Determinants of outcome in the pathways through care for children hearing voices

Auditory hallucination, or hearing voices, is generally associated with psychopathology. In psychiatry it is inter-preted as a symptom of an illness, with no connection to the individual's life history. Voice hallucinations in childhood occur in a variety of contexts and have variable long-term outcomes. Little is known about the course of the experience. In this study, 80 children and youngsters hearing voices were interviewed on four occasions over a period of three years about the content of the voices and their overall experience of voices, focusing on the determinants for a promising outcome in the pathways through care. The results indicate that the need for care in the context of the experience of voices is associated not only with high levels of problem behaviour and associated negative symptoms of psychosis, but also, independently, with an appraisal of the voices in terms of anxiety, depression, dissociation and frequency of occurrence. In 60 per cent of the participants the voices disappeared during the three-year research period. The relationship between the disappearance of voices and the course of mental health treatment is, however, ambiguous.     

Identification of Nonseparable Triangular Models With Discrete Instruments

We study the identification through instruments of a nonseparable function that relates a continuous outcome to a continuous endogenous variable. Using group and dynamical systems theories, we show that full identification can be achieved under strong exogeneity of the instrument and a dual monotonicity condition, even if the instrument is discrete. When identified, the model is also testable. Our results therefore highlight the identifying power of strong exogeneity when combined with monotonicity restrictions.     

CREDIT CONSTRAINTS AND THE CYCLICALITY OF R&D INVESTMENT: EVIDENCE FROM FRANCE

We use a French firm‐level data set containing 13,000 firms over the period 1994–2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms’ R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) R&D investment is countercyclical without credit constraints, but it becomes procyclical as firms face tighter credit constraints; (ii) this result is only observed for firms in sectors that depend more heavily upon external finance, or that are characterized by a low degree of asset tangibility; (iii) in more credit‐constrained firms, R&D investment plummets during recessions but does not increase proportionally during upturns.     

TRANSFERABLE CONTROL

In this paper, we introduce the notion of transferable control, defined as a situation where one party (the principal, say) can transfer control to another party (the agent) but cannot commit herself to do so. One theoretical foundation for this notion builds on the distinction between formal and real authority introduced by Aghion and Tirole, in which the actual exercise of authority may require noncontractible information, absent which formal control rights are vacuous. We use this notion to study the extent to which control transfers may allow an agent to reveal information regarding his ability or willingness to cooperate with the principal in the future. We show that the distinction between contractible and transferable control can drastically influence how learning takes place: with contractible control, information about the agent can often be acquired through revelation mechanisms that involve communication and message‐contingent control allocations; in contrast, when control is transferable but not contractible, it can be optimal to transfer control unconditionally and learn instead from the way in which the agent exercises control. (JEL: C70, C72, D23, L2)