Relationship between sarcopenia and fracture risks in obese postmenopausal women

It is known that obesity is inversely correlated with fracture risk. It remains unclear if a low muscle mass (sarcopenia) modulates the relationship between obesity and bone mass density. Twenty-seven obese women were matched for total fat mass (+/- 0.5 kg) and age (+/- 4 yrs) and divided in 3 equal groups: class II sarcopenic, class I sarcopenic, and nonsarcopenic. Body composition (DXA) and dietary intake were measured. Our results suggest that obesity may offer some protection against osteoporosis, even in sarcopenic postmenopausal women. However, further studies are needed to examine the actual implication of these results on a clinical standpoint.     

First Exits from the Swedish Labor Market Due to Disability

Nowadays, with an increasingly aging population, an increasing proportion of the population on disability benefits, and an implicitly lower level of economic output and foregone tax revenue, disability has become a major public policy issue in many countries. Estimating both single risk and competing risks models on a Swedish longitudinal database, this study analyzes the risk of exit from the labor market due to disability at a certain age, conditional on having remained in the labor force until that age. The explanatory variables did not have identical coefficients across destination types. For example, the estimated single risk model shows that a higher level of education decreased the hazard of exiting the labor market with a disability pension, while the estimated competing risks model suggests that a higher level of education increased the hazard of exiting with a partial disability pension, but it decreased the hazard of exiting with a full disability pension.

The allocation of time and goods in household activities: A test of separability

In this paper, we test for the weak separability hypothesis imposed by the household production model between goods and time inputs used in the production of different commodities. Our data come from a French survey which reports both expenditures and time that households devote to some activities. The results allow us to show that the weak separability assumption cannot be rejected only when households are strongly time constrained. In the opposite case, home time uses are found to be nonseparable. Received: 24 November 1999/Accepted: 16 November 2000     

Pension design and gender: Analyses of developed and developing countries

In this article the authors examine different ways of organizing and financing pension systems in China, France, Ghana, Jordan, Mexico, Poland, and Sweden. They explore the advantages and disadvantages of the combinations of different features with special reference to gender differences. Men and women have different patterns of work history, with women usually having a lower participation rate in the formal labor market, including interrupted career in response to child rearing, as well as lower wages in general. Women have a longer life expectancy than men and are more likely to become widows than men are to become widowers. These differences influence the financial resources available to women in old age, depending on how a pension system is designed.     

Santé mentale et travail,entre plaisir et souffrance: quand le normal devient pathologique

Mental health in the workplace introduces a basic viewpoint to better understand the actual dynamic relationship between the individual and work in highly productive organisations. It is particularly visible in a hypermodern society, that is, a society where performance and productivity count on the workers’ free involvement and creativity. Concepts of mental health, social norms, normality and pathology, work and organisation are first defined. The main argument is then developed around the different dimensions describing the neoproductivist trend in many societies, in the occidental world but also in many others countries, like Japan, to name one. This neoproductivist ideology, based on neoliberal economy and the neo-Taylorist social approach of work organisation, produces for many workers a syndrome called ‘hyperactivity’ at work. There is a specific combination of great demands on the workers’ performance and involvement in the organisation on one end, and a great appeal to excellence and self-development on the other end. Studies in different organisations, unions, highly-technological enterprises, a television station and universities indicate that this syndrome of hyperactivity comes to be the norm, the reference, for the majority. Performance union leaders, leading scientists, television performers, highly-skilled technicians are some examples of people who become models of working behaviour in the workplace. This new ideology has consequences in all spheres of society and calls for a critical appraisal and research: clinical sociology can be a proper tool to address this challenge.     

Subsidizing “Stayers”? Effects of a Norwegian Child Care Reform on Marital Stability

Since January 1999, all parents in Norway with children aged 1 to 3 years who do not attend publicly subsidized day care are eligible for “cash‐for‐care” (CFC). One important purpose of the reform is to enable parents to spend more time with their children. We analyze whether the CFC reform has affected marital stability, using individual register data covering information on 130,265 observations of married couples. The results from both a natural experiment approach and from a matching procedure indicate that the CFC reform has reduced the likelihood of marital dissolution in the short run.     

The Thin End of the Wedge: Foreign Women Professors as Double Strangers in Academia

The impetus for this study was an observation that many of the first women to obtain chairs at European universities were foreigners. Our initial attempt to provide a statistical picture of this proved impossible, because there were numerous problems deciding the contents of such concepts as ‘first’, ‘university professor’ and ‘foreigner’. We have therefore focused on four life stories. It turns out that being a ‘double stranger’— a woman in a masculine profession and a foreigner — is not, as one might think, a cumulative disadvantage. Rather, it seems that these two types of strangeness might cancel out one another, permitting these women a greater degree of success than was allowed their native sisters. This situation however, provides little psychological comfort, hence the metaphor of the wedge: opening the doors but suffering from double pressure.     

Encompassing and indirect inference

Summary In the literature on encompassing [see e.g. Mizon-Richard (1986), Hendry-Richard (1990), Florens-Hendry-Richard (1987)] there is a basic contradiction: on the one hand it is said that it is not possible to assume that the true distribution belongs to one of two competing modelM ₁ andM ₂, but, on the other hand, this assumption is made in the study of encompassing tests. In this paper we first propose a formal definition of encompassing, we then briefly examine the properties of this notion and we propose encompassing tests which do not assume that the true distribution belongs toM ₁ orM ₂; these tests are based on simulations. Finally, generalizing an idea used in the definition of an encompassing test (the GET test) we propose a new kind of inference, called indirect inference, which allows for estimation and test procedures when the model is too complicated to be treated by usual methods (for instance maximum likelihood methods); the only assumption made on the model is that it can be simulated, which seems to be a minimal requirement. This new class of inference methods can be used in a large number of domains and some examples are given. The present paper is based on Gouriéroux-Monfort (1992), and Gouriéroux-Monfort-Renault (1993), respectively GM and GMR hereafter. Invited paper at the Conference on ?Statistical Tests: Methodology and Econometric Applications?, held in Bologna, Italy, 27–28 May 1993.     

Mortality by cause in the USSR in 1970–1987: the reconstruction of time series

This paper is the first step in an exploration of Soviet cause-of-death statistics which became accessible after 1986. Its main aim is the reconstruction of consistent annual series for the period 1970–1987 in spite of changes in cause-of-death classification caused by the 1980 revision of the Soviet nosological system. In a second part, the series thus reconstructed are analysed to describe the main features of the evolution of mortality during these two decades, using first standardized mortality rates for several very important specific causes and, second, using a method of decomposition of life expectancy changes. For the first time, trends in causes of death are thus shown for the crucial period where life expectancy has grown again after two decades of regression.Cet article constitue la première étape d'une exploration des statistiques soviétiques de décès par cause, devenues disponibles à partir de 1986. Il a pour principal objectif la reconstruction de séries annuelles cohérentes pour la période 1970–1987, en traitant les ruptures introduites par la révision de la Classification soviétique de 1980. La méthode utilisée pour ce faire est exposée dans la première partie. Dans une deuxième partie, les résultats ainsi obtenus permettent de décrire les grands traits de l'évolution de la mortalité au cours de ces deux décennies, d'abord sur la base de taux comparatifs de mortalité pour des causes spécifiques, puis grâce à une décomposition des variations de l'espérance de vie. Pour la première fois on peut ainsi suivre l'évolution des causes de décès dans une période déterminante au cours de laquelle, après deux décennies de recul, les progrès de l'espérance de vie ont repris.     

Economic subsystems and the occupational structure: A comparison of Hungary and the United States

This article proposes a new way of looking at social inequality in socialist and nonsocialist societies. In the first section, a conceptual framework for recovering houseworkers for class analysis is introduced, and a historically-based argument for representing them in the occupational structure is advanced. The second section reviews the evolution of social cleavages from the preindustrial era to the present day and discusses the implications of using the same occupational classification scheme to describe both socialist and nonsocialist societies. This occupational classification is illustrated in the concluding section of the paper by reanalyzing data from Hungary and the United States. The results provide new insights into the structure of gender-based inequalities and the effects of socialism on the occupational division of labor.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 84th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, August 1989.