The Interplay between Educational Achievement, Occupational Success, and Well-Being

Many studies have examined the effect of life events, education, and income on well-being. Conversely, research concerning well-being as a predictor of life course outcomes is sparse. Diener’s suggestion “to inquire about the effects of well-being on future behavior and success” has, with some exceptions, not yet come to fruition. This article contributes to this body of research. We conceptualize and analyze the interplay between educational achievement, occupational success, and well-being as a complex process. The relationship between these domains is examined drawing on a structure-agency framework derived from Bourdieu and Social Comparison Theory. Social comparison between adolescents and their parents is suggested to be the mechanism explaining the effects of successful and unsuccessful intergenerational transmission of educational achievement and occupational success on well-being. It is further argued that well-being may serve as an individual resource by fostering educational and occupational outcomes. Panel data from the Transition from Education to Employment (TREE) project, a Swiss PISA 2000 follow-up study, was used. The interplay between well-being and successful and unsuccessful intergenerational transfer of educational attainment was analyzed in an autoregressive cross-lagged mixture model framework. Social comparison was found to be related to well-being, while well-being proved to significantly increase the probability of successful intergenerational transfer of educational attainment.     

Comment on state space modeling of multiple time series

This paper raises some interpretative issues that arise from univariate trend–cycle decompositions with correlated disturbances. In particular, it discusses whether the interpretation of a negative correlation as providing evidence for the prominence of real, or supply, shocks, can be supported.

For this purpose it determines the conditions under which correlated components may originate from the underestimation of the cyclical component in an orthogonal decomposition; from the presence of a growth rate cycle, rather than a deviation cycle; or alternatively, as a consequence of the hysteresis phenomenon. Finally, it considers interpreting correlated components in terms of permanent–transitory decompositions, where the permanent component has richer dynamics than a pure random walk.

The consequences for smoothing and signal extraction are discussed: in particular, it is documented that a negative correlation implies that future observations carry most of the information needed to assess cyclical stance. As a result, the components will be subject to underestimation in real time and thus to high revisions. The overall conclusion is that the characterization of economic fluctuations in macroeconomic time series largely remains an open issue.     

Wachstumsbedingungen von Ein-Personen-Gründungen – Eine Längsschnittbeobachtung über acht Jahre

This study analyzes the growth potential of one-person startups on the basis of the framework model proposed by Gilbert, McDougall and Audretsch (2006) by postulating five key groups of enterprise growth predictors: entrepreneur characteristics, resources, strategy, industry, and organizational structures and systems. The framework model was adapted to suit the specific circumstances of one-person startups. The model was tested using a longitudinal data set comprising 188 Austrian one-person startups which were observed over a period of eight years. At the end of the observation period, the businesses included in the study had an average of 1.33 employees. The gender of the founder, capital requirements at the time of establishment, and growth strategy proved to be the most important predictors of growth. In addition, human capital resources also tended to have a positive impact. In summary, it is possible to draw empirically reliable conclusions about growth potential on the basis of the “seriousness” of an one-person startup project.     

Demographic aspects of educational expansion and labour-force development in the federal republic of germany

This paper assesses the impact of the baby boom and the subsequent decline of fertility to below-replacement level for both the educational system and the labour market. The experience of the last 25 years is documented and projections through to 2030 are presented. Particular attention is paid to comparison of the effects of demographic change with the effects of changing educational needs and aspirations.     

Bayesian analysis of the scatterometer wind retrieval inverse problem: some new approaches

Summary.  The retrieval of wind vectors from satellite scatterometer observations is a non-linear inverse problem. A common approach to solving inverse problems is to adopt a Bayesian framework and to infer the posterior distribution of the parameters of interest given the observations by using a likelihood model relating the observations to the parameters, and a prior distribution over the parameters. We show how Gaussian process priors can be used efficiently with a variety of likelihood models, using local forward (observation) models and direct inverse models for the scatterometer. We present an enhanced Markov chain Monte Carlo method to sample from the resulting multimodal posterior distribution. We go on to show how the computational complexity of the inference can be controlled by using a sparse, sequential Bayes algorithm for estimation with Gaussian processes. This helps to overcome the most serious barrier to the use of probabilistic, Gaussian process methods in remote sensing inverse problems, which is the prohibitively large size of the data sets. We contrast the sampling results with the approximations that are found by using the sparse, sequential Bayes algorithm.     

Strikes and the real wage-employment nexus: A hicksian analysis of industrial disputes and pay

This paper advances and analyzes a simple model of industrial conflict and pay dynamics. In addition to its account of these endogenous variables, the model exhibits a potential to account for stagflationary episodes of the type experienced by large parts of the world economy in the 1970s. The analysis also contributes to a central but still unsettled question in business cycle theory (and empirics): namely, whether real-wage movements respond systematically to fluctuations in employment and output. With some success the model is applied to the West German economy. Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, University of Basel. I should like to thank Peter Bernholz for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft is gratefully acknowledged. More recent contributions to this discussion are Scarth and Myatt (1980) and McDonald and Solow (1981).     

The Downside of Downsizing

With the help of data obtained from open-endedinterviews conducted with the various stakeholders indownsizing operations and applied within a clinicalframework, individual reaction patterns are explored in the victims, the survivors (those stayingwith a company after layoffs), and theexecutioners (those responsible for theimplementation of downsizing). Special emphasis is givento the reactions of the executives implementing the downsizingoperation. Among this group of people, a number of waysof coping can be discerned, described ascompulsive/ritualistic, abrasive, dissociative,alexithymic/anhedonic, and depressive. The article ends with a numberof practical recommendations about how to facilitate thedownsizing process. From the interviews conducted, itappears that downsizing, in the more narrow sense of the word, can be a quite destructiveprocess. Reframing the concept so that downsizing isviewed as a continuous process of corporatetransformation and change, a way to plan for thecontinuity of the organization, seems to be a moreconstructive approach.     

The “Three Waves” of Industrial Group Work: Historical Reflections on Current Research on Group Work

This paper deals with the three waves of the discourse on group work in social science and industrial practice that have helped pave the way for the current boom in the introduction of group work in companies. These waves are represented by the human relations approach, the sociotechnical systems approach, and the lean management debate. They are reviewed in two perspectives. The first relates to their concepts of work design and group work, following four questions: (a) What emphasis is put on work factors or on subjective orientations, on the design of working conditions or symbolic strategies? (b) How do the various approaches address the relationship between efficiency and control? (c) Which concepts of participation or democracy are involved? (d) How is the role of the social scientist in the process of industrial modernization conceptualized, explicitly or implicitly? The second perspective from a sociology of science relates to the context of production and utilization of social scientific knowledge. In general, two theses are put forward. The first states that a gap exists between the aspirations and reality of group work because the basic conflict of efficiency and control has been overlooked for ideological reasons. The second postulates that there is no linear progress in the theory and practice of group work. It seems that the socioeconomical context determines reasonably which group concept and ideology dominates certain historical phases of industrial modernization.     

Two-stage discrete aggregation: the Ostrogorski paradox and related phenomena

Motivated by certain paradoxa that have been discussed in the literature (Ostrogorski paradox), we prove an impossibility theorem for two-stage aggregation procedures for discrete data. We consider aggregation procedures of the following form: The whole population is partitioned into subgroups. First we aggregate over each subgroup, and in a second step we aggregate the subgroup aggregates to obtain a total aggregate. The data are either dichotomous (1 — 0; yes-no) or take values in a finite ordered set of possible attributes (e.g., exam grades A, B,...F). Examples are given by multistage voting procedures (indirect democracy, federalism), or by the forming of partial grades and overall grades in academic examinations and similar evaluation problems (sports competitions, consumer reports). It is well known from standard examples that the result of such a two-stage aggregation procedure depends, in general, not only on the distribution of attributes in the whole population, but also on how the attributes are distributed across the various subgroups (in other words: how the subgroups are defined). This dependence leads to certain paradoxa. The main result of the present paper is that these paradoxa are not due to the special aggregation rules employed in the examples, but are unavoidable in principle, provided the aggregators satisfy certain natural assumptions. More precisely: the only aggregator functions for which the result of a two-stage (a fortiori: multi-stage) aggregation does not depend on the partitioning are degenerate aggregators of the following form: there exists a partial order (dominance) on the set of possible attributes such that the aggregate over any collection of data is always equal to the supremum (w.r.t. dominance) of the attributes occurring in the data, regardless of the relative frequnencies of these occurrences. In the voting context, degeneracy corresponds to the unanimity principle. Our theorem is true for arbitrary partitionings of arbitrary (finite) sets and generalizes the results of Deb & Kelsey (for the matrix case with dichotomous variables and majority voting) to general two-stage aggregation procedures for attributes belonging to a finite ordered set. The general result is illustrated by some examples.This paper was completed during a visit to the University of Bielefeld. I am much indebted to the Faculty of Economics there for its hospitality; in particular I should like to thank Gerhard Schwödiauer and Walter Trockel for their support.