Happiness and altruism within the extended family

We propose a direct measure of altruism between parents and adult children, using survey data on happiness from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 2000–2004. The question of altruism within families has policy relevance, for example, to understand whether public transfers crowd out private ones. Previous empirical evidence, based on observed transfer behavior, has failed to establish a clear consensus. Using various cross section, panel data, and instrumental variable estimators, we find a robust association between the happiness of parents and that of their adult children. A 1 standard deviation increase in a child’s happiness is associated with the same increase in own happiness as that of a 20–45% increase in household income, depending on specification.     

Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in a model of fertility choice

We examine the relationship between assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and the microeconomics of fertility choice. Along the way, we develop a model consistent with between-country differences in overall fertility and fertility timing. Our analysis of ART centers around the distinction between biomedical and behavioral effects. While improvements in ART have the biomedical effect of raising fertility, they may cause some women who would otherwise have tried to have children earlier on in life to postpone childbirth to later in life when the conception success probability is lower. This behavioral effect of postponement may reduce the fertility rate.     

Exact percentage points for the Kolmogorov test on truncated versions of known continuous distributions with unknown truncation parameters

In this paper we deal with Kolmogorov-Smirnov testson uniformity with completely or partly unknown limits. Tables of exact percentage points are presented or referred using the wellknown determinant formula given by Steck (1971). It is shown that these tables also give the percentage points for the analogous statistics of the test on truncated versions of known continuous distributions with completely or partly unknown truncation limits. We will give some examples of these applications. Among these are the tests on exponentiality and on Pareto distribution with known shape parameter and unknown lower terminal.     

Empirically Testing the Relationship Between End-User Computing Problems and Information Center Success Factors

End-user computing (EUC) has been a significant organizational phenomenon for more than two decades and remains critically important with the rapid introduction of new technologies (e.g., client-server architectures, internet and intranet applications). Although EUC is a mature concept, it is apparent that end users do not become independent over time, but instead require additional resources and support. One widely employed support mechanism is the Information Center (IC). This study surveyed the internal auditor and the information systems (IS) director in each of 185 organizations. The internal auditors provided responses on the severity of EUC problems in their organizations, and the IS directors supplied information on their firms' performance on the IC critical success factors (CSFs) proposed by Magal, Carr, and Watson (1988). Results show that stronger IC performance is indeed inversely related to the severity of EUC problems encountered by the organization. Specifically, the study's findings show that to have the greatest impact on EUC problems, IC managers should concentrate on clearly defining the IC's mission; establish standards and controls; monitor, coordinate, and help users prioritize applications development; and be responsive to user requests.     

Gender Equality in Europe: The Development of the Sustainable Development Goal No. 5 Illustrated by Exemplary Cases

Social Indicators Research - The inequality between genders is a problem virtually in all countries. A comparison among 28 nations of the European Union together with a data set corresponding to a...     

An Empirical Analysis of the Decision to Train Apprentices

Abstract. It is a widely held belief that apprenticeship training represents a net investment for training firms, the cost of which needs to be recouped after the training period. A new firm‐level data set for Switzerland reveals large variation in net costs across firms and, remarkably, negative net costs for 60 per cent of all firms. We use these data to estimate the effect of net costs on the number of apprentices hired by a firm. The results show that the costs have a significant impact on the training decision but no significant influence on the number of apprentices, once the firm has decided to train. For policy purposes, these results indicate that subsidies for firms that already train apprentices would not boost the number of available training places.     

Non-parametric Curve Estimation by Wavelet Thresholding with Locally Stationary Errors

An important aspect in the modelling of biological phenomena in living organisms, whether the measurements are of blood pressure, enzyme levels, biomechanical movements or heartbeats, etc., is time variation in the data. Thus, the recovery of a 'smooth' regression or trend function from noisy time-varying sampled data becomes a problem of particular interest. Here we use non-linear wavelet thresholding to estimate a regression or a trend function in the presence of additive noise which, in contrast to most existing models, does not need to be stationary. (Here, non-stationarity means that the spectral behaviour of the noise is allowed to change slowly over time). We develop a procedure to adapt existing threshold rules to such situations, e.g. that of a time-varying variance in the errors. Moreover, in the model of curve estimation for functions belonging to a Besov class with locally stationary errors, we derive a near-optimal rate for the -risk between the unknown function and our soft or hard threshold estimator, which holds in the general case of an error distribution with bounded cumulants. In the case of Gaussian errors, a lower bound on the asymptotic minimax rate in the wavelet coefficient domain is also obtained. Also it is argued that a stronger adaptivity result is possible by the use of a particular location and level dependent threshold obtained by minimizing Stein's unbiased estimate of the risk. In this respect, our work generalizes previous results, which cover the situation of correlated, but stationary errors. A natural application of our approach is the estimation of the trend function of non-stationary time series under the model of local stationarity. The method is illustrated on both an interesting simulated example and a biostatistical data-set, measurements of sheep luteinizing hormone, which exhibits a clear non-stationarity in its variance.