The Family Context of Cohabitation and Single Motherhood in Latin America

The dramatic shift from marriage to cohabitation during the last four decades in most Latin American countries, even among the upper social strata, begs the question as to the living arrangements of cohabiting couples and single mothers. The new “Family Interrelationships Variables” in the IPUMS samples of Latin American censuses facilitated the construction of an enlarged LIPRO typology. LIPRO classifies individuals with respect to the types of households in which they are living. The results indicate that cohabiting women and single mothers aged 25 to 29 are frequently found in their parental households or in other extended or composite households. However, there are large variations depending on country and education. For instance, cohabitation is mainly in nuclear households, as in Europe, in Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. It occurs mainly in the context of extended households in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Cuba. Mexico and Chile occupy intermediate positions. In all instances co‐residence of cohabiting couples with other kin drops significantly upon the transition to parenthood, at which point there are no longer any differences between cohabiting and married couples. Single mothers, however, continue to co‐reside in extended or composite households to a larger extent, and this holds particularly for the better‐educated among them. This analysis illustrates that cohabitation of the traditional type and of the “Second Demographic Transition” type are found alongside each other, with one being more important than the other depending on country and on educational level or social class within each country.     

Bayesian Analysis of Multiple Hypothesis Testing with Applications to Microarray Experiments

Recently, the field of multiple hypothesis testing has experienced a great expansion, basically because of the new methods developed in the field of genomics. These new methods allow scientists to simultaneously process thousands of hypothesis tests. The frequentist approach to this problem is made by using different testing error measures that allow to control the Type I error rate at a certain desired level. Alternatively, in this article, a Bayesian hierarchical model based on mixture distributions and an empirical Bayes approach are proposed in order to produce a list of rejected hypotheses that will be declared significant and interesting for a more detailed posterior analysis. In particular, we develop a straightforward implementation of a Gibbs sampling scheme where all the conditional posterior distributions are explicit. The results are compared with the frequentist False Discovery Rate (FDR) methodology. Simulation examples show that our model improves the FDR procedure in the sense that it diminishes the percentage of false negatives keeping an acceptable percentage of false positives.     

Limit laws for the cumulative number of ties for the maximum in a random sequence

Let {_Xn,n?1}$\{X_n,n?1\}$ be a sequence of independent identically distributed random variables, taking nonnegative integer values. An observation _Xn$X_n$ is a tie for the maximum if _Xn=max{_X1,…,_Xn-1}$X_n=\max \{X_1,\dots ,X_{n-1}\}$. In this paper, we obtain weak and strong laws of large numbers and central limit theorems for the cumulative number of ties for the maximum among the first n$n$ observations.     

Union Formation Implications of Race and Gender Gaps in Educational Attainment: The Case of Latin America

We use census microdata to assess the levels of educational homogamy in six Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Mexico. This paper contributes to the literature on homogamy in three ways. First, by conducting a comparative analysis between countries belonging to the still little-studied region of Latin America, which is still undergoing intense and varied processes of demographic, economic, social, and political modernization. Second, by simultaneously including variables of structural and individual nature. Finally, by making progress with respect to the interactions between educational homogamy and other important variables associated with high levels of social inequality in the region: race, ethnicity and birthplace.     

A Bayesian analysis for the multivariate point null testing problem

A Bayesian test for the point null testing problem in the multivariate case is developed. A procedure to get the mixed distribution using the prior density is suggested. For comparisons between the Bayesian and classical approaches, lower bounds on posterior probabilities of the null hypothesis, over some reasonable classes of prior distributions, are computed and compared with the p-value of the classical test. With our procedure, a better approximation is obtained because the p-value is in the range of the Bayesian measures of evidence.     

PARTIAL TAX HARMONIZATION THROUGH INFRASTRUCTURE COORDINATION

In this article, we analyze the role of infrastructure coordination in facilitating partial tax harmonization within a coalition of asymmetric jurisdictions. Two main results are obtained. First, productivity asymmetries represent a serious handicap for partial tax harmonization that can be remedied by coordinating nontax instruments when they allow to reduce these asymmetries. Second, infrastructure coordination through the choice of a common investment level is particularly indicated when asymmetries between potential members of a tax coalition are large. The current usage of European Union (EU) structural funds orientated to reduce regional infrastructure deficits is therefore suitable to facilitate tax harmonization within the EU. (JEL H87, H54, H21)     

Family Policy Index: A Tool for Policy Makers to Increase the Effectiveness of Family Policies

Social Indicators Research - This paper presents the Family Policy Index (XFPI), an analytical tool designed to measure and compare different models of countries’ provision of educational...     

The Influence of Top Management Teams in the Strategic Orientation and Performance of Small and Medium‐sized Enterprises

Identifying which factors affect firms' performance is a critical issue in strategic management research. This paper addresses the influence of managerial team over the behaviour and performance of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). By treating top management team (TMT) characteristics as predictors of a firm's strategic orientation, we seek to provide a more complete understanding of how the characteristics of managerial teams shape decision‐making processes and SMEs' behaviours in order to successfully compete in low munificent environments. Based on primary data regarding managerial characteristics and firms' behaviours of a sample of 295 SMEs, our results confirm that a firm's strategic orientation plays a mediating role in explaining how TMT characteristics determine SMEs' performance.     

The Gender‐Gap Reversal in Education and Its Effect on Union Formation: The End of Hypergamy?

Newly released census microdata reveal the nearly worldwide and substantial decline in educational hypergamy (women marrying men with higher educational attainment) across 56 countries from the 1970s to the 2000s. We examine the extent to which the observed decrease in hypergamy is connected to the worldwide rise in female educational attainment. Our results show that educational hypergamy is an enduring form of gender inequality in union formation across the countries examined but that it has been decreasing over the last few decades and in some countries has reversed in recent years. Overall, we find a strong association between hypergamy and gender differences in educational attainment. Societies in which the female educational advantage is greater tend to have lower levels of educational hypergamy. There is a tendency toward a joint increase in women's educational levels and a decrease in educational hypergamy. This article underlines the influence of women's educational opportunities on the increase in gender symmetry in assortative mating, which leads us to predict the end of educational hypergamy.