Individual and Household Values of Mortality Reductions with Intrahousehold Bargaining

I derive alternative measures of maximum willingness to pay (WTP) and value of statistical life (VSL) for selfish members of two-person households who bargain efficiently over consumption of individual and household goods. There is then no systematic bias in letting one member conduct the valuation on behalf of the household. Public-good VSL may exceed private-good VSL when each member attaches (selfish) preferences to survival of the spouse, and to any income from a surviving spouse in period 2. When period 2 is a retirement period and household members’ incomes are fixed, interview surveys tend to overvalue VSL due to ignored negative effects of own survival on private of public pension budgets.JEL Classification: I12, G22, J17     

Economic Modeling Triggers More Efficient Planning: An Experimental Justification

Consider a firm as an organization that needs to efficiently coordinate several specialized departments in an uncertain environment. Decision making involves collective planning sessions and decentralized operational processes. In this setting this paper explores the role of economic modeling through an experimental game. Results support the idea that economic modeling favors higher performance. Economic modeling facilitates the emergence of common knowledge and the decomposition of a group decision problem into individual decision problems that are meaningfully interrelated. This paper was presented at the Porquerolles Summer School on Cognitive Sciences, September 2001.     

Mental Health and Domestic Violence: 'I Call it Symptoms of Abuse'

Correspondence to Dr Cathy Humphreys, School of Health and Social Studies, University of Warwick CV4 7AL, UK. E-mail: c.f.Humphreys{at}warwick.ac.uk Summary Research evidence now clearly shows a direct link between women'sexperiences of domestic violence and heightened rates of depression,trauma symptoms, and selfharm. A research project based in Women'sAid outreach services provides further evidence of women's experiencesof severe emotional distress. However, their experiences ofmental health services were often found to be negative. A numberof practices within the medical model of mental health wereunhelpful including: the lack of recognition of trauma or provisionof trauma services; making the abuser invisible through focusingon the woman's mental health reified from her experiences ofabuse; blaming the victim; offering medication rather than counsellingsupport; the negative, consequent effects on child contact andchild protection proceedings if the woman is labelled with mentalhealth problems. Alternatively, women found services, oftenin the voluntary sector, helpful when they provided the followinginterventions: helping women name domestic violence; activelyasking about the abuse; attending to safety planning; respondingto women's specialist needs; and actively working with womento recover from abuse experiences. Support for her childrenwas also seen as very helpful. Implications for practice includethe commissioning of further services in the voluntary sector,addressing the inadequate response within the medical model,and increasing the sensitivity of responses to women's emotionaldistress across all sectors.     

Domestic Violence and Substance Use: Tackling Complexity

Domestic violence and substance use are issues which pervadesocial work practice, yet are often on the margins of the knowledgebase for practitioners and their managers. This article providesan overview of the literature on substance use and domesticviolence, highlighting the problems with the separation of bothpractice and policy in these areas. Research on substance useand the needs of women survivors of domestic violence are explored,alongside the more substantial literature on perpetrators ofdomestic violence and patterns of substance use. The problemsof a simplistic analysis which suggest that there is a causallink between substance use and domestic violence are highlighted.Using data from an on-going research project, the sources ofthe continuing and dysfunctional separation of work in theseareas are explored.     

The Value of Safety as Revealed in the Swedish Car Market: An Application of the Hedonic Pricing Approach

In this article the hedonic regression technique is used to estimate the value of traffic safety, using information from the Swedish market for automobiles. The results from the study show that the market price of an automobile is negatively correlated with its inherent risk level, i.e. Swedish car consumers pay a safety premium for safer cars. In comparison to previous Swedish stated-preference studies, this study reveals a lower willingness to pay for additional car safety, which might be a result of the interaction between government interventions and individual self-insurance and self-protection.JEL Classification: C51, D61, J28     

Left-Side strong increases in risk and their comparative statics

This paper introduces a new concept of left-side strong increases in risk (L-SIR) that extends the definition of strong increases in risk (SIR). We also provide somewhat stronger restrictive set of risk-averse decision-makers with a non-negative third derivative utility (prudence) to obtain an appealing comparative statics result for L-SIR.The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of an anonymous referee     

Lebensstile und Wohnstandortwahl

Life style research and various disciplines dealing with regional studies argue that life styles are explanatory relevant for decisions in different behavioral areas, in particular for residential choices. However, the results of previous research are rather mixed. To specify the conditions for the explanatory relevance of life style based preferences for locational choices, this article ties in with a parsimonious decision theoretic model, which has been applied both in the sociology of the city and in life style research. Based on this theoretical framework an empirical study is presented, which tests the explanatory relevance of life styles for residential choices. The study is based on neighborhood survey data from Leipzig, representing a context, in which a strong impact of life styles may be expected. However, even in this context the empirical study shows rather limited explanatory power of life style based preferences for residential choices, whereas household arrangements and economic resource endowments of persons show much more explanatory power.     

On optimising the estimation of high quantiles of a probability distribution

One of the major aims of one-dimensional extreme-value theory is to estimate quantiles outside the sample or at the boundary of the sample. The underlying idea of any method to do this is to estimate a quantile well inside the sample but near the boundary and then to shift it somehow to the right place. The choice of this “anchor quantile” plays a major role in the accuracy of the method. We present a bootstrap method to achieve the optimal choice of sample fraction in the estimation of either high quantile or endpoint estimation which extends earlier results by Hall and Weissman (1997) in the case of high quantile estimation. We give detailed results for the estimators used by Dekkers et al. (1989). An alternative way of attacking problems like this one is given in a paper by Drees and Kaufmann (1998).     

中国经济发展机制及其解释

本文从中国经济现实出发 ,阐释了以土地集体所有、个人使用的农业制度为基础的中国经济 ,在以消除剩余劳动力为特征的经济发展过程中可能表现出来的若干基本趋势 ,从而提出了中国经济长期发展的一种可能机制