and vulnerability. Lack of awareness and recognition of their diverse experiences can result in their needs failing to be adequately met, which compounds their disproportionately negative experience of conflict. It is important to finally start paying attention in order to ensure their inclusion in humanitarian responses.     

Using artistic form for aesthetic organizational inquiry: Rimini Protokoll constructs Daimler's Annual General Meeting as a theatre play

This paper reviews and analyses an artistic intervention in the context of aesthetic organizational inquiry and theatre in organizations. Having served as inspiration and as a tool within organizations, theatre now has returned the favour: Rimini Protokoll, a group of directors, used Daimler's 2009 Annual General Meeting in Berlin as a ready-made and constructed it as a theatre play entitled Hauptversammlung. Two hundred theatre spectators were channelled into the event via the purchase of shares. This study focuses on the aesthetic experience of the event and underlines the potential of artistic forms for aesthetic organizational inquiry. Implications suggest that a so-called postdramatic, nonlinear aesthetic form can be most promising for enabling critical interpretations of organizational issues.     

Die Arbeitsbeziehung im Coaching �C ein Stiefkind der Forschung

This study examines the relevance of the coaching relationship. 30 semi-structured interviews with coaching officers in swiss large-scale enterprises are analyzed in the frame of a qualitative content analysis. The half of the polled experts believes that a good coaching relationship is the crucial impact factor of coaching. One third considers a well-working relationship as an important condition to achieve a successful coaching process. The most mentioned attributes and capacities of a coach in order to contribute to a functioning relationship are the ability to listen, empathy, appreciation, trustability, interest and openness. The discussion explains the relevance of these findings for prospective efforts in the field of coaching research.     

Geschlechtergerechtigkeit

To ask about gender justice presupposes an explanation of the concept of justice itself. We notice that the concept of justice has historical and systematical definite structural elements which make it possible to analyze equality in comparison with difference. The observation of distortional effects (gender bias) is necessary for the distinction between relevant and irrelevant differences between genders. Finally, as an example, two instances of injustice between genders will be considered, namely profession biographies of women and men and their social consequences and the discussion about gender related income differences (gender pay gap).     

On the accuracy in high‐dimensional linear models and its application to genomic selection

Genomic selection is today a hot topic in genetics. It consists in predicting breeding values of selection candidates, using the large number of genetic markers now available owing to the recent progress in molecular biology. One of the most popular methods chosen by geneticists is ridge regression. We focus on some predictive aspects of ridge regression and present theoretical results regarding the accuracy criteria, that is, the correlation between predicted value and true value. We show the influence of singular values, the regularization parameter, and the projection of the signal on the space spanned by the rows of the design matrix. Asymptotic results in a high‐dimensional framework are given; in particular, we prove that the convergence to optimal accuracy highly depends on a weighted projection of the signal on each subspace. We discuss on how to improve the prediction. Last, illustrations on simulated and real data are proposed.