Forced Migration and Mortality in the Very Long Term: Did Perestroika Affect Death Rates Also in Finland?

In this article, we analyze mortality rates of Finns born in areas that were ceded to the Soviet Union after World War II and from which the entire population was evacuated. These internally displaced persons are observed during the period 1971-2004 and compared with people born in the same region but on the adjacent side of the new border. We find that in the 1970s and 1980s, the forced migrants had mortality rates that were on par with those of people in the comparison group. In the late 1980s, the mortality risk of internally displaced men increased by 20% in relation to the expected time trend. This deviation, which manifests particularly in cardiovascular mortality, coincides with perestroika and the demise of the Soviet Union, which were events that resulted in an intense debate in civil society about restitution of the ceded areas. Because state actors were reluctant to engage, the debate declined after some few years, and after the mid-1990s, the death risk again approached the long-term trend. Our findings indicate that when internally displaced persons must adjust to situations for which appropriate coping behaviors are unknown, psychosocial stress might arise several decades after their evacuation.     

The New Jersey performance management system: a state system and uses of simple measures.

The New Jersey Performance Management System (PMS) is a major mechanism used by the leadership of the New Jersey Division of Mental Health and Hospitals to contract for, monitor and manage community mental health services. The goal of PMS is to foster proactive, data-based management via sound assessment of multi-dimensional performances, equitable distribution of resources and introduction of incentives. This paper describes PMS, its components, implementation, and limitations.     

Can Private Donations Help Public Universities Build Bridges Over Troubled Waters?: Practical Lessons for Administrators and Donors

With decreasing appropriations, some public organizations seek donations, often from large donors who may want to generate a return on investment by transforming the institution. As such, an interesting question emerges about institutions’ ability to meet donors’ expectations. Long fundraising histories, combined with a political and decentralized nature, make state universities an interesting venue to study the use of donations to create institutional change. Based on two single-state case studies, this research argues that real and perceived organizational barriers must be overcome. It concludes with implications for both administrator and donors.     

Divorce and parity progression following the death of a child: A register-based study from Finland

Most studies that have examined whether a child’s death influences parental relationship stability have used small-scale data sets and their results are inconclusive. A likely reason is that child loss affects not only the risk of parental separation, but also the risk of having another child. Hence parity progression and separation must be treated as two competing events in relation to child loss. The analysis in this paper used Finnish register data from 1971 to 2003, covering over 100,000 married couples whose durations of both first marriage and parenthood could be observed. We ran parity-specific Cox regressions in which process time started from the birth of each additional child. All marriages included women of childbearing age, none of whom had experienced any child death on entering the analysis. We find that child loss only modestly influences the divorce risk, whereas its effect on the risk of parity progression is considerable.     

Much Ado About Nothing? Macro-Prudential Ideas and the Post-Crisis Regulation of Shadow Banking

Post-crisis, macro-prudential ideas have challenged the epistemic authority of private risk management technologies, declaring them to be pro-cyclical contributors to systemic risk. This discursive challenge has been most critical of the shadow banking system, where private risk management instruments are central. This challenge, however, has not been translated into regulatory tools which reflect these convictions. This paper studies this process of discursive challenge to (failed) regulatory intervention for the case of the repo-market, the heart of the current shadow banking system. It traces regulatory efforts on the global and EU level from regulatory statements to (lack of) action, documenting both the persistent articulation of macro-prudential ideas challenging private risk-management systems and timid to no regulatory intervention. It links this hiatus to international coordination problems, the need for macro-prudential action to span regulatory communities, involving banking and financial market authorities and disagreements between micro- and macro-prudentially oriented regulators. The lack of evidence and the difficulty to generate it are identified as major impediments for regulatory consensus, further aggravated by ambiguities about the goals of anti-cyclical regulation. Beyond governance problems and the persistent appeal of private risk-management systems, the paper thus points to difficulties operationalizing macro-prudential ideas as a major explanatory factor.     

The Good Grandparent: Perspectives of Young Adults

As life expectancy increases, the role of grandparent has increased in duration and is continually adapting as families change in structure, function and form. Across the past several decades, researchers have examined grandparenting styles, finding some consistency as well as the emergence of newer styles, and evidence that grandparenting styles are related to the age and gender of both the grandparents and the grandchildren. In this study, we investigated young adults’ perceptions of grandparenting quality. University Students (N?=?470) from a Midwestern university responded to an online survey that asked them to evaluate the quality of their grandparents grandparenting now and at two retrospective points in time, childhood and adolescence. We hypothesized that the grandparents' performance of multiple styles of their role would be related to grandparenting quality. In addition, we expected that preferred grandparental roles would vary in relation to grandchildren's gender. The results of regression analysis indicated that, although grandparenting quality tended to decline across the respondents' developmental stages, higher ratings at an earlier stage were related to higher ratings at the latter two stages. Further, grandsons preferred grandparents who performed as supporters and advisors, whereas granddaughters preferred grandparents who functioned as supporter and friend. Overall, grandmothers were likely to be the more significant grandparent. Continual research on both grandchildren and grandparents will be needed to chronicle the development of the grandparental role in changing times.     

Integrated methodology for multiple systems estimation and record linkage using a missing data formulation

There are now three essentially separate literatures on the topics of multiple systems estimation, record linkage, and missing data. But in practice the three are intimately intertwined. For example, record linkage involving multiple data sources for human populations is often carried out with the expressed goal of developing a merged database for multiple system estimation (MSE). Similarly, one way to view both the record linkage and MSE problems is as ones involving the estimation of missing data. This presentation highlights the technical nature of these interrelationships and provides a preliminary effort at their integration.     

Invariant co-ordinate selection

Summary.  A general method for exploring multivariate data by comparing different estimates of multivariate scatter is presented. The method is based on the eigenvalue–eigenvector decomposition of one scatter matrix relative to another. In particular, it is shown that the eigenvectors can be used to generate an affine invariant co-ordinate system for the multivariate data. Consequently, we view this method as a method for invariant co-ordinate selection . By plotting the data with respect to this new invariant co-ordinate system, various data structures can be revealed. For example, under certain independent components models, it is shown that the invariant co- ordinates correspond to the independent components. Another example pertains to mixtures of elliptical distributions. In this case, it is shown that a subset of the invariant co-ordinates corresponds to Fisher's linear discriminant subspace, even though the class identifications of the data points are unknown. Some illustrative examples are given.     

Link-tracing sampling with an initial sequential sample of sites: Estimating the size of a hidden human population

We proposed a modification to the variant of link-tracing sampling suggested by Félix-Medina and Thompson [M.H. Félix-Medina, S.K. Thompson, Combining cluster sampling and link-tracing sampling to estimate the size of hidden populations, Journal of Official Statistics 20 (2004) 19–38] that allows the researcher to have certain control of the final sample size, precision of the estimates or other characteristics of the sample that the researcher is interested in controlling. We achieve this goal by selecting an initial sequential sample of sites instead of an initial simple random sample of sites as those authors suggested. We estimate the population size by means of the maximum likelihood estimators suggested by the above-mentioned authors or by the Bayesian estimators proposed by Félix-Medina and Monjardin [M.H. Félix-Medina, P.E. Monjardin, Combining link-tracing sampling and cluster sampling to estimate the size of hidden populations: A Bayesian-assisted approach, Survey Methodology 32 (2006) 187–195]. Variances are estimated by means of jackknife and bootstrap estimators as well as by the delta estimators proposed in the two above-mentioned papers. Interval estimates of the population size are obtained by means of Wald and bootstrap confidence intervals. The results of an exploratory simulation study indicate good performance of the proposed sampling strategy.