He who pays the piper calls the tune? Setting the stage for an informed discourse on third-party funding of academic business research

Review of Managerial Science - Third-party funding of academic research has grown rapidly in its scope and impact. However, several forces demand greater attention to potential opportunities,...     

Adolescent Female Offenders’ Subjective Experiences of How Peers Influence Norm-Breaking Behavior

Delinquent peers have a strong influence on adolescent delinquent behavior. However, few studies have investigated adolescents’, and in particular young females’, own perspectives of the role of peers on their delinquent behavior. The purpose of the present study was to explore how young female offenders described their delinquent behavior and more specifically the role they assign to peer relations in committing or avoiding delinquent acts. Nine female adolescents, sentenced to youth service, were interviewed, and the data was analyzed using the Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR) method. The results showed that committing crimes and taking drugs with peers were portrayed as a way for the female delinquents to socialize. Delinquent and pro-social activities with peers appear to serve similar developmental functions in the sense that it is described to fulfill the same developmental needs. The young offenders also described collectively created pressures and norms in the peer group as the main contributing factor to their norm-breaking behavior, where they described being both recipients and producers of influence in the group. Another important finding was that the female offenders showed an awareness of the importance of pro-social peers and the need to eliminate delinquent friends from their peer network in order to help them refrain from deviant behavior. Implications for prevention and intervention are discussed.     

Spectral Estimation of Covolatility from Noisy Observations Using Local Weights

We propose localized spectral estimators for the quadratic covariation and the spot covolatility of diffusion processes, which are observed discretely with additive observation noise. The appropriate estimation for time‐varying volatilities is based on an asymptotic equivalence of the underlying statistical model to a white‐noise model with correlation and volatility processes being constant over small time intervals. The asymptotic equivalence of the continuous‐time and discrete‐time experiments is proved by a construction with linear interpolation in one direction and local means for the other. The new estimator outperforms earlier non‐parametric methods in the literature for the considered model. We investigate its finite sample size characteristics in simulations and draw a comparison between various proposed methods.     

Warum fast alle das deutsche Rentensystem ungerecht finden, aber trotzdem nichts daran ändern möchten

As Germany’s representative 2006 Survey of the International Social Justice Project clarifies, intergenerational justice and financing of future pensions are seen as central problems of Germany’s state pension system by a vast majority. Despite this common perception, proposals for reform that address the issue of intergenerational justice directly at the institutional level are extremely unpopular. Moreover, concrete constitutive elements of the state pensions system, like the amount of contributions, the amount of benefits and the principle of status-conservation are seen as largely fair. As mechanisms driving this preference for the status quo, anchoring effects, loss aversion and socialization are proposed and tested empirically via factorial survey methods. Results indicate that arbitrary settings (anchors) determine what people regard as a just pension irrespective of individual justice standards. Furthermore, loss aversion can help explain why individual worries about economic status in old age overlay consideration of exchange relations between the young and the old within the pensions system. As a result, potential benefits of reform are hardly recognized. Finally, former institutional settings prove to be formative for ideas of justice in the long run. Even under the condition of comparable economic interests, Germans from the former GDR expect a more egalitarian distribution of pensions, whereas Western Germans strongly favor allocation according to status criteria.     

Obesity and hospitalization over the adult life course: does duration of exposure increase use?

Consistent with a new genre of research on life-course analyses of health-service use, this study explores the consequences of long-term exposure to a risk factor. Drawing from cumulative-disadvantage theory, the study examines whether obesity, especially chronic obesity, increases hospitalization admission and length of stay. Analyses make use of hospital records abstracted over 20 years from a national survey of adults 41 to 77 years of age at baseline (n = 4,574). Multiple measures of body weight are used to calculate adult obesity duration. Results reveal that obesity increased hospital admissions and length of stay over the 20 years studied. Among persons obese at any time during the study, years of obesity also led to longer stays. The findings highlight the utility of measures of the duration of risk exposure for both life-course studies of health and tests of cumulative-disadvantage theory.     

Differences and similarities in monetary benefits for informal care in old and new EU member states

This article presents an overview of the monetary benefits available in the context of long‐term care provided by family or other informal carers in 11 old and 10 new EU member states. All but one country in our sample offer at least some monetary benefits that can be used to help finance informal care. Old EU member states tend to direct benefits to individuals in need of care, whereas new EU member states place more emphasis on benefits for carers. Among new EU member states, monetary benefits are less often means‐tested and tend to be lower compared with benefits in old EU member states. Because social policies in many countries increasingly rely on monetary benefits rather than on benefits in kind and because the share of informal care in the overall provision of elderly care will scarcely decline, monetary benefit incentives for labour market participation need to be carefully monitored.     

In Vino Pecunia? The Association Between Beverage-Specific Drinking Behavior and Wages

The positive association between moderate alcohol consumption and wages is well documented in the economic literature. Positive health effects as well as networking mechanisms serve as explanations for the “alcohol–income puzzle.” Using individual-based microdata from the SOEP for 2006, we confirm that this relationship exists for Germany as well. More importantly, we shed light on the alcohol–income puzzle by analyzing, for the first time, the association between beverage-specific drinking behavior and wages. In our analysis, we disentangle the general wage effect of drinking into diverse effects for different types of drinkers. Mincerian estimates reveal significant and positive relationships between wine drinkers and wages as well as between multiple beverage drinkers and wages. When splitting the sample into age groups, the “drinking gain” disappears for employees under the age of 35 and increases in size and significance for higher age groups. We also find a “beer gain” for the oldest age group and male residents of rural areas as well as a “cocktail gain” for residents of urban areas. Several explanations for our empirical results are discussed in view of the likelihood that the alcohol–income puzzle is a multicausal phenomenon.

Toddlers Involve Their Caregiver to Help Another Person in Need

Three experiments with 18‐ to 35‐month‐old children (n = 169) studied toddler–caregiver interactions when being confronted with another person in need. In particular, we explored whether toddlers would request their caregiver to help a needy other when they are not able to help themselves. Children observed another person who needed help to accomplish a task, but were either not able to provide help as the object was out of reach (Experiment 1) or because an obstacle prevented children from interacting with the other person (Experiments 2, 2b). The experiments revealed the same developmental trend with 2.5‐year‐olds selectively involving their caregiver to help the needy other. The results are interpreted in terms of toddlers’ motivation to see others helped and with respect to their developing ability to actively involve others to regulate their emotions.     

Permuting incomplete paired data: a novel exact and asymptotic correct randomization test

Various statistical tests have been developed for testing the equality of means in matched pairs with missing values. However, most existing methods are commonly based on certain distributional assumptions such as normality, 0-symmetry or homoscedasticity of the data. The aim of this paper is to develop a statistical test that is robust against deviations from such assumptions and also leads to valid inference in case of heteroscedasticity or skewed distributions. This is achieved by applying a clever randomization approach to handle missing data. The resulting test procedure is not only shown to be asymptotically correct but is also finitely exact if the distribution of the data is invariant with respect to the considered randomization group. Its small sample performance is further studied in an extensive simulation study and compared to existing methods. Finally, an illustrative data example is analysed.     

Heterosexual,Homosexual, and Bisexual Men’s Pupillary Responses to Persons at Different Stages of Sexual Development

This study investigated whether pupil size during the viewing of images of adults and children reflects the sexual orientation of heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual men (n = 100, M_age = 22). More specifically, we explored whether this measure corresponds with sexual age preferences for adults over children in nonpedophilic men. In general, results across three experiments, in which observers freely viewed or rated the sexual appeal of person images, suggest that pupil dilation to sexual stimuli is an indicator of sexual orientation toward adults. Heterosexual men’s pupils dilated most strongly to adults of the other sex, homosexual men dilated most strongly to adults of the same sex, and bisexual men showed an intermediate pattern. Dilation to adults was substantially stronger than dilation to younger age groups. Sexual appeal ratings for images of adults and children also correlated with pupil responses, suggesting a direct link between pupil dilation and sexual interest. These findings provide support for pupil dilation as a measure of sex- and age-specific sexual preferences.