The importance of peer relatedness at school for affective well‐being in children: Between‐ and within‐person associations

Two intensive longitudinal studies examining the association between children's feeling of relatedness to peers at school and their affective well‐being were performed. In Study 1, 110 third and fourth graders reported on their positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) 4 times daily and on their peer relatedness once a day over 4 weeks. Multilevel analyses revealed that children who reported higher peer relatedness on average also reported higher PA and lower NA (between‐person associations). Moreover, on days when children reported higher peer relatedness than usual, they also reported higher PA, but they did not necessarily report lower NA (within‐person associations). In Study 2, 55 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders indicated their PA, NA, and peer relatedness once a day over 2 weeks. We replicated the findings of Study 1 on both levels. The studies showed that feeling related to peers is associated with high PA at school and at home on a daily basis, illustrating the function of peer relatedness in promoting positive well‐being. The findings further demonstrated the necessity of intensive longitudinal studies focusing on within‐person associations and the importance of measuring both PA and NA in order to capture effects on affective well‐being thoroughly.     

THE OPTIMAL ALLOCATION OF PRIZES IN TOURNAMENTS OF HETEROGENEOUS AGENTS

Tournaments are widely used in organizations, explicitly or implicitly, to reward the best‐performing employees, for example, by promotion or bonuses, and/or to penalize the worst‐performing employees, for example, by demotion, withholding bonuses, or unfavorable job assignments. These incentive schemes can be interpreted as various prize allocations based on the employees' relative performance. While the optimal prize allocation in tournaments of symmetric agents is relatively well understood, little is known about the impact of the allocation of prizes on the effectiveness of tournament incentive schemes for heterogeneous agents. We show that while multiple prize allocation rules are equivalent when agents are symmetric in their ability, the equivalence is broken in the presence of heterogeneity. Under a wide range of conditions, loser‐prize tournaments, that is, tournaments that award a low prize to relatively few bottom performers, are optimal for the firm. The reason is that low‐ability agents are discouraged less in such tournaments, as compared to winner‐prize tournaments awarding a high prize to few top performers, and hence can be compensated less to meet their participation constraints. (JEL M52, J33, J24)     

Which Inequality Makes People Dissatisfied with Their Lives? Evidence of the Link Between Life Satisfaction and Inequalities

This paper aims at establishing a clear link between different types of inequality and life satisfaction in Europe. We analyse the relationship between life satisfaction and both income inequality and inequality of opportunity using seven waves of the European Social Survey. The results show that in Europe both income inequality and inequality of opportunity reduce people’s life satisfaction. Our main results suggest that all socio-economic groups are dissatisfied with income inequality, whereas primarily low socio-economic individuals worry about inequality of opportunity. We find that expected mobility is very important in explaining the link between inequality and life satisfaction for all socio-economic groups in Europe. We advance the hypothesis that life satisfaction is conditioned by a mix of normative arguments against inequality and by the fear/possibility to lose/gain a good social position. This result complements findings on the mediating role of social mobility in the relationship with subjective well-being.     

Skilling and deskilling: technological change in classical economic theory and its empirical evidence

This article reviews and brings together two literatures: classical political economists’ views on the skilling or deskilling nature of technological change in England, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when they wrote, are compared with the empirical evidence about the skill effects of technological change that emerges from studies of economic historians. In both literatures, we look at both the skill impacts of technological change and at the “inducement mechanisms” that are envisaged for the introduction of new technologies. Adam Smith and Karl Marx both regarded the deskilling of the labour force as the predominant form of biased technical change, but other authors such as Charles Babbage also took account of capital-skill complementarities and skill-enhancing effects of technological change. For Smith, the deskilling bias was an unintended by-product of the increasing division of labour, which in his view “naturally” led to ever more simplification of workers’ tasks. As opposed to Smith, Marx considered unskilled-biased technical change as a bourgeois weapon in the class struggle for impairing the workers’ bargaining position. Studies of economic historians lend support to Marx’s hypothesis about the inducement mechanisms for the introduction of unskilled-biased innovations, but have produced no clear-cut empirical evidence for a deskilling tendency of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technological change as a whole. Industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rather led to labour polarization, by simultaneously deskilling a large part of the workforce and raising the demand for some (but fewer) high-skilled workers.     

Using Implied Probabilities to Improve the Estimation of Unconditional Moment Restrictions for Weakly Dependent Data

In this article, we investigate the use of implied probabilities (Back and Brown, 1993) to improve estimation in unconditional moment conditions models. Using the seminal contributions of Bonnal and Renault (2001 Bonnal, H., Renault, E. (2001). Minimal Chi-Square Estimation with Conditional Moment Restrictions, Document de Travail, CESG, September 2001. [Google Scholar]) and Antoine et al. (2007 Antoine, B., Bonnal, H., Renault, E. (2007). On the efficient use of the informational content of estimating equations: Implied probabilities and euclidean empirical likelihood. Journal of Econometrics 138(2):461–487.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), we propose two three-step Euclidian empirical likelihood (3S-EEL) estimators for weakly dependent data. Both estimators make use of a control variates principle that can be interpreted in terms of implied probabilities in order to achieve higher-order improvements relative to the traditional two-step GMM estimator. A Monte Carlo study reveals that the finite and large sample properties of the three-step estimators compare favorably to the existing approaches: the two-step GMM and the continuous updating estimator.     

Urban culture and physical and sports activities. The "sportification" of parkour and street golf as cultural mediation

The article explores the process of "sportification"--i.e., processing physical activity in a sport regulated by a set of rules and standards, legitimized by supervisory institutions--from two originals practices, parkour and urban golf. To study these practices, we crossed the contributions of urban sociology and of the contemporary sociology of sport while respecting the methodological principles of qualitative sociology. A first point concerns the process of"sport" itself, its definition, its various stages, and the role played by communication of stakeholders on public space. The cultural mediation shows us how to institutionalize the movement that represents the "sports" resulted in the same time reconfiguration of physical practices themselves. Recent events illustrate the ongoing reconfiguration, we will detail them. Finally, we show the effects produced by the process on the definition of urban culture and sports: setting sight of activities, enhanced cooperation with the media-cultural, polarization between different types of practical in the case of parkour, around a confrontation between two of the founders.