Réinterroger la relation entre école et mobilité sociale. Le cas des enfants d’agriculteurs et d’ouvriers dans l’Ouest

Till now, the relation between schooling and social mobility, a classical question in the sociology of education, has been approached through analyses of a structural sort, either by focusing on the functions that schools are supposed to fill or by adopting the timeless model of neoclassical economics. This approach does not examine all possible relations between schools and social mobility; nor does it see these relations in terms of a process. A study of the scholastic biographies of the children of farmers and workers in western France renews our conception of this relation. It shows that this relation mainly stems from a combination of quite heterogeneous elements, which we glimpse in these biographies.     

Repeated electoral competition over nonlinear income tax schedules

We consider a repeated electoral competition game between two parties, each representing a constituent with a given income level. Parties are unable to commit to a policy before the election; they choose a nonlinear income tax schedule once elected. In each period, citizens cast a vote either for the incumbent or for the challenger. We first show that there exist (pure strategy) subgame perfect equilibria where both parties choose the most-preferred tax schedule of their constituent, subject to the constraint that they are reelected. We characterize a specific class of these BPR (Best Policy with Reelection) equilibria in which one of the parties plays its constituent’s unconstrained optimal tax function. Equilibrium tax schedules are always piecewise linear. Depending on the income levels of the two parties’ constituents, we obtain either classical left-vs-right equilibria (where the poor vote for one party and the rich for the other one) or ends-against-the-middle equilibria (where both poor and rich vote for one party while the middle class votes for the other party). In both types of equilibria, both parties propose the same tax schedule to a subset of the population.     

Works Councils and Firm Productivity in France

This paper utilizes establishment-level data to explore the impact of works councils on firm productivity in France. A variety of empirical techniques is employed, including fixed effects and regression discontinuity designs, to identify this impact. We estimate the works council effect on productivity in union and nonunion settings, and investigate the extent to which alternative forms of worker voice and information sharing might substitute for the works council’s impact in production. We find no evidence of a positive impact of works councils on firm productivity in any of our results, and some limited evidence of a negative effect in some of the findings. There is no indication that estimated impacts on productivity vary with union status. However, a notable finding is that worker voice and information-sharing human resource practices are prevalent in French firms regardless of works council status, and are found to have positive and statistically significant effects on firm productivity.     

Bayesian penalized smoothing approaches in models specified using differential equations with unknown error distributions

A full Bayesian approach based on ordinary differential equation (ODE)-penalized B-splines and penalized Gaussian mixture is proposed to jointly estimate ODE-parameters, state function and error distribution from the observation of some state functions involved in systems of affine differential equations. Simulations inspired by pharmacokinetic (PK) studies show that the proposed method provides comparable results to the method based on the standard ODE-penalized B-spline approach (i.e. with the Gaussian error distribution assumption) and outperforms the standard ODE-penalized B-splines when the distribution is not Gaussian. This methodology is illustrated on a PK data set.     

Sense of belonging in secondary schools: a survey of LGB and heterosexual students in Flanders

This study focuses on differences in sense of belonging between lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) and heterosexual students. Data from 1,745 secondary school students were collected with an online survey. Step-wise multiple regression analyses was used to investigate the relationship between sexual orientation and sense of school belonging. The results show that sexual orientation has an impact on sense of belonging for girls, but not for boys. Perceived discrimination and LGB friendliness of the school appeared to be important indicators of sense of belonging for all the respondents, irrespective of their sexual orientation.     

NUSAP Method for Evaluating the Data Quality in a Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment Model for Salmonella in the Pork Production Chain

The numeral unit spread assessment pedigree (NUSAP) system was implemented to evaluate the quality of input parameters in a quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) model for Salmonella spp. in minced pork meat. The input parameters were grouped according to four successive exposure pathways: (1) primary production (2) transport, holding, and slaughterhouse, (3) postprocessing, distribution, and storage, and (4) preparation and consumption. An inventory of 101 potential input parameters was used for building the QMRA model. The characteristics of each parameter were defined using a standardized procedure to assess (1) the source of information, (2) the sampling methodology and sample size, and (3) the distributional properties of the estimate. Each parameter was scored by a panel of experts using a pedigree matrix containing four criteria (proxy, empirical basis, method, and validation) to assess the quality, and this was graphically represented by means of kite diagrams. The parameters obtained significantly lower scores for the validation criterion as compared with the other criteria. Overall strengths of parameters related to the primary production module were significantly stronger compared to the other modules (the transport, holding, and slaughterhouse module, the processing, distribution, and storage module, and the preparation and consumption module). The pedigree assessment contributed to select 20 parameters, which were subsequently introduced in the QMRA model. The NUSAP methodology and kite diagrams are objective tools to discuss and visualize the quality of the parameters in a structured way. These two tools can be used in the selection procedure of input parameters for a QMRA, and can lead to a more transparent quality assurance in the QMRA.