The social bases of declining infant mortality: Lessons from a nineteenth-century Italian town

Studies of the historical decline of infant mortality in the West have relied mainly on aggregate-level data. We use the Italian population register and related sources to look more directly at the social forces bearing on declining infant mortality. We focus on the town of Casalecchio di Reno, an agricultural community near Bologna, for a period (1865–1921) in which the town shifted from sharecropping to a wage-labour economy, and mortality rates declined sharply. The implications of various social and demographic factors for the likelihood of infant death are examined and related to explanations of the historical decline in infant mortality.     

The effect of non-traditional attitudes on married women's labor supply

This paper uses repeated cross sections from the General Social Survey to test whether married women's labor force participation responds to how traditional her attitudes are concerning a woman's role. Such attitudes are important predictors of labor force participation in any given year. On the other hand, attitude variables do not explain the increase in women's labor force participation during the 1970's.     

Correct credit distribution: A model for sharing credit among coauthors

On the basis of some assumptions (e.g. Minimum and Maximum Contribution Scores of authors) a simple equation is introduced for calculating individual contribution scores of co-authors of multi-authored papers. The calculated Corrected Contribution Scores are in good agreement with the data obtained empirically, earlier. It is suggested that individual percentage contributions should be declared by the co-authors in the by-line of papers.     

New critical region tables for Fisher's exact test

The best-known non-asymptotic method for comparing two independent proportions is Fisher's exact text. The usual critical region (CR) tables for this test contain one or more of the following defects:they distinguish between rows and columns; they distinguish between the alternatives H = p1 < p2 and H = p1 > p2; they assume that the error for the two-tailed test is twice that of the one-tailed test; they do not use the optimal version of the test; they do not give both CRs for one and two tails at the same time. All this results in the unnecessary duplication of the space required for the tables, the construction of tables of low-powered methods, or the need to manipulate two different tables (one for the one-tailed test, the other for the two-tailed test). This paper presents CR tables which have been obtained from the most powerful version of Fisher's exact test and which occupy the minimum space possible. The tables, which are valid for one- or two-tailed tests, have levels of significance of 10%, 5% and 1% and values for N (the total size of both samples) of less than or equal to 40. This article shows how to calculate the P value in a specific problem, using the tables as a means of partial checking and as a preliminary step to determining the exact P value.