Privatization, provision, and targeting: Trends and policy implications for social security in the United States

This paper examines several important trends in the changing structure of social security in the United States and their impact on the elderly in different income groups. These trends involve the shifting public/private mix of retirement income, the declining replacement rates of public benefits, and reforms for targeting benefits by age. An analysis of these trends suggests that (a) social security will provide declining economic support for those most in need; (b) middle- and upper-income groups will have a diminished stake in social security, reducing the programme's political base of support; (c) increasing reliance on occupational pensions will heighten the need for greater public regulation of private schemes; (d) an unplanned two-tiered system of pensions will emerge, with the first tier consisting of a whittled-down version of social security to provide a predominant source of retirement income for low-income wage earners and the second tier consisting of private pensions for middle- and upper-income groups.     

Working Together Apart

In this paper we report upon the development and operation of a “street-level” response to the problems of interprofessional joint working in providing appropriate care for elderly people living in one Scottish city. The “exchange system”, as it was known in the locale, was a mechanism for co-ordinating the movement of elderly people between the geriatric, psychiatric, and residential services within the city in response to changes in the needs of the individual elderly person, and the needs of service providers. The importance of the scheme stemmed from the fact that it was not imposed on professionals' work, but rather that it developed out of that work. By focusing on the operation of interprofessional joint working at the street level we draw attention to those complexities involved in such work which are often overlooked in the broad policy statements on joint working which have emerged from government departments, and health and social services agencies. Policy makers and analysts alike have largely ignored the meaning and consequences of joint working at the level of professionals' actual work, and it is this lacuna in the literature that the paper seeks to address. The paper concludes with an appeal to researchers and practitioners to describe any such schemes of whatever nature operating in their own locales. In so doing a corpus of knowledge looking critically at the experience of interservice and interprofessional collaboration at the street level may emerge which would inform broad policy statements.     

Talking about Beauty: A Study of Everyday Aesthetics among Low‐Income Citizens of Milan

This paper reports on research undertaken into the aesthetics of the everyday. As well as the subject matter of aesthetic philosophy, art criticism and of the sociology of art, beauty, and beautiful are of course very ordinary matters too. To shed light on the meanings of beauty as used in everyday settings and in natural language, we use the data collected in a study conducted with a group of low‐income residents of the city of Milan. In this study we were interested in analyzing their lifestyle in terms of their relationship with aesthetics, i.e., with “beautiful” objects and/or experiences. Participants' self‐reported aesthetic appreciations suggest that conceptions of “beauty” are used as devices to narrate pieces of identity, memories, experiences, etc. Their aesthetic judgements take on an anthropological function, creating a framework of meanings that help the participants make sense of the world of objects and of their own lives with/through them.     

Peer effects and intentional entrepreneurial behaviour: A systematic literature review and research agenda

What role peers play in individuals’ decisions to become entrepreneurs and to what extent peer effects play a role in influencing behaviours at the various stages of business venturing are important questions for scholars and policymakers. This systematic review takes stock of the recent additions to the literature around the phenomenon of peer influence in entrepreneurship. The review identified 2894 documents which were then narrowed down through three consecutive filtering stages. We thematically analysed the final sample of 27 empirical studies that shed light on how individual peers influence the process and outcomes of these individuals’ entrepreneurial intentions and behaviour, allowing for critical analysis. We propose a conceptual schema of social influence that occurs in interactions among entrepreneurial individuals within business venturing and across the three stages of pre-formation, formation and growth. Our framework reconciles the conceptual classification around discovering, evaluating and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities with the mechanisms of social influence affecting entrepreneurial behaviours. Grounded in the findings of the literature review, this framework synthesizes peer influence in entrepreneurship with the tripartite distinction of the behavioural motives recognized in contemporary theories of social influence. We suggest promising directions for further research on how interactions with peers might affect individuals’ entrepreneurial behaviours.     

Modification of the kolmogorov-smirnov test for the erlang-2 distribution

An adjusted Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic and critical values are developed for the Erlang-2 probability distribution using data from Monte Carlo simulations. The process used is similar to that of Stephens in the 1970s. The test statistic produced features of compactness and ease of implementation. It is quite accurate for sample sizes as low as ten.     

Accurate and efficient numerical calculation of stable densities via optimized quadrature and asymptotics

Stable distributions are an important class of infinitely divisible probability distributions, of which two special cases are the Cauchy distribution and the normal distribution. Aside from a few special cases, the density function for stable distributions has no known analytic form and is expressible only through the variate’s characteristic function or other integral forms. In this paper, we present numerical schemes for evaluating the density function for stable distributions, its gradient, and distribution function in various parameter regimes of interest, some of which had no preexisting efficient method for their computation. The novel evaluation schemes consist of optimized generalized Gaussian quadrature rules for integral representations of the density function, complemented by asymptotic expansions near various values of the shape and argument parameters. We report several numerical examples illustrating the efficiency of our methods. The resulting code has been made available online.     

Migration is the Driving Force of Rapid Aging in Puerto Rico: A Research Brief

Population Research and Policy Review - The combined effects of declining fertility and increased longevity have accelerated population aging in different parts of the world. Unlike other...