Factors affecting completion of a matched savings program: Impacts of time preference,discount rate,and financial hardship

There is a general consensus among researchers and policymakers that matched savings programs can significantly increase the propensity to save among low-income households. This study offers a unique contribution to the field by testing whether principals and theories from behavioral economics affect the decisions that participants make in these savings programs. Using a sample of people participating in the $aveNYC program, a matched savings program for very low-income households, we test whether information failure, time preference, and financial hardship affected people's ability to complete the program and receive the match money. We find that future orientation does not significantly impact program completion, but both information failure and financial hardship increase the hazard of early account closure. Although the pool of participants who did not receive the match was small, both information failure and financial hardship had large impacts on the risk of withdrawing the account before receiving a match. We discuss how these findings can inform program design and suggest future research.     

TELSQA and the Mainstreamed LD Social Studies Student

The content of social studies curricula make studying abroad during the summer months a win-win for social studies teachers. During these experiences, teachers have the opportunity to develop their knowledge of global history and other cultures and to see a bit of the world. That said, the most dangerous assumption one can make is that simply going abroad will automatically lead to the ambitious expectations often associated with such experiences. Using data drawn from the experiences of four social studies teachers who engaged in international professional development and observations of their learning abroad, this article provides strategies for making the most of what may be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.     

Operationalizing hunger in rural America: A reexamination of McMurry

The Harvard Physician Task Force report Hunger Counties 1986 evoked several critical responses, including Dan McMurry's (1991) in this journal. McMurry maintained that the Harvard report incorrectly identifies hunger counties in the United States: It is an invalid study that measures economic dependence rather than hunger and malnutrition. In this reexamination of McMurry, it is argued that his field observations lack ethnographic validity and thus draw erroneous conclusions from the data. McMurry, in addition, made false assumptions about the voting behavior of rural residents, which further weakens his arguments against the Harvard Physician Task Force. Finally, it is suggested that researchers find a more inclusive method of measuring rural hunger in America.     

Supreme Court Auditing of the US Courts of Appeals: An Organizational Perspective

Using an aggregate-level model of Supreme Court–circuitcourt interactions, this study assesses the extent to whichthe Court's auditing process of circuit court outputs is shapedby organizational dynamics such as structural capacity, institutionalization,and demographic characteristics. Principals in organizationalhierarchies must audit the behavior of their agents to ensurethat the agents are faithfully complying with the principals'preferences. In the case of the Supreme Court, such auditingactivities must take place in the face of very limited institutionalcapacity on the Court's part. We propose that the Court considerscertain broad organizational and institutional characteristicsat the circuit level when performing this task. In particular,we find that the Court strategically allocates its limited institutionalresources to audit decisions to respond to its recent interactionswith individual circuits in past terms, the circuits' internaldecision-making dynamics (including dissent and reversal rates),and goal conflict between the circuit and the Supreme Court.     

Minicommunications

This section of the periodical is reserved for Conclusions (Results), Comments, Conjectures, and Microcommunications. Contributions will be welcomed and might even be printed!     

On Regression Analysis with Data Cleaning via Trimming,Winsorization, and Dichotomization

ABSTRACT

In a two-variable regression model setup, we examine in this paper the effects of trimming and winsorization and dichotomization of the independent variable on the regression estimates and the efficiency of the regression estimation. These results have direct implications in the accounting literature when dealing with the effects of analyst forecast errors on stock returns.     

On Jointly Estimating Parameters and Missing Data by Maximizing the Complete-Data Likelihood

One approach to handling incomplete data occasionally encountered in the literature is to treat the missing data as parameters and to maximize the complete-data likelihood over the missing data and parameters. This article points out that although this approach can be useful in particular problems, it is not a generally reliable approach to the analysis of incomplete data. In particular, it does not share the optimal properties of maximum likelihood estimation, except under the trivial asymptotics in which the proportion of missing data goes to zero as the sample size increases.     

Alternative Approximations to Value-At-Risk: A Comparison

This article compares three value-at-risk (VaR) approximation methods suggested in the literature: Cornish and Fisher (1937 Cornish, E.A., Fisher, R.A. (1937). Moments and cumulants in the specification of distributions. Revue de l’Institut International de Statistique 5:307–320.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Sillitto (1969 Sillitto, G.P. (1969). Derivation of approximants to the inverse distribution function of a continuous univariate population from the order statistics of a sample. Biometrika 56:641–650.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and Liu (2010 Liu, W.-H. (2010). Estimation and testing of portfolio value-at-risk based on L-comoment matrices. Journal of Futures Markets 30:897–908.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Simulation results are obtained for three families of distributions: student-t, skewed-normal, and skewed-t. We recommend the Sillitto approximation as the best method to evaluate the VaR when the financial return has an unknown, skewed, and heavy-tailed distribution.     

Evidence-Based Assessment and Application of Prognostic Markers: The Long Way from Single Studies to Meta-Analysis

In recent years, several attempts have been made to characterize the generalized Pareto distributions (GPD) based on the properties of order statistics and record values. In the present article, we give some characterization results on GPD based on order statistics and generalized order statistics. Some characterizations of uniform distribution based on expectation of some functions of order statistics are also given.