How Sunday, price, and social norms influence donation behaviour

We describe a natural field experiment investigating donation behaviour. The setting was an art gallery where donations could be deposited into a transparent box in the foyer. Two aspects of the donation environment were manipulated: signs on the donation box and the initial contents of the box. We used three sign treatments: a control with no sign, a sign that thanked donors, and a sign that indicated donations would be matched. We used two initial contents treatments: one with relatively little money ($50) and one with four times as much. The average donation per donor was significantly larger in the $200 treatments but this was offset by a decrease in the propensity to donate. In the matching treatments donations were significantly larger both at the per donor and per visitor level. A control variable turned out to have the largest influence on donation behaviour: the day of the week. The average donation per visitor was 51% higher on Sundays, when compared to every other day of the week.     

Net migration and migration effectiveness: A comparison between Australia and the United Kingdom, 1976–96

This paper explores the impact of net migration in Australia and the United Kingdom using measures of migration effectiveness computed from period-age migration data for four consecutive five-year periods. Results reported in Part 1 of this paper (Stillwellet al. 2000) suggest that while the overall effectiveness of net migration at the scale of city regions has declined over the twenty-year period in both countries, important geographical variations are evident. Part 2 considers how patterns of migration effectiveness vary by age and presents a single classification of all the city regions on the basis of age-specific effectiveness. More detailed analysis includes spatial patterns for particular age groups and net migration profiles of selected regions. Cohort effects are shown to be important for explaining changes between time periods in these regions.     

Making sense of census data: A components analysis of employment change among indigenous Australians

The 1996 Census count of indigenous Australians included a substantial number of individuals who were not recorded as indigenous by the previous census. This paper considers the implications of this for interpreting change in employment numbers. Two adjustments are made to employment change data. First, reverse survival of the 1996 population is applied to reconstruct 1991 employment figures. Second, administrative data are used to discount employment generated by participation in labour market programs. The effect is to substantially deflate the strong intercensal employment growth apparent from census counts with the conclusion that the rate of indigenous employment in the mainstream labour market has fallen.     

TEACHING EFFECTIVENESS IN THE DECISION SCIENCES: THE USE OF STUDENT EVALUATIONS

This article presents the results of an AIDS-sponsored investigation of teaching effectiveness in the decision sciences. Two national samples were employed in the study: a sample of 247 business school deans and a sample of 3,292 students from 32 different business schools. Included among the findings are that 87 percent of the deans responding indicate they require some sort of faculty teaching effectiveness evaluation, and that great care must be exercised when interpreting student ratings of an individual instructor's teaching effectiveness.     

EFFECTS OF EXPOSURE ON PREVALENCE AND CUMULATIVE RELATIVE RISK: DIRECT AND INDIRECT EFFECTS IN A RECURSIVE HAZARD MODEL

This paper outlines decomposition methods for assessing how exposure affects prevalence and cumulative relative risk. Let     x     denote a vector of exogenous covariates and suppose that a single dimension of time   t   governs two event processes     T ₁  and   T ₂.    If the occurrence of the event     T ₁    determines entry into the risk of the event     T ₂,    then subgroup variation in     T ₁    will affect the prevalence     T ₂,    even if subgroups in the population are otherwise identical. Although researchers often acknowledge this phenomenon, the literature has not provided procedures to assess the magnitude of an exposure effect of     T ₁    on the prevalence of     T ₂.    We derive decompositions that assess how variation in exposure generated by direct and indirect effects of the covariates     x     affect measures of absolute and relative prevalence of     T ₂.    We employ a parametric but highly flexible specification for baseline hazard for the     T ₁  and   T ₂    processes and use the resulting parametric proportional hazard model to illustrate the direct and indirect effects of family structure when     T ₁    is age at first sexual intercourse and     T ₂    is age at a premarital first birth for data on a cohort of non-hispanic white U.S. women.