Economic inequality and child stunting in Bangladesh and Kenya: an investigation of six hypotheses

Consistent with the increasing focus on issues of equity in developing countries, I extend the literature analyzing the relationship between economic inequality and individual health to the developing world. Using survey data from Bangladesh and Kenya with economic status measured by a wealth index and with three different geographic definitions of community, I analyze six competing hypotheses for how economic inequality may be related to stunting among children younger than 5 years old. I find little support for the predominant hypothesis that economic inequality as measured by a Gini index is an important predictor of individual health. Instead, I find that the difference between a household's wealth and the mean household wealth in the community is the measure of economic inequality that is most closely related to stunting in these countries. In particular, a 1 standard deviation increase in household wealth relative to the community mean is associated with a 30–32 percent decrease in the odds of stunting in Bangladesh and a 16–21 percent decrease in the odds of stunting in Kenya.     

Interorganizational Determinants of Environmental Purchasing: Initial Evidence from the Consumer Products Industries*

Environmental purchasing consists of the purchasing function's involvement in activities that include reduction, recycling, reuse, and substitution of materials. Despite the potentially important role that the purchasing function can play in a firm's environmental activities, little research has been performed to date that examines the factors that impact environmental purchasing. The authors develop and empirically test a theoretical model that examines how interorganizational factors both drive and constrain purchasing's involvement in environmental activities. The empirical findings suggest that environmental purchasing activities will be facilitated through increased coordination with suppliers as well as downstream members of the supply chain, including retailers. The results also suggest the need for increased coordination within the firm, particularly between the purchasing function on the inbound side and marketing and distribution functions on the outbound side.     

Learning by Objectives for Adaptive Shop-Floor Scheduling*

Effective production scheduling requires consideration of the dynamics and unpredictability of the manufacturing environment. An automated learning scheme, utilizing genetic search, is proposed for adaptive control in typical decentralized factory-floor decision making. A high-level knowledge representation for modeling production environments is developed, with facilities for genetic learning within this scheme. A multiagent framework is used, with individual agents being responsible for the dispatch decision making at different workstations. Learning is with respect to stated objectives, and given the diversity of scheduling goals, the efficacy of the designed learning scheme is judged through its response under different objectives. The behavior of the genetic learning scheme is analyzed and simulation studies help compare how learning under different objectives impacts certain aggregate measures of system performance.     

Syllable-final /s/ as an index of language,gender, and ethnicity in a contact variety of Mexican Spanish

This study of syllable-final /s/ reduction in a 55-speaker corpus of Spanish in Juchitán, México, a contact variety, uses both language contact and social processes to explain its results. Contact with the indigenous Isthmus Zapotec language leads to decreased rates of syllable-final /s/ retention, creating a locally salient n+1-order index between “Zapotecness” and /s/ reduction that influences the indexical field for syllable-final /s/ reduction. Zapotec identity is associated with tradition and femininity. Therefore, in this new indexical field, syllable-final /s/ reduction comes to directly index Zapotec language dominance and indirectly index both femininity and tradition. This leads feminine and elderly speakers to reduce /s/ more frequently than “less feminine” and young speakers, even though the opposite pattern is usually found in other varieties. The results show, therefore, that language contact can influence the indexical field typically linked to socially meaningful variation and thereby cause unexpected patterns of variation to emerge.     

Correction Constants for Present Values of Seasonal Cash Flows

In a recent Decision Sciences article, McMath (1990) developed the correction constants approach for eliminating the end-of-year bias in the present value of streams with subannual cash flows. A limitation of this approach is that it assumes subannual cash flows are level. In many types of businesses, subannual cash flows follow a predictable seasonal pattern and, consequently, a present value estimate based upon a level correction constant is biased. This article derives a general formula for determining correction constants for seasonal cash flow patterns, examines the direction and magnitude of the seasonal bias, and applies seasonal correction constants to a capital budgeting problem.     

Maternal depression,parental attributions,and adolescent psychopathology: An evaluation using observational and video-mediated recall methods

Parenting styles associated with maternal depression are a risk factor for adolescent psychopathology, and maternal attributional styles may be a key mechanism in this relationship. Mother-adolescent dyads (N = 180; 96 male; ages 10–15) completed in-person interactions and then the mothers participated in a video-mediated recall procedure to assess maternal attributions. Maternal depression was associated with negative attributions. Negative attributions were associated with low parental acceptance, aggressive parenting, and low positive parenting. Positive maternal attributions were associated with less aggressive parenting, and more positive parenting during one interaction task. Adolescent externalizing behaviors were associated with negative attributions. Future research should evaluate whether maternal attributions mediate the association between maternal depression and both parenting behaviors and adolescent mental health.     

Marketing Category Forecasting: An Alternative of BVAR‐Artificial Neural Networks*

Analyzing scanner data in brand management activities presents unique difficulties due to the vast quantity of the data. Time series methods that are able to handle the volume effectively often are inappropriate due to the violation of many statistical assumptions in the data characteristics. We examine scanner data sets for three brand categories and examine properties associated with many time series forecasting methods. Many violations are found with respect to linearity, normality, autocorrelation, and heteroscedasticity. With this in mind we compare the forecasting ability of neural networks that require no assumptions to two of the more robust time series techniques. Neural networks provide similar forecasts to Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR), and both outperform generalized autoregressive conditional herteroscedasticty (GARCH) models.     

IRA balances and contributions: an overview of the EBRI IRA database

NEW IRA DATABASE: The Employee Benefit Research Institute created the EBRI IRA Database in order to more closely examine retirement savings behavior. The EBRI IRA Database is able to link individuals within and across the data providers and will also be able to link the data with participants in 401(k) plans, allowing retirement funds to be tracked as they are generated, rolled over, and ultimately used. This Issue Brief is the first of a series of publications analyzing the EBRI IRA Database, and highlights the distribution of IRA owners by IRA type, average and median account balances, and contributions to IRAs. The data security techniques used by the data providers assure that EBRI has no ability to identify individuals so that all privacy is assured. IRA TYPES: In the EBRI IRA Database, IRAs are classified into four types: traditional (originating from contributions), rollovers from other retirement plans, Roth, and SEP/SIMPLE. The distribution of the IRA accounts is 33.6 percent traditional IRAs; 33.4 percent rollover IRAs (combined with the traditional IRAs, 67 percent); 23.4 percent Roth IRAs; the remaining 9.6 percent are SEPs and SIMPLEs. OWNERSHIP BY AGE AND GENDER: IRA owners were more likely to be male, especially those having a rollover or a SEP/SIMPLE IRA. Among all IRA participants in the database, nearly one-half (48.3 percent) were ages 45-64. Only 16.7 percent of those owning a traditional IRA were under age 45, compared with 46.5 percent for those with a Roth, 30.4 percent for rollovers, and 34.8 percent for those with a SEP or SIMPLE. AVERAGE AND MEDIAN BALANCES: The average and median IRA account balance in 2008 was $54,863 and $15,756, respectively, while the average and median IRA individual balance (all accounts from the same person combined) was $69,498 and $20,046, Individuals with a rollover balance had the highest average and median balance at $91,783 and $31,264. Roth owners had the lowest average and median balance at $14,056 and $7,319. The average and median individual IRA balance increased with age before leveling off for those age 70 or older. Averages--The average amount contributed to an IRA in the database was $3,665 in 2008. The average contribution was highest for accounts owned by those ages 65-69. More contributions were made to Roth accounts than to traditional (combined traditional and rollover) accounts. However, the average contribution to a traditional account was higher, at $3,798, compared with $3,580 to a Roth account. Yet, a higher overall amount was contributed to Roth IRAs ($3.4 billion for Roths compared with $2.3 billion for traditional accounts). By type--Focusing only on those owning traditional, rollover, or Roth IRAs, 12.1 percent of the accounts were contributed to, and 15.1 percent of the individuals owning these IRA types contributed to them in 2008. When combining the owners of traditional and rollover IRAs (which are considered the same type for contribution purposes), 7.2 percent contributed, while 29.5 percent of those owning a Roth IRA contributed to a Roth IRA. Maxing out--Of those individuals contributing, 42.4 percent contributed the maximum amount. Of those contributing to a traditional or rollover IRA, 43.4 percent maxed out, while 40.2 percent did so with a Roth IRA.     

Ordering behavior in a supply chain with customers that respond to changes in service level

The presence of service-level-dependent demand has been empirically observed in industry and is well-documented in the literature. How does the implicit contractual existence of such service dependency impact the ordering decisions of upstream suppliers? We conduct three controlled laboratory experiments to study the impact a service-reward mechanism may have on the upstream ordering decisions of those charged with inventory ordering decisions. The multistudy approach provides representations of decision dynamics across a variety of scenarios, from one-shot buys to long-term supply-chain relationships. Our combined empirical results consistently suggest that the service-reward mechanism significantly and systematically elevates order levels and order variability in a manner that increases departure from optimal ordering. This effect is observed even when decision-makers have incentives to maintain a steady ordering pattern with their suppliers. Our findings shed much-needed light on individual ordering responses to, and the associated risks of, service-reward mechanisms.