A QUARTET OF SEMIGROUPS FOR MODEL SPECIFICATION,ROBUSTNESS, PRICES OF RISK,AND MODEL DETECTION

A representative agent fears that his model, a continuous time Markov process with jump and diffusion components, is misspecified and therefore uses robust control theory to make decisions. Under the decision maker's approximating model, cautious behavior puts adjustments for model misspecification into market prices for risk factors. We use a statistical theory of detection to quantify how much model misspecification the decision maker should fear, given his historical data record. A semigroup is a collection of objects connected by something like the law of iterated expectations. The law of iterated expectations defines the semigroup for a Markov process, while similar laws define other semigroups. Related semigroups describe (1) an approximating model; (2) a model misspecification adjustment to the continuation value in the decision maker's Bellman equation; (3) asset prices; and (4) the behavior of the model detection statistics that we use to calibrate how much robustness the decision maker prefers. Semigroups 2, 3, and 4 establish a tight link between the market price of uncertainty and a bound on the error in statistically discriminating between an approximating and a worst case model. (JEL: C00, D51, D81, E1, G12)     

Automated decision-making: Toward a people-centred approach

Recently, automated decision-making (ADM) has been increasingly introduced in for example, the public sector potentially ensuring efficiency and more just decision-making. The increasing use of ADM has been reflected by a growing interest by scholarly research. While initially mainly researchers within law and computer sciences engaged with ADM, there has also been a growing engagement by social science and humanities-oriented researchers. This article traces the emergence and evolution of ADM research beyond computer sciences and engineering with a specific focus on social sciences and humanities by identifying central concerns and methods while outlining a stable baseline for future research. Based on a systematic mapping of publications, we outline the contours of ADM as an area of research engaging with an emerging empirical phenomenon. Drawing on findings from the mapping, we discuss ways ahead for ADM research as part of the subfield of digital sociology and suggest that sociological media and communication studies have a crucial role to play in developing future research avenues. Drawing on advances made in audience research, we suggest a radically contextualized and people-centered approach to ADM. Such an approach would help to develop ADM and ground it alongside people's divergent capabilities and contextual arrangements.     

A labor of love: The impact of same-sex marriage on labor supply

Review of Economics of the Household - We study how the average labor supply of gay men and lesbian women responds to the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. We exploit...     

Youth Program Adult Leader's Directive Assistance and Autonomy Support and Development of Adolescents’ Agency Capacity

Developing a capacity for exercising agency is an important developmental task of adolescence. Many organized youth programs provide adolescents opportunities to build their capacity to exercise agency. The researchers tested hypotheses that adult youth program leader's directive assistance and autonomy support would promote adolescents’ capacity for agency. They surveyed 441 high school adolescents and 11 adult advisors from 10 Future Farmers of America chapters twice over 2 years. Adolescents self‐reported on their capacity for agency and advisors reported on each adolescent's capacity. Directive assistance and autonomy support correlated with the capacity for agency within both time points. Only autonomy support predicted adolescents’ capacity for agency over time. Implications of leader's support for adolescents’ capacity for exercising agency are discussed.     

Poverty and its persistence: a comparison of natives and immigrants in Sweden

This paper analyzes poverty and its persistence in Sweden using a large panel with detailed income information obtained from tax registers. As opposed to many commonly used household panels, the features of the data utilized in this paper allow us to study native-immigrant differences in poverty. We use a hazard rate model based on multiple spells that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity and endogenous initial conditions. The empirical results suggest that there is negative duration dependence in both exit and entry hazard rates. Moreover, the transition rates are significantly affected by immigrant status, educational attainment, labor market conditions, age, and family status.

Integrating Work,Family, and Community Through Holistic Life Planning

This article provides a rationale and interdisciplinary framework for integrating work and other dimensions of life by (a) reviewing relevant changes in society and the career development and counseling profession, (b) describing one holistic career‐planning model called Integrative Life Planning (ILP), based on 6 interactive critical life tasks, and (c) discussing questions and issues surrounding narrow versus broad approaches to life planning. ILP includes a strong emphasis on career counselors as advocates and change agents. It focuses on several kinds of wholeness, integrative thinking, democratic values, and helping clients make career decisions not only for self‐satisfaction but also for the common good.     

Tying the Acquirer's Human Resource Management Quality to Cross‐Border Acquisition Divestment Probability: Curvilinear Connection with Slacklining

Cross‐border acquisitions are growing in volume and global economic importance, yet a considerable number end in failure. Many of these failures may be linked to people management‐related issues. We extend this stream of research by investigating the impact of the acquirer's aggregate human resource management (HRM) quality on cross‐border acquisition divestment. Our empirical analysis uses a panel database of 4128 cross‐border acquisition/year observations and an event history design. The findings confirm a curvilinear relationship and suggest that acquisition failures are not merely associated with poor HRM quality, but also with very high levels of HRM quality, that is, with both extremes. Moreover, our results show that financial slack has a significant moderating effect on the curvilinear relationship between HRM quality and the likelihood of acquisition divestment. Overall, our study reveals boundary conditions for the widely demonstrated positive relationship between HRM quality and organizational performance in an acquisition context.     

Dynamic Valuation Decomposition Within Stochastic Economies

I explore the equilibrium value implications of economic models that incorporate responses to a stochastic environment with growth. I propose dynamic valuation decompositions (DVD's) designed to distinguish components of an underlying economic model that influence values over long investment horizons from components that impact only the short run. A DVD represents the values of stochastically growing claims to consumption payoffs or cash flows using a stochastic discount process that both discounts the future and adjusts for risk. It is enabled by constructing operators indexed by the elapsed time between the trading date and the date of the future realization of the payoff. Thus formulated, methods from applied mathematics permit me to characterize valuation behavior and the term structure of risk prices in a revealing manner. I apply this approach to investigate how investor beliefs and the associated uncertainty are reflected in current‐period values and risk‐price elasticities.     

A dream come true – no more residential care. A corrective note

This note is about the attempt by the Australian State and Territory child care and protection systems to do without residential programmes. It traces the process of moving to this position and the historical and policy imperatives that supported this service direction. It also outlines the consequences of the absence of 24 hours-a-day 7-days-a-week residential education or treatment programmes for difficult and disturbed young people. It is both a cautionary and corrective note designed to underline the need for some specialised and highly selective residential programmes as part of any mature child care and protection system. This is something that Australia forgot.