Popular support for social evaluation functions

This paper provides sufficient conditions under which the preferences of a social decision maker accord with majority voting. We show that an additive and monotone utilitarian social evaluation function is consistent with the outcomes of majority voting for the class of income distributions that are symmetric under a strictly increasing transformation. An example is the lognormal distribution. The required symmetry condition is generally accepted employing panel data for 116 countries from the World Bank’s POVCAL database.In this manner, the proposed methodology provides the consistent degree of inequality aversion and shows that median income is a good proxy for welfare.     

What finite-additivity can add to decision theory

Statistical Methods & Applications - We examine general decision problems with loss functions that are bounded below. We allow the loss function to assume the value $$infty $$ . No other...     

Lambie-Mumford,H. Silvasti,T. (ed.): The Rise of Food Charity in Europe

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

A generalized least squares estimation method for VARMA models

In this paper a new generalized least squares procedure for estimating VARMA models is proposed. This method differs from existing ones in explicitly considering the stochastic structure of the approximation error that arises when lagged innovations are replaced with lagged residuals obtained from a long VAR. Simulation results indicate that this method performs better than the Double Regression method and similar to Mauricio's (1995) exact maximum likelihood estimation procedure.     

Taking Adoption Issues into the New Millennium: An Introduction

The prevalence of adoption in our society and our awareness of adoption-related issues have increased markedly in recent years, due to socioeconomic and sociopolitical changes at the national and international level. Given the high incidence of adoption in the United States today, it is perplexing and unfortunate that many adoptive triad members still feel that the complexities of adoption are not fully understood. In addition, many clinicians still feel that clear and useful guidelines and training for therapy with adoptive triad members are hard to find. This introduction addresses these concerns in general in the context of discussing the different contributions included in this special issue.     

Protective service unions’ political activities and department expenditures

This paper examines how police and firefighter unions’ political activities influence departmental expenditures. Unlike prior research, we measure unions’ political activity independently of union bargaining power. Results indicate that a protective service union’s electoral activities positively affect departmental expenditures, and these effects are attributable to union political power rather than multilateral collective bargaining power. The authors thank Steve Blumenfeld, Wally Hendricks, Asghar Zardkoohi, and an anonymous referee for their excellent comments and suggestions.     

Managerial Hostility and Attitudes Towards Unions: A Canada-US Comparison

We use a cross-country survey of attitudes toward work and unions, which includes a sample of managers in both the US and Canada, to explore whether there is greater attitudinal hostility to unions in the U.S. Our estimates indicate that American manager’s attitudes towards unions are, perhaps surprisingly, less hostile than those of Canadian managers. We explain this first finding by the differential effect of perceived union power, which is greater in Canada than the US and which is correlated negatively with union approval. We also find that US managers are less likely to use extreme methods to oppose union organizing drives, implying that the lower union rates in the US as compared to Canada are not likely the result of greater negativity towards unions themselves but rather some other factor or combination of factors. The implication is that if Canadian managers faced the same labor relations playing field as their US counterparts, they would likely find it easier to thwart union certification drives as well. Alternatively stated, Canadian-style labor relations reforms (such as card-check systems or quicker certification votes) could perhaps tip the balance in favor of unions when organizing in the US.