Los determinantes y consecuencias de la desconfianza en México1

This paper analyzes the relationship between interpersonal trust and the trust in different institutions as well as its involvement with sociodemographic and political culture-related variables and its connection with associativism. For this, 1993 and 2000 national surveys where used. The results show that there is independence between interpersonal trust and the trust in institutions, because they are built by different processes. There is also a slight relationship between sociodemographic variables and political values or ideology. Interpersonal trust is linked with active participation in associations, which may point out that it is associated to specific forms of social organization. On the other hand, trust in institutions seems to respond more to the behavior of the political system, its performance, and how it is evaluated. Besides, it appears that the trust is influenced by age or place of residence. Older persons and those living in small villages are associated with conservatism. Non-political institutions (such as religion, unions, etc.) could be affected by policy performance.     

The new dependency: Technological change and socioeconomic restructuring in Latin America

This article analyzes the implications for the Latin American societies of the ongoing restructuring of the world economy, which is driven by the accelerated application of science and technology to the production process. After a short review of the current developments at the regional level, the article focuses on Mexico and Bolivia. These two extreme cases, ranging from high-technology industries on the United States-Mexico border to the growth of an underground economy based in the production of coca and cocaine, allow the analysis of new forms of dependency that are already constraining the economic adjustment and the democratization process in Latin America.     

A decision support system for modelling and implementing the supply network configuration and operations scheduling problem in the machine tool industry

This paper presents a decision support system to simultaneously solve the supply network configuration problem and the operations scheduling problem for the machine tool industry. A novel database structure, which is able to consider alternative operations and alternative bills of material, has been used. An algorithm for complete enumeration to determine all the feasible solutions using stroke graphs is introduced. A multiagent-based simulator evaluates the different key performance indicators that the supply network deals with for each alternative solution (e.g. workload, profits, delivery times, etc.) to determine that ‘satisficed’ by the collaborative decision-making among its members. A case study based on a Spanish company that assembles highly customised machines and tools in several European plants is considered. From the experiments results based on data linked to this industry, it will be demonstrated that the tool is potentially useful for stakeholders and for the central decision-maker to make decisions collaboratively in a multisite context case.     

Normative collective behavior in the Station building fire

Objective. This article offers a test of the normative explanation of collective behavior by examining the fire at the Station nightclub in Rhode Island that killed 100 and injured nearly 200 persons.Methods. Information on all persons at the club comes from content analysis of documents from the Rhode Island Police Department, the Rhode Island Office of the Attorney General, and The Providence Journal. We use negative binomial regression to test hypotheses about the effects of group-level predictors of the counts of dead and injured in 179 groups at the nightclub.Results. Results indicate that group-level factors such as distance of group members at the start of the fire, the number of intimate relations among them, the extent to which they had visited the nightclub prior to the incident, and the average length of the evacuation route they used predict counts of injured and dead. The research also looks at what behavioral differences exist between survivors and victims, ascertains the existence of role extension among employees of the nightclub, and provides support for the affirmation that dangerous contexts negate the protective influence of intimate relations in groups.Conclusion. We argue for the abandonment of current emphasis on irrationality and herd-like imitative behavior in studies of evacuation from structural fires in buildings and for the inclusion of group-level processes in social psychological explanations of these incidents.     

A review of representation issues and modeling challenges with influence diagrams

Since their introduction in the mid 1970s, influence diagrams have become a de facto standard for representing Bayesian decision problems. The need to represent complex problems has led to extensions of the influence diagram methodology designed to increase the ability to represent complex problems. In this paper, we review the representation issues and modeling challenges associated with influence diagrams. In particular, we look at the representation of asymmetric decision problems including conditional distribution trees, sequential decision diagrams, and sequential valuation networks. We also examine the issue of representing the sequence of decision and chance variables, and how it is done in unconstrained influence diagrams, sequential valuation networks, and sequential influence diagrams. We also discuss the use of continuous chance and decision variables, including continuous conditionally deterministic variables. Finally, we discuss some of the modeling challenges faced in representing decision problems in practice and some software that is currently available.     

How first-generation students learn to navigate education systems: a case study of First Graduate

Students from underrepresented groups who seek to become the first in their family to attend college confront economically and racially stratified education systems. This article reports findings from an evaluation of First Graduate, an organization that offers college advising, mentoring, tutoring, and case management to first-generation students starting in seventh grade. We highlight three systems that youth say they encountered on their pathway to college: open enrollment, course taking, and college admissions. We describe how youth navigated these systems and the roles that adults played in support. Our conclusion discusses implications for how after-school programs can support first-generation students.     

Differences in Life Expectancy Between Self-Employed Workers and Paid Employees when Retirement Pensioners: Evidence from Spanish Social Security Records

European Journal of Population - The aim of this paper is to examine differences in life expectancy (LE) between self-employed (SE) and paid employee (PE) workers when they become retirement...     

UNCERTAINTY,PERSISTENCE, AND HETEROGENEITY: A PANEL DATA PERSPECTIVE

The purpose of this paper is to review newly developed identification and estimation tools that are relevant for the analysis of dynamic dependence structures of income risk. I present an application to nonlinear permanent–transitory models of household income using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), but the empirical approach is more generally applicable. Household income processes are of interest because the size of shocks, the nature of their persistence, and cross‐household heterogeneity are all important to understand how income inequality varies with age and cohort and how it translates into consumption inequality. I argue that going from an econometrics of autocovariances to an econometrics of flexible distributions is feasible and has the potential to reveal richer aspects of risk—for example, nonlinear persistence of unusual shocks.