Searching for effective interventions for foster children under stress: a meta‐analysis

Foster children experience a lot of stress because of their life histories and changes in their family circumstances, such as foster care placement. It is important that foster parents recognize the early signs of stress in foster children and learn how to act in a non‐threatening and understanding manner. Family‐based interventions may help in this. In this paper, we report on a meta‐analysis of studies (n= 19) of the effectiveness of such interventions. All studies used a pre‐test/post‐test design. Both problem behaviour in foster children and the parenting skills of foster parents improved by 30%; however, none of the interventions were specifically intended to help young children (<4 years) to cope with stress. The importance of interventions for young foster children is discussed, as well as the necessary elements these interventions should include.     

Spillover Between Work and Home,Role Importance and Life Satisfaction

This study of n = 201 knowledge workers examines positive and negative spillover between work and home and its interrelation with life satisfaction. Additionally, it accounts for the direct effect of role importance on life satisfaction and its moderating effect on the interrelation between spillover and life satisfaction. Central to role importance is the degree of attachment that an individual places on family role and career role. Positive spillover from home is interrelated with higher life satisfaction, whereas negative spillover from work is related to lower life satisfaction. Family role importance and career role importance are associated with higher life satisfaction. For respondents with higher family role importance, there is a stronger interrelation between negative spillover from home and lower life satisfaction.     

The impact of policy measures and coaching on the availability and accessibility of early child care: A longitudinal study

We conducted a study of changes in the availability, accessibility and enrolment of children from low‐income, single‐parent and ethnic minority families in early child care centres. The study was carried out in Brussels which offers unique possibilities to study accessibility in a context in which quality and costs are controlled across centres. A survey on access policies in 89 day care centres, and on 150 mothers regarding their search process, was complemented by two focus groups attended by centre directors. The results were compared with data from a similar study we conducted in 2005. The results show that while inequality in availability has remained, centre directors' awareness of social priority criteria has changed, resulting in a significant increase in the enrolment of children from single‐parent and ethnic minority families, and – to a lesser extent – an increase in the enrolment of children from low‐income families. The results support the hypothesis that policy measures, combined with support, can influence inequalities in enrolment rates.     

A new index of perceived inflation: Assumptions, method, and application to Germany

After the introduction of Euro notes and coins in January 2002, throughout the Economic and Monetary Union member countries a substantial discrepancy was evident between inflation as measured by the official consumer price indices (CPI) and that perceived by the general public. The starting point of this paper is the German case. First, the public controversy in Germany after the Euro changeover is sketched. Then conventional approaches to perceived inflation are reviewed including the many studies published by the German Federal Statistical Office as well as the perceived inflation balance generated within the EU Consumer Survey. In the main part of the paper, a novel approach to measuring perceived inflation is developed, the Index of Perceived Inflation (IPI). First, the hypotheses underlying this index are presented. Then, the IPI is derived. In the forth section the IPI is applied to the German data. The IPI time series for Germany from 1996 through 2005 shows a particularly high perceived inflation around the introduction of Euro notes and coins. In the fifth section the hypotheses of inflation perception underlying the IPI are critically reviewed. The paper closes with a conclusion on the insights gained through computation of the IPI.     

Competition of politicians for wages and office

We examine a model in which two politicians compete for office and for wages. Their remunerations are either set by the public or are offered competitively by the candidates during campaigns. Our main finding shows that competitive wage offers by candidates lead to lower social welfare than remunerations predetermined by the public, since wage competition may lead to higher wage costs or to the election of less competent candidates. I would like to thank Alexandrina Braack, Peter Bernholz, Robert Dur, Amihai Glazer, Volker Hahn, Stephan Imhof, Verena Liessem, Christian Schultz, Otto H. Swank, conference participants at the annual meeting of the Public Choice Society 2000, the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society in Durham 2001, the annual congress of the European Economic Association 2001 in Lausanne, seminar participants in Heidelberg and at the University of California, Irvine, and two referees for their valuable suggestions and comments. A previous version of this article can be found under doi:.     

PHARMACEUTICAL BENEFITS IN AUSTRALIA AND SWEDEN: WELFARE POLICY AND THE COST OF PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

Pharmaceutical benefits provide a stable framework within which consumers, prescribers, suppliers, pharmacists and other actors undertake transactions. The state in effect delivers a good that enhances individual autonomy. A major reason for the legitimacy enjoyed by pharmaceutical benefits in both Australia and Sweden is that these programs have strong attributes of universalism (rather than targeting). Sweden's predominantly public health system allows greater scope for pharmaceutical policy innovation. Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), while historically resilient and effective, is now wedged precariously between traditional considerations of equity and public health on the one hand, and constant pressure for increased marketisation on the other.     

Competition of politicians for wages and office

We examine a model in which two politicians compete for office and for wages. Their remunerations are either set by the public or are offered competitively by the candidates during campaigns. Our main finding shows that competitive wage offers by candidates lead to lower social welfare than remunerations predetermined by the public, since wage competition may lead to higher wage costs or to the election of less competent candidates. I would like to thank Alexandrina Braack, Peter Bernholz, Robert Dur, Amihai Glazer, Volker Hahn, Stephan Imhof, Verena Liessem, Christian Schultz, Otto H. Swank, conference participants at the annual meeting of the Public Choice Society 2000, the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society in Durham 2001, the annual congress of the European Economic Association 2001 in Lausanne, seminar participants in Heidelberg and at the University of California, Irvine, and two referees for their valuable suggestions and comments.     

The unbiasedness of hodges and lehman's test for a composite hypothesis of the man of a distribution with unknown variance

In 1954 Hodges and Lehmann considered the following problem: given is an i.i. normally distributed random sample with variance unknown. Under the null-hypothesis the mean is contained in a prescribed interval. Hodges and Lehmann constructed a test similar on the interval. This test is superior in power to the usual auxiliary procedure applied to this problem. Numerical calculations by Hodges and Lehmann indicated that the test is unbaised, however an analytical proof could not be given. In a recent paper the author proved unbiasedness for levels not too large, the magnitude depending on the sample size. Here the Proof is completed by establishing unbiasedness for all levels.     

A comparison of some approximations to the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney distribution

The following approximations to the exact distribution of the Wilcoxon rank sum test (Mann-Whitney U-test) are compared at or near significance levels .05, .025, .01 and .005: the normal approximation with continuity correction, the simple and complete version of the Edgeworth series approximation proposed by Fix and Hodges (1955), Buckle, Kraft and van Eeden’s (1969a) uniform approximation and Iman’s (1976) recently proposed approximation. The comparison takes into account simplicity of application as well as closeness, and some preference rules are suggested for different user objectives.     

Distribution-free confidence bounds for pr y< when fx and gy = fx-6 are continuous and symmetric

For and continuous and symmetric and differing at most by a shift parameter, distribution-free confidence intervals for are obtained by means of the Chebyshev inequality and an upper bound for the variance of the Mann-Whitney statistic. The (two-sided) intervals are reliable for small samples and about 20 to 30 per cent shorter than those obtained by Ury for and completely unknown for equal sample sizes, with larger savings otherwise. They are also shorter than the upper bounds obtained by Birnbaum and McCarty (1958) when the confidence coefficient does not exceed 0.95.