MATERNAL EDUCATION,HOME ENVIRONMENTS,AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

We study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children’s cognitive achievement, behavioral problems, grade repetition, and obesity, using matched data from the female participants of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and their children. We address the endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting it with variation in schooling costs during the mother’s adolescence. Our results show substantial intergenerational returns to education. Our data set allows us to study a large array of channels which may transmit the effect of maternal education to the child, including family environment and parental investments at different ages of the child. We discuss policy implications and relate our findings to the literature on intergenerational mobility.     

The structure of global centrality measures

The aim of this article is to identify and analyse the logic and structure of centrality measures applied to social networks. On the basis of the article by Borgatti and Everett, identifying the latent functions of centrality, we first use a survey of personal networks with 450 cases to perform an empirical study of the differences and correspondences between degree, closeness and betweenness centrality in personal networks. Then, we examine the correspondences between the three global indicators in each type of centrality: the maximum value, the mean value and the hierarchy or centralization. The results provide a better understanding of the centrality indicators of networks and the reality that they express in an empirical context.     

Improved Exponential Type Estimators of the Mean of a Sensitive Variable in the Presence of Nonsensitive Auxiliary Information

Recently, Koyuncu et al. (2013 Koyuncu, N., Gupta, S., Sousa, R. (2014). Exponential type estimators of the mean of a sensitive variable in the presence of non-sensitive auxiliary information. Communications in Statistics- Simulation and Computation[PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) proposed an exponential type estimator to improve the efficiency of mean estimator based on randomized response technique. In this article, we propose an improved exponential type estimator which is more efficient than the Koyuncu et al. (2013 Koyuncu, N., Gupta, S., Sousa, R. (2014). Exponential type estimators of the mean of a sensitive variable in the presence of non-sensitive auxiliary information. Communications in Statistics- Simulation and Computation[PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) estimator, which in turn was shown to be more efficient than the usual mean estimator, ratio estimator, regression estimator, and the Gupta et al. (2012 Gupta, S., Shabbir, J., Sousa, R., Corte-Real, P. (2012). Regression estimation of the mean of a sensitive variable in the presence of auxiliary information. Communications in Statistics – Theory and Methods 41:2394–2404.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) estimator. Under simple random sampling without replacement (SRSWOR) scheme, bias and mean square error expressions for the proposed estimator are obtained up to first order of approximation and comparisons are made with the Koyuncu et al. (2013 Koyuncu, N., Gupta, S., Sousa, R. (2014). Exponential type estimators of the mean of a sensitive variable in the presence of non-sensitive auxiliary information. Communications in Statistics- Simulation and Computation[PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) estimator. A simulation study is used to observe the performances of these two estimators. Theoretical findings are also supported by a numerical example with real data. We also show how to, extend the proposed estimator to the case when more than one auxiliary variable is available.     

An Applied Comparison of Area-Level Linear Mixed Models in Small Area Estimation

This article reviews four area-level linear mixed models that borrow strength by exploiting the possible correlation among the neighboring areas or/and past time periods. Its main goal is to study if there are efficiency gains when a spatial dependence or/and a temporal autocorrelation among random-area effects are included into the models. The Fay–Herriot estimator is used as benchmark. A design-based simulation study based on real data collected from a longitudinal survey conducted by a statistical office is presented. Our results show that models that explore both spatial and chronological association considerably improve the efficiency of small area estimates.     

Global Leadership Management Talent

There is a lot of agreement today that managers and leaders are not exactly the same. Already in 1992 Edgar Schein said that leaders ＂create and change cultures, while managers and administrators live within them＂. Management and leadership capabilities however are necessary to create companies, make them grow and eventually consolidate them as successful global players. Management and leadership are thus two different types of talent and although we may be born with more or less intellectual potential, leadership and management capabilities need to be developed： leadership, management or entrepreneurship are not the resuk some of us being born with a particular gen, these things are the result of learning.     

The Harris Extended Exponential Distribution

A new lifetime distribution is proposed and studied. The Harris extended exponential is obtained from a mixture of the exponential and Harris distributions, which arises from a branching process. Several structural properties of the new distribution are discussed, including moments, generating function and order statistics. The new distribution can model data with increasing or decreasing failure rate. The shape of the hazard rate function is controlled by one of the added parameters in an uncomplicated manner. An application to a real dataset illustrates the usefulness of the new distribution.     

Evaluating Marginal Policy Changes and the Average Effect of Treatment for Individuals at the Margin

This paper develops methods for evaluating marginal policy changes. We characterize how the effects of marginal policy changes depend on the direction of the policy change, and show that marginal policy effects are fundamentally easier to identify and to estimate than conventional treatment parameters. We develop the connection between marginal policy effects and the average effect of treatment for persons on the margin of indifference between participation in treatment and nonparticipation, and use this connection to analyze both parameters. We apply our analysis to estimate the effect of marginal changes in tuition on the return to going to college.     

Job bust, baby bust?: Evidence from Spain

The unemployment rate in Spain has been exceptionally high for more than two decades by now. During the same period the fertility rate dropped dramatically reaching the lowest level in the world. In this study we look for evidence of a link between the `unemployment crisis' and the `fertility crisis' in Spain. We examine the factors that affect individuals' ages at marriage and childbirth, focusing on the effects of male employment status. Our results show that spells of non-employment have a strong negative effect on the hazard of marriage. We also find negative (but smaller) effects of part-time or temporal employment on the hazard of marriage. The estimated direct effects of joblessness and part-time work on birth hazards conditional on marriage are smaller and/or not significant for most birth intervals and sample groups. Simulations based on the estimated models confirm the potential for large `delaying' effects of joblessness on marriage. However, the delaying effect is not so large in simulations which control for the actual incidence of non-employment in the sample. Received: 7 January 1999/Accepted: 7 March 2000