Macroeconomic conditions, institutional factors and demographic structure: What causes welfare caseloads?

Some of the possible determinants of changes observed in welfare caseloads are analysed in this study. The paper attempts to explain variations in welfare caseloads on the basis of four different factors: macroeconomic conditions, interactions with other income maintenance programmes, changes in the programme's parameters and changes in the demographic structure. Different models are tested by applying time series techniques. The data employed are of an administrative nature and cover the whole period that the Madrid programme has been in operation. The results show that the effects of both unemployment and institutional variables are strong and significant. Macroeconomic effects on caseloads could be offset or reinforced by changes in unemployment protection and reforms of the programme's parameters. The significant effects found for the share of lone-parent applicants also show that demographic shifts could shape the trends of welfare rolls regardless of the changes in unemployment or the implementation of institutional reforms. The authors would like to thank Juan Gabriel Rodríguez, Minoru Kunizaki, Miguel Angel Malo and three anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. Financial and technical support from the Spanish Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Inter-ministerial Commission on Science and Technology (SEC 2001-0746) and the Social Services Department of the Madrid Government is also gratefully acknowledged. Responsible editor: Christian Dustmann.     

Older Workers: Who are the working poor in the U.S.?

With data from the 2000 Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the purpose of this study was to provide a profile of older workers who live poverty, and to compare the demographic, financial, employment, and health attributes of such individuals to similar persons not living in poverty. This study found that 3.5% of employed individuals between the ages of 51 and 61 belonged to the class of working poor. The results of the multivariate logistic regression analyses indicated that the older working poor were more likely to be non-White, less educated, non-married, and had lower levels of net worth than the working non-poor. They were more likely to be employed part time and were less likely to be covered by employee-sponsored health insurance.     

UNIONS, PLANTS, JOBS, AND WORKERS

The relationship between unions and their members is an important, yet neglected, subject in recent studies of the sociology of work. This study develops and tests a theory of union satisfaction and participation that combines recent research in the sociology of work with previous explanations of union satisfaction and participation provided by industrial relations researchers, in an attempt to understand the relationship between unions, plants, jobs, and workers in U.S. manufacturing industries. This theory predicts that union members will be satisfied with their unions and participate more in them if there are extensive ties between workers, employers, and unions. These ties stem from the focus of labor/management relations in particular, and class struggles in general, on market outcomes and the historical linkage of union membership with employment in the United States. The theory also predicts that unions them-selves act as ties to specific work settings and that union participation is a forum for voicing dissatisfaction with specific characteristics of workers' jobs. Testing these predictions is complicated by contradictory nature of the structure and organization of work in advanced industrial societies. The analysis provides qualified support for this theory, with data drawn from more unions, plants, and union members than have been used to date. In addition to discussing modifications to the theory and analysis presented here, the study includes a discussion of its implications for the future of unionization and the organization of work, in light of declines in union membership, increased efforts to decertify unions and resist union organizing efforts, and deindustrialization in the United States.     

Obstacles to research analysis

1. The homeless population is composed of subgroups with varying mental health status and needs. 2. Different research designs and data collection methods require differing psychosocial abilities and skills on the part of the respondent. 3. As a result of the psychosocial abilities required and method of sampling, studies are likely to either underrepresent or overrepresent the severely mentally ill homeless. 4. Caution must be exercised in drawing conclusions from any one study.     

Design and analysis of variable fidelity experimentation applied to engine valve heat treatment process design

Summary.  When experimentation on a real system is expensive, data are often collected by using cheaper, lower fidelity surrogate systems. The paper concerns response surface methods in the context of variable fidelity experimentation. We propose the use of generalized least squares to generate the predictions. We also present perhaps the first optimal designs for variable fidelity experimentation, using an extension of the expected integrated mean-squared error criterion. Numerical tests are used to compare the performance of the method with alternatives and to investigate the robustness to incorporated assumptions. The method is applied to automotive engine valve heat treatment process design in which real world data were mixed with data from two types of computer simulation.