Gaps in social protection for health care and long‐term care in Europe: Are the elderly faced with financial ruin?

While public expenditure on health care and long‐term care (LTC) has been monitored for many years in European countries, far less attention has been paid to the financial consequences for older people of private out‐of‐pocket (OOP) expenditure necessary to access such care. Employing representative cross‐sectional data on the elderly populations of 11 European countries in 2004 from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we find that OOP payments for health care and LTC are very common among the elderly across European countries and such expenditures impact significantly on disposable income: up to 95 per cent of the elderly make OOP payments for health care and 5 per cent for LTC, resulting in income reductions of between 5 and 10 per cent, respectively. Failure to prevent financial ruin, as a consequence of excessive OOP payments, is evident in 0.7 per cent of elderly households utilizing health care and 0.5 per cent of elderly households utilizing LTC. Those particularly concerned are the poor, women and the very old.     

Young Infants Match Facial and Vocal Emotional Expressions of Other Infants

Research has demonstrated that infants recognize emotional expressions of adults in the first half year of life. We extended this research to a new domain, infant perception of the expressions of other infants. In an intermodal matching procedure, 3.5‐ and 5‐month‐old infants heard a series of infant vocal expressions (positive and negative affect) along with side‐by‐side dynamic videos in which one infant conveyed positive facial affect and another infant conveyed negative facial affect. Results demonstrated that 5‐month‐olds matched the vocal expressions with the affectively congruent facial expressions, whereas 3.5‐month‐olds showed no evidence of matching. These findings indicate that by 5 months of age, infants detect, discriminate, and match the facial and vocal affective displays of other infants. Further, because the facial and vocal expressions were portrayed by different infants and shared no face–voice synchrony, temporal, or intensity patterning, matching was likely based on detection of a more general affective valence common to the face and voice.     

The Boston Vocation Bureau's First Counseling Staff

Although much has been written about Frank Parsons, the founder of the vocational guidance movement, little is known about the 1st counseling staff of the Vocation Bureau. Lucinda Wyman Prince, Ralph Albertson, and Philip Davis each deserve recognition for their role in founding vocation guidance as well as their civic contributions. This article describes the roles and contribution of the profession's 1st counselors.     

Assessing the Concept of the ‘Insecure‐Other’ Category in the Cassidy–Marvin Scheme: Changes Between 4 and 6 Years in the English and Romanian Adoptee Study

We set out to explore the meaning of the attachment categories in the Cassidy/Marvin strange situation procedure, as employed in the home, using data from a longitudinal study of children adopted into UK families up to the age of 42 months from Romanian institutions, and of adopted children without the experience of institutional care––both groups being assessed at 4 and 6 years of age. Inter‐rater reliability was found to be good. Security (meaning the use of the parent as a secure base and no negative behavior on reunion) was the modal categorical rating in both the institution‐reared and comparison groups, but the category of anomalous non‐normative behavior (meaning a lack of any ordered attachment behavior as covered by the standard ratings), previously labeled ‘insecure‐other’, was more common in the institution‐reared children. Because this was unassociated with the usual manifestations of insecurity (such as avoidance or resistance) and because it was largely evident in interactions with the stranger, it is concluded that the adjective ‘insecure’ was not appropriate. Although this ‘insecure‐other’ category was associated with disinhibited attachment as reported by parents (meaning a lack of differentiation among adults, a willingness to go off with strangers and a lack of checking back with parents in anxiety‐provoking situations), it did not prove to be a good index of disinhibited attachment because changes over time in the ‘insecure‐other’ category were not associated with changes in the rate of disinhibited attachment. Also, whereas the rate of ‘insecure‐other’ fell markedly in the institution‐reared group between 4 and 6 years of age, it rose in the comparison group, raising queries over its meaning.     

Enriching Resources for the Poor: Lessons from the Philippines

The paper provides an overview of the poverty situation in the Philippines, followed by a brief profile and assessment of two anti‐poverty programs: the Kapit‐Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan‐Comprehensive and Integrated Delivery of Social Services (KALAHI‐CIDSS) program and the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps). Official statistics disclose that the global economic crisis in 2008 adversely affected Filipino households, leading to higher levels of poverty especially in rural areas. In response, government introduced an Economic Resiliency Program with social protection as one component. Sixty‐six social protection programs were launched, including the two under review. KALAHI‐CIDSS and the 4Ps apply poverty reduction strategies that focus on the development of human and social capital, rather than economic capital. They involve processes and relationships that aim to improve the other dimensions of poverty, such as lack of access to opportunities or deprivation of basic human necessities. Qualitative and quantitative reports describe generally favorable outcomes from both programs. However, these gains at the household level need to be supported by relevant policy, enhanced public services and badly‐needed infrastructure programs from government, in order to sustain achievements culled from social protection programs and attain broader developmental impacts.     

Interplay between Friends' Aggression and Friendship Quality in the Development of Child Aggression during the Early School Years

The aim of this study was to investigate the unique and combined role of friendship quality and friends' aggression in regard to the persistence of young children's physical aggression from kindergarten to grade 2. The sample included 1555 children (808 girls) assessed annually using teacher ratings. Two theoretical perspectives (i.e., the social learning and the social bonding perspectives) served as frameworks to guide the analyses and interpret the results. In line with the social learning perspective, friends' aggression was related to a significant increase in children's physical aggression. However, in line with the social bonding perspective, good friendship quality played both a compensatory and a protective role, by, respectively, reducing children's initial level of physical aggression and by mitigating, albeit marginally, the associations between friends' and children's physical aggression. These results suggest that fostering a positive relationship between friends in the early school years may decrease physical aggression even if the friends are aggressive.     

Female Labor Supply,Human Capital,and Welfare Reform

We estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation—including education, and savings for women in the United Kingdom, exploiting tax and benefit reforms, and use it to analyze the effects of welfare policy. We find substantial elasticities for labor supply and particularly for lone mothers. Returns to experience, which are important in determining the longer‐term effects of policy, increase with education, but experience mainly accumulates when in full‐time employment. Tax credits are welfare improving in the U.K., increase lone‐mother labor supply and marginally reduce educational attainment, but the employment effects do not extend beyond the period of eligibility. Marginal increases in tax credits improve welfare more than equally costly increases in income support or tax cuts.     

The Political Economy of Moral Conflict: An Empirical Study of Learning and Law Enforcement Under Prohibition

The U.S. Prohibition experience shows a remarkable policy reversal. In only 14 years, a drastic shift in public opinion required two constitutional amendments. I develop and estimate a model of endogenous law enforcement, determined by beliefs about the Prohibition‐crime nexus and alcohol‐related moral views. In turn, the policy outcomes shape subsequent learning about Prohibition enforcement costs. I estimate the model through maximum likelihood on Prohibition Era city‐level data on police enforcement, crime, and alcohol‐related legislation. The model can account for the variation in public opinion changes, and the heterogeneous responses of law enforcement and violence across cities. Results show that a 15% increase in the homicide rate can be attributed to Prohibition enforcement. The subsequent learning‐driven adjustment of local law enforcement allowed for the alcohol market to rebound to 60% of its pre‐Prohibition size. I conclude with counterfactual exercises exploring the welfare implications of policy learning, prior beliefs, preference polarization, and alternative political environments. Results illustrate the importance of incorporating the endogenous nature of law enforcement into our understanding of policy failure and policy success.     

Cautious Expected Utility and the Certainty Effect

Many violations of the independence axiom of expected utility can be traced to subjects' attraction to risk‐free prospects. The key axiom in this paper, negative certainty independence ([Dillenberger, 2010]), formalizes this tendency. Our main result is a utility representation of all preferences over monetary lotteries that satisfy negative certainty independence together with basic rationality postulates. Such preferences can be represented as if the agent were unsure of how to evaluate a given lottery p; instead, she has in mind a set of possible utility functions over outcomes and displays a cautious behavior: she computes the certainty equivalent of p with respect to each possible function in the set and picks the smallest one. The set of utilities is unique in a well defined sense. We show that our representation can also be derived from a “cautious” completion of an incomplete preference relation.     

Entry and Exit in OTC Derivatives Markets

We develop a parsimonious model to study the equilibrium and socially optimal decisions of banks to enter, trade in, and possibly exit, an OTC market. Although we endow all banks with the same trading technology, banks' optimal entry and trading decisions endogenously lead to a realistic market structure composed of dealers and customers with distinct trading patterns. We decompose banks' entry incentives into incentives to hedge risk and incentives to make intermediation profits. We show that dealer banks enter more than is socially optimal. In the face of large negative shocks, they may also exit more than is socially optimal when markets are not perfectly resilient.