Partial diallel crosses based on three associate class association schemes

Designs of partial diallel crosses obtained by including parents based on rectangular and cubic association schemes have been presented. In addition, a simplified method of their analysis by making use of latent roots and idempotent matrices has also been presented. The method has been illustrated with the help of numerical data.     

Spatial variation in contraceptive use in Bangladesh: Looking Beyond the borders

This article promotes a more complete understanding of social change by analyzing spatial patterns of contraceptive use in Bangladesh and the contiguous state of West Bengal in India. Multilevel analyses that control for variations in individual- and household-level correlates show an important role for cross-border influences only in those districts that share a common language across the border. The districts that are positive outliers in contraception hug the Bangladesh-West Bengal border. A map of outliers shows that the positive outliers form a contiguous band in a manner suggestive of a role for contagion.     

The determinants of union membership growth in Taiwan

This paper examines the determinants of intertemporal variation in the growth rate of trade union membership in Taiwan during 1960–1987. The empirical results indicate that the widely used empirical model of growth in trade union membership based largely on cyclical variables applies to the case of a newly industrialized Asian country—Taiwan.     

TESTING FOR INDEPEDENCE IN MULTIVARIATE EXPONENTIAL DISTRIBUTIONS2

In this paper the work of Weier & Basu (1980) is extended to a special case of the trivariate exponential distributions and to the general k-variate case. In the trivariate case several statistics are derived including one based on the likelihood ratio approach and the locally most powerful rank statistic, and power studies are carried out. The general k-variate model is derived, and testing for independence is shown to reduce to a solved problem.     

INTERMARRIAGE AND THE LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES OF ASIAN WOMEN

The impact of intermarriage with natives, on labor market outcomes of immigrants, is not homogeneous across ethnic groups. Wages of Asian women are compared with non‐Asians. Both ordinary least squares and instrumental variables estimates of the effects of intermarriage on the wages of Asian women are negative and significant. Non‐Asian women earn a wage premium that becomes insignificant when controls for selection into marriage are introduced. One possible explanation for the intermarriage penalty for Asians is an income effect of having a high‐earning native husband. Intermarriage penalties rise with husband's education. Assimilation patterns of intermarried Asians indicate that they have lower initial wages, market hours, and employment, but exhibit faster rates of growth over their years of stay. The results are robust across Asian subgroups and husband's ethnicity. (JEL J16, J12, J31, J61)     

Tests for statistical significance of a treatment effect in the presence of hidden sub-populations

For testing the statistical significance of a treatment effect, we often compare between two parts of a population; one is exposed to the treatment, and the other is not exposed to it. Standard parametric or nonparametric two-sample tests are commonly used for this comparison. But direct applications of these tests can yield misleading results, especially when the population has some hidden sub-populations, and the effect of this sub-population difference on the response dominates the treatment effect. This problem becomes more evident if these sub-populations have widely different proportions of representatives in the samples obtained from these two parts. In this article, we propose some simple methods to overcome these limitations. These proposed methods first use a suitable clustering algorithm to find the hidden sub-populations, and then they eliminate the sub-population effect by using a suitable transformation of the data. Standard two-sample tests, when they are applied on the transformed data, usually yield better results. We analyze some simulated and real data sets to demonstrate the utility of these proposed methods.