Nonreporting of births or nonreporting of pregnancies? Some evidence from four rural counties in North China

Coale and Banister argue that in China, elevated sex ratios in retrospective surveys are in part a function of collecting birth histories in a culture in which the definition of a birth may exclude mortality shortly after birth: an infant death in the West may be a stillbirth in east Asia. I present data from a recent sample survey featuring a retrospective pregnancy history. These data reveal that at least in the first pregnancy, from which the preponderance of sample births arise, there is no evidence of elevated female infant mortality or of high numbers of stillbirths, but that reported sex ratios are unusually high. The proportion of stillbirths grows for later pregnancies, but not enough to account for high sex ratios. Retrospective fertility data regarding recall over a recent interval are vexed less by a misunderstanding of what a live birth is than by a “misunderstanding” of what a (reportable) pregnancy is.     

Power of One-Sample Location Tests Under Distributions with Equal Lévy Distance

In this article, we study the power of one-sample location tests under classical distributions and two supermodels which include the normal distribution as a special case. The distributions of the supermodels are chosen in such a way that they have equal distance to the normal as the logistic, uniform, double exponential, and the Cauchy, respectively. As a measure of distance we use the Lévy metric. The tests considered are two parametric tests, the t-test and a trimmed t-test, and two nonparametric tests, the sign test and the Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. It turns out that the power of the tests, first of all, does not depend on the Lévy distance but on the special chosen supermodel.     

Some Thoughts on Causation as It Relates to Demography and Population Studies

The counterfactual account of causality defines an effect as the difference, for some unit, between an outcome under an observed treatment and an outcome under a hypothetical alternative. When units are heterogeneous in a population, there is no single causal effect. The micro‐level account of causation is complicated when units interact with one another, as they do in human populations. The search for causation requires manipulation. But key micro‐level demographic variables—age, race, sex—are not easily manipulated. What are subject to manipulation are the social rules, policies, or choice sets available to individuals within populations. Thus causes are best conceptualized at the macro level, even if their effects are observed at the micro level.     

Doublebreasted operations and the decline of construction unionism

Labor relations in the construction industry are conducted under a legal framework that is both different and more favorable to unions than is that in industry generally. One aspect of this favored union environment is that construction employers are more subject to challenge than other employers if they operate both union and nonunion subsidiaries (“doublebreasted operations”). For almost a decade, the construction unions have attempted to obtain legislation disallowing this practice on the erroneous claims that it is unique to the construction industry and responsible for the decline of construction unions. This article examines the facts of the case and concludes that having both union and nonunion construction subsidiaries is no different from having both union and nonunion manufacturing subsidiaries insofar as the structure and operational organization of such companies are concerned; that the initial National Labor Relation Board decision in regard to doublebreasted operations in the construction industry was merely an application of precedent of some years previous in other industries; and that construction industry doublebreasted operations are much more a result than a cause of union decline. Professor Emeritus of Management; formerly, Professor of Industry; Director, Industrial Research Unit; and Chairman, Labor Relations Council.     

Robustness of linear models in dynamic multivariate predictions

Linear aggregation models employing unit and equal weights have been shown to be superior to human decisions in a surprising range of decision situations. In addition, decisions based on these models have often been found to be superior to those based on linear regression models (LRMs). This general issue was explored for repetitive decisions in production planning. The problem considered differs in several aspects from the types of problems investigated previously: (1) the problem is dynamic rather than static; (2) a set (or vector) of interactive decisions dependent on previous decisions is required to be made, where a decision in stage t, the dependent variable, becomes an independent variable in stage t + 1; and (3) the criterion function is cost with a quadratic loss function (rather than the correlation measure of R²). Moreover, since repetitive decisions were involved, the parameters of the models were estimated using past human decisions. These were used to predict specific values of the decision variables (rather than rank order), which in turn were employed recursively to predict values of the decision variables at subsequent stages. While decisions from equal weighting rules were found to be superior to human decisions and not greatly inferior to decisions from linear regression models, decisions from unit weighting rules performed poorly. The rationale for such performance is discussed, indicating that previous theoretical and empirical research on linear weighting models is not generally applicable to dynamic, multivariate interactive decisions problems with lagged variables.     

Accounting for a Nonviolent Mass Demonstration*

A 1963 nonviolent mass demonstration for civil rights at Durham, N.C., is here described on the basis of interviews with participants, businessmen, and political figures. A utility model to help account for the personnel, form, and site of such a protest includes the processes of evolution, contagion, and reinforcement.     

Measures of Work Satisfaction among Economic Development Practitioners*

From data collected in a mail survey of 327 urban based economic development practitioners, four dimensions of work satisfaction are proposed. Predictive correlates of these four dimensions–the expectation that practitioners create economic miracles, the rejection of formalistic activity, the sense that practitioners can be effective, and the belief that their bosses are helpful–are introduced. Overall satisfaction is highest in communities in which economic development practitioners feel they have successfully brought about public-private cooperation. This finding is interpreted in terms of the differences between process and outcome measures in evaluating work satisfaction for administrators responsible for non-routine activities.