Competitive structure and fiscal policy

Using new measures to compare both the 48 states and 52 upstate New York counties, this research reformulates V. O. Key's hypothesis that noncompetitive systems benefit upper socioeconomic groups while competitive systems favor the lower classes. In designing these tests, we returned to Key's original conceptualization, which, contrary to the subsequent research that claimed to test his hypothesis, did not separate and oppose the political and economic sectors. In line with Key's formulation, we find that competitive political structure goes hand in hand with competitive economic structure and together they determine an array of fiscal policies that are different from those of noncompetitive political-economic systems. This return to the original sense of the hypothesis resolves many of the puzzling findings that have been generated in the last several decades. Democratic party affiliation and urban differentiation also affected revenues and expenditures. These same characteristics were previously shown to affect poverty and social pathology. That they now affect public policy for dealing with these problems means that those caught in the web of poverty are in double jeopardy.     

The Economic Impacts of a Terrorist Attack on the U.S. Commercial Aviation System

We use data on air passenger travel expenditures per passenger as well as statistical analysis of the air traffic lost for the two-year aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks to estimate direct demand losses for air transportation services. These are used along with a national input-output model to assess the full costs of these losses. Depending on assumptions made, the full losses to the U.S. economy were between $214.3 and $420.5 billion. These estimates are similar to those from other studies of such an event, and suggest that the high costs of effective countermeasures may be justified.     

Modified stages of acquisition of gateway drug use: a primary prevention application of the stages of change model

The purpose of the study was to identify the stages of acquisition of gateway drugs in fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. The Stages of Acquisition model is a primary prevention application of the Stages of Change model. The subjects in the study were 811 students from seventeen elementary schools in Arkansas and Missouri. The instrument elicited information regarding the stages of acquisition and individual self-reported drug use. The data were analyzed using frequency, distribution, discriminant analysis, and correlation analyses. Stage placement was confirmed using a series of drug use measures. Results confirmed the existence of discrete stages of acquisition. Results supported the concept of gateway drugs in that subjects indicated they had progressed further through the stages of acquisition of alcohol use than through the stages of acquisition of cigarettes use, smokeless tobacco use, or marijuana use.     

Negotiating Imitation: Examining the Interactions of Consultants and Clients to Understand Institutionalization as Translation

Organizational scholars increasingly view institutionalization as a process through which actors adapt or translate seemingly successful practices in a field to create variations that are specific to their own organization. Yet little is known about how outsiders who seek to diffuse ‘best practice’ affect translation. We examined interactions between management consultants and their clients in two different consulting projects, which focused on embedding the practice of ‘lean’ in one and the practice of a quality improvement framework in the other. Our findings provide insights into the processes of translation through which promoters and adopters iterate at different stages to reach a compromise, illuminating how the evolution of an imported practice signals the outcome of a negotiation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that management practices are not translated in isolation but enveloped by peripheral practices that are adopted by association. We highlight how the peripheral practice of benchmarking, in both cases, was rarely contested or negotiated and thus proved more resistant to translation. Our analysis allows us to unpack the agency inherent within translation‐as‐negotiation and integrate research on diffusion and translation.     

Geographically indirect immigration to Canada: description and analysis

"This article is concerned with geographically indirect immigration to Canada over the period 1968-1988. A geographically indirect immigrant is an individual legally admitted to Canada whose country of last permanent residence differs from country of birth. Records maintained by Employment and Immigration Canada on every immigrant legally admitted over the period were used in the study. Relative to geographically direct immigrants, geographically indirect immigrants tend to be older, more educated, and more highly skilled. Moreover, if they were not born in an English or French speaking country, indirect immigrants are more likely to speak English and/or French capably than direct migrants born in such countries. The study also contains bivariate logit estimates of a model of geographically indirect Canadian immigration. This model suggests that indirect migrants tend to be influenced by personal characteristics (age, sex, marital status, occupation, language ability), as well as by various characteristics of the country of birth (distance from Canada, income level, political conditions)."     

Generic tobacco use among four ethnic groups in a school age population

The prevalence of overall or "generic" tobacco use among Hispanic, white, Black and Asian youths in grades four, seven, ten and twelve was compared in San Diego, California (n = 4980). Significant differences in generic tobacco use between ethnic groups were found in the 4th, 10th and 12th grades, but were greatest in the 10th grade. Only white youths demonstrated a sharp increase in regular tobacco use (once a month or more) between 7th and 10th grade. Overall, the prevalence of regular use was highest among whites (25.8%), followed by Hispanics (19.7%), Blacks (17.6%) and Asians (12.6%). Marijuana, alcohol, and other drug use explained approximately 40 percent of the variance in tobacco use in each ethnic group. Other predictors varied by ethnicity and included socioeconomic status, happiness of student, strictness of parent, adult tobacco use at home, accessibility to marijuana, and gender.     

Declining first-marriage rates in England and Wales: A change in timing or a rejection of marriage?

During the 1970s, first-marriage rates in many Western European countries declined sharply. We use two different methods (devised by Ryder and by Le Bras and Roussel) to assess how far the changes in first-marriage rates in England and Wales arise from a shift to marrying at later ages or from a decline in the popularity of formal marriage. The two methods yield consistent results, and indicate that the majority of young people in England and Wales will continue to marry but that during the 1970s many were postponing marriage. The pattern of cohabitation and prevailing attitudes to marriage are compatible with such a finding. Recent marriage patterns in England and Wales are found to differ from those in France and Sweden.     

Bayesian adaptive two-stage design for determining person-time in Phase II clinical trials with Poisson data

Adaptive clinical trial designs can often improve drug-study efficiency by utilizing data obtained during the course of the trial. We present a novel Bayesian two-stage adaptive design for Phase II clinical trials with Poisson-distributed outcomes that allows for person-observation-time adjustments for early termination due to either futility or efficacy. Our design is motivated by the adaptive trial from [9 V. Sambucini, A Bayesian predictive two-stage design for Phase II clinical trials, Stat. Med. 27 (2008), pp. 1199–1224. doi: 10.1002/sim.3021[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]], which uses binomial data. Although many frequentist and Bayesian two-stage adaptive designs for count data have been proposed in the literature, many designs do not allow for person-time adjustments after the first stage. This restriction limits flexibility in the study design. However, our proposed design allows for such flexibility by basing the second-stage person-time on the first-stage observed-count data. We demonstrate the implementation of our Bayesian predictive adaptive two-stage design using a hypothetical Phase II trial of Immune Globulin (Intravenous).