Young families migrating to non‐metropolitan areas: Are they at increased risk of social exclusion?

Over the past three decades, thousands of young families have moved from large cities to non‐metropolitan areas of Australia. Various policies, particularly housing policies, have played a significant role in this trend. Despite the various impetuses towards relocation, little is known about how young families fare once they have relocated to non‐metropolitan areas. In this paper we draw on a study about families relocating to three distinct non‐metropolitan areas. From our qualitative analysis of the observations of service providers in education, health, and community support services, we present a model of how relocation to non‐metropolitan areas can contribute to the increased vulnerability of some young families to social exclusion. We discuss some ways in which policy makers can intervene to reduce this risk for young families at each phase of the relocation process.     

Peak performing organisations

The literature on organisational performance is riddled with measurement problems that cannot easily be solved. In contrast we argue that elite theory in terms of performance can be more easily measured by the win record of sports organisations. Accordingly, this article argues that certain organisational peak practices are key to understanding how peak performance is sustained. Through data collected from the top ten sports organisations in the world we introduce the embryonic theory of Peak Performing Organisations (PPO). Sustained PPO practices offer more robust outcomes than the genre of High Performing Organisations.     

Inference from PseudoLikelihoods with Plug‐In Estimates

Effective implementation of likelihood inference in models for high‐dimensional data often requires a simplified treatment of nuisance parameters, with these having to be replaced by handy estimates. In addition, the likelihood function may have been simplified by means of a partial specification of the model, as is the case when composite likelihood is used. In such circumstances tests and confidence regions for the parameter of interest may be constructed using Wald type and score type statistics, defined so as to account for nuisance parameter estimation or partial specification of the likelihood. In this paper a general analytical expression for the required asymptotic covariance matrices is derived, and suggestions for obtaining Monte Carlo approximations are presented. The same matrices are involved in a rescaling adjustment of the log likelihood ratio type statistic that we propose. This adjustment restores the usual chi‐squared asymptotic distribution, which is generally invalid after the simplifications considered. The practical implication is that, for a wide variety of likelihoods and nuisance parameter estimates, confidence regions for the parameters of interest are readily computable from the rescaled log likelihood ratio type statistic as well as from the Wald type and score type statistics. Two examples, a measurement error model with full likelihood and a spatial correlation model with pairwise likelihood, illustrate and compare the procedures. Wald type and score type statistics may give rise to confidence regions with unsatisfactory shape in small and moderate samples. In addition to having satisfactory shape, regions based on the rescaled log likelihood ratio type statistic show empirical coverage in reasonable agreement with nominal confidence levels.     

Collaboration experience in the supply chain of knowledge and patent development

Abstract

In this paper, we aim at understanding the role of collaboration experience in supply chains of knowledge (SCoK). The SCoK of a company is its supply chain not related to the flow of physical goods but to the flow of R&D commodities. R&D commodities are for example patents, technologies, research services, studies, and projects, and, in high-tech industries, their development and commercialisation are considered as important as real products. To accomplish our aim in this paper, we fulfil the following research objectives: (1) investigate the relationship between the collaboration experience in SCoK and the propensity of the firm to develop new patents; (2) examine how the structural embeddedness of the firm within its SCoK mediates this relationship. We ground our conceptual model on the supply chain, open innovation and social capital literatures and empirically test our hypotheses on a cross-sectional data-set of 208 biotech companies that have signed 612 SCoK agreements in the years 2006–2010. The key findings of this study are: first, accumulating experience in SCoK collaborations facilitates the development of new patents; second, being central and bridging structural holes within the SCoK are two means by which the experience in SCoK collaborations is translated into new patents.     

Estimating and using propensity score in presence of missing background data: an application to assess the impact of childbearing on wellbeing

Propensity score methods are an increasingly popular technique for causal inference. To estimate propensity scores, we must model the distribution of the treatment indicator given a vector of covariates. Much work has been done in the case where the covariates are fully observed. Unfortunately, many large scale and complex surveys, such as longitudinal surveys, suffer from missing covariate values. In this paper, we compare three different approaches and their underlying assumptions of handling missing background data in the estimation and use of propensity scores: a complete-case analysis, a pattern-mixture model based approach developed by Rosenbaum and Rubin (J Am Stat Assoc79:516–524, 1984), and a multiple imputation approach. We apply these methods to assess the impact of childbearing events on individuals’ wellbeing in Indonesia, using a sample of women from the Indonesia Family Life Survey. I am grateful to all the participants at the project “Poverty Dynamics and Fertility in Developing Countries” for their support and encouragement. Special thanks are due to Fabrizia Mealli for her insightful suggestions and discussions. I also thank Jungho Kim, who is the main author of the STATA code to produce Indonesia consumption expenditure. Finally, I thank Arnstein Aassve, and Letizia Mencarini for help working with the data and their very useful discussions, and Alexia Fuernkranz-Prskawetz, and Henriette Engelhardt for detailed comments and suggestions which have improved the paper. Financial support from CNR-EFS and COFIN 2005 is gratefully acknowledged.     

European competitiveness: Bargaining between boom and gloom

The newly-renamed European Union is in crisis from economic weakness and political claustrophia. Ralf Boscheck argues that, in addition to a suggested ‘New Founding Contract’, broad-based development of the EU requires that priority is given to adjusting competitive specialization and to centralizing political power. The management of internal and external bargaining is critical. per cent, and 19 per cent respectively. EUROSTAT (1994).