Sociology, ethics, and the priority of the particular: learning from a case study of genetic deliberations

There are growing debates about the relationship between the two disciplines of sociology and ethics, particularly as they each become increasingly involved in research and policy formation on the life sciences, especially genetics. Much of this debate has been highly abstract, often stipulating the seemingly different character of the two disciplines and speculating on their theoretical potential--or lack thereof--for future collaborative work. This article uses an existing collaboration between a sociologist and an ethicist, on a study of participation in genetic databases, to explore some of the challenges, for both disciplines, of working together. Building upon this case study, we examine the suggestion that the Aristotelian concept of 'phronesis' provides the grounds for establishing one possible theoretical framework with which the disciplines can be bridged. Further exploration of this approach leads to suggestions for ways of thinking about the apparently fundamental divides between the disciplines and for ways of adding to notions of a 'public sociology'.     

Pay-as-you-go social security in a changing environment

In this paper, we examine the optimal pay-as-you-go social security scheme which reallocates resources across generations in a changing environment, that is, with fluctuations in population growth rates and in productivity levels. We use an overlapping generations model along with a social welfare function consisting of the sum of generational utilities either unweighted or weighted by population size and a discount factor. We show how intergenerational resource sharing can be used to improve social welfare even though the extent of intergenerational redistribution is hampered by payroll tax deadweight losses in the spirit of the optimal taxation literature. Also it appears that resource sharing is much more restricted in a closed economy that in an open economy, which is not subject to a national resource constraint at each period of time. This paper was presented at the 1990 ISPE-Conference on the Fiscal Implications of an Ageing Population, Vaalsbroek Castle, Netherlands. The authors wish to thank the participants and particularly B. van Praag and W. Peters for their comments. They also thank the two referees and Philippe Michel for very helpful comments and discussions. The financial support of CIM during his sabbatical year is greatly acknowledged by the second author.     

Risk,ambiguity, and insurance

In a series of experiments, economically sophisticated subjects, including professional actuaries, priced insurance both as consumers and as firms under conditions of ambiguity. Findings support implications of the Einhorn-Hogarth ambiguity model: (1) For low probability-of-loss events, prices of both consumers and firms indicated aversion to ambiguity; (2) As probabilities of losses increased, aversion to ambiguity decreased, with consumers exhibiting ambiguity preference for high probability-of-loss events; and (3) Firms showed greater aversion to ambiguity than consumers. The results are shown to be incompatible with traditional economic analysis of insurance markets and are discussed with respect to the effects of ambiguity on the supply and demand for insurance.University of Chicago Graduate School of BusinessUniversity of Pennsylvania The Wharton School     

Women rebuilding lives post-disaster: innovative community practices for building resilience and promoting sustainable development

Disasters result in devastating human, economic, and environmental effects. The paper highlights women's active participation in community-based disaster recovery efforts drawing from the results of the ‘Rebuilding Lives Post-disaster: Innovative Community Practices for Sustainable Development’ by an international research partnership. Two case studies are presented from Pakistan and the USA to demonstrate how women contribute to building resilience and promoting sustainable development in diverse post-disaster contexts. The policy and practice implications are relevant for discussions regarding the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals and framework.     

Equilibrium Wage Dispersion with Worker and Employer Heterogeneity

We construct and estimate an equilibrium search model with on–the–job–search. Firms make take–it–or–leave–it wage offers to workers conditional on their characteristics and they can respond to the outside job offers received by their employees. Unobserved worker productive heterogeneity is introduced in the form of cross–worker differences in a “competence” parameter. On the other side of the market, firms also are heterogeneous with respect to their marginal productivity of labor. The model delivers a theory of steady–state wage dispersion driven by heterogenous worker abilities and firm productivities, as well as by matching frictions. The structural model is estimated using matched employer and employee French panel data. The exogenous distributions of worker and firm heterogeneity components are nonparametrically estimated. We use this structural estimation to provide a decomposition of cross–employee wage variance. We find that the share of the cross–sectional wage variance that is explained by person effects varies across skill groups. Specifically, this share lies close to 40% for high–skilled white collars, and quickly decreases to 0% as the observed skill level decreases. The contribution of market imperfections to wage dispersion is typically around 50%.     

Knocking on Academia's Doors: An Inquiry into the Early Careers of Doctors in Life Sciences

The early careers of French doctors in life sciences are characterized by the importance of temporary jobs. While most young Ph.D. researchers wish to obtain a job in the French academic sector (which grants them, among other things, lifetime employment), few of them manage to achieve this objective immediately after completing their Ph.D. A majority of young doctors have to wait for a period of time before they find stable employment in the academic sector. In the meantime, they usually find temporary research jobs. Two main types of short–term jobs can be distinguished: fixed–term research contracts (in most cases in a French public laboratory) and post–doctoral positions (temporary research jobs in a foreign country). The aim of this paper is to determine whether these different types of temporary jobs have different consequences on the careers of Ph.D. researchers. We first discuss from a theoretical perspective the impact of choosing ‘post–doc’ research rather than a job on a fixed–term contract. Then, after dealing with selection biases that affect the access to these temporary jobs, we will use survival data analysis to estimate the impact of both types of temporary positions on the probability of entering the academic sector. The analysis is based on a database on the early careers of 800 young French doctors in life sciences. The main results include the following findings: the probability of a Ph.D. researcher finding stable employment is higher if he has held a post–doc position than if he has held a fixed–term contract. This result holds for both the private and public sectors. However, careers in the private sector are also affected by long–term choices, such as the decision to undertake Ph.D. research in partnership with a firm.     

Latent Separability: Grouping Goods without Weak Separability

This paper develops a new concept of separability with overlapping groups—latent separability. This is shown to provide a useful empirical and theoretical framework for investigating the grouping of goods and prices. It is a generalization of weak separability in which goods are allowed to enter more than one group and where the composition of groups is identified by the choice of group specific exclusive goods. Latent separability is shown to be equivalent to weak separability in latent rather than purchased goods and provides a relationship between separability and household production theory. For the popular class of linear, almost ideal and translog demand models and their generalizations, we provide a method for choosing the number of homothetic separable groups. A detailed method for exploring the composition of the separable groups is also presented. These methods are applied to a long time series of British individual household data on the consumption of twenty two nondurable and service goods.     

Integrating Knowledge through Information Trading: Examining the Relationship between Boundary Spanning Communication and Individual Performance*

With the global penetration of Internet technologies, individuals may now cross organizational boundaries to communicate efficiently with others regardless of time and space. Thus, when looking for help in solving work tasks, knowledge workers may just as easily contact individuals in rival firms across the globe as a coworker sitting at the next desk. As a result, management faces questions such as (1) How should firms manage employees' knowledge‐sourcing activities when they span both intra‐organizational and extra‐organizational boundaries, and (2) What is the relationship between different knowledge‐sourcing activities and individual performance? Grounded in the knowledge‐based view of the firm, we investigate these questions using data from Europe's largest information technology (IT) services and management consulting company. Our results provide evidence that organizations should support boundary spanning and knowledge sourcing from both internal and external sources. Results suggest (1) a positive relationship between boundary spanning communication and creativity and general performance, and (2) a negative relationship between a reliance on colocated coworkers as knowledge sources and creativity.