Good Mothers,Bad Mothers

This paper reports on an analysis of representations of child abuse in English-language newspapers in Malaysia. Certain media images of mothers recur: bad mothers who are unable to protect their children; and good mothers, who are feminine representatives of a maternalised national government which is charged with interceding on behalf of abused children. Mothers implicated in child abuse are harshly judged by the maternalist regime. Our findings resonate with previous feminist analyses of child abuse but manifest differently in a non-Western, non-Christian context. In Malaysia, motherhood plays a crucial role in nationalist political culture; women and mothers carry increasing economic, social and political burdens in the rapidly modernising state. Fathers are largely marginal or absent in media reporting of child abuse, while mothers are represented as fully responsible for the care of children, particularly when problems occur. The media's blaming of child abuse on social changes while valorising traditional families reflects a conservative, patriarchal perspective, occluding discussion of the contexts of child abuse and thus mitigating against comprehensive solutions.     

Bayesian Probabilistic Projections of Life Expectancy for All Countries

We propose a Bayesian hierarchical model for producing probabilistic forecasts of male period life expectancy at birth for all the countries of the world to 2100. Such forecasts would be an input to the production of probabilistic population projections for all countries, which is currently being considered by the United Nations. To evaluate the method, we conducted an out-of-sample cross-validation experiment, fitting the model to the data from 1950–1995 and using the estimated model to forecast for the subsequent 10 years. The 10-year predictions had a mean absolute error of about 1 year, about 40 % less than the current UN methodology. The probabilistic forecasts were calibrated in the sense that, for example, the 80 % prediction intervals contained the truth about 80 % of the time. We illustrate our method with results from Madagascar (a typical country with steadily improving life expectancy), Latvia (a country that has had a mortality crisis), and Japan (a leading country). We also show aggregated results for South Asia, a region with eight countries. Free, publicly available R software packages called bayesLife and bayesDem are available to implement the method.     

Social Capital and Subjective Wellbeing in Europe: A New Approach on Social Capital

This paper aims to analyze the relationship between the various dimensions of social capital and subjective wellbeing. Data used in this study come from the fourth wave of the European Social Survey and different measures of wellbeing are used to take account of both the cognitive and affective processes of individual wellbeing (i.e. life satisfaction, happiness, and subjective wellbeing). A factor analysis is performed to summarize information coming from a large set of variables into different components corresponding to each dimension of social capital (i.e. networks, norms, and trust). Among the results, we find that the impact of social capital on subjective wellbeing differ depending on the component of social capital which is under analysis. In particular, social networks, social trust and institutional trust are the components that show a higher correlation with subjective wellbeing. Furthermore, in addition to the positive effects of the individual variables, our results suggest that social capital at the aggregate level positively correlates with individual wellbeing, thus pointing to an external or environmental effect of social capital.     

Improving supply chain responsiveness through Advanced Manufacturing Technology: the mediating role of internal and external integration

Abstract

Responsiveness is one of the key performance factors that firms need to face up to the challenges posed by today’s markets. Many manufacturing firms are investing in advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) with a view to improving competitiveness. However, empirical evidence shows that investments in AMT alone do not lead to improvements in performance. In this study, a model that links AMT implementation and responsiveness through internal integration and external integration is proposed. A sample of 441 Spanish industrial companies was used to test the model through structural equation modelling. The findings highlight that internal integration needs to be supplemented with external integration in order to ensure that the implementation of AMT will result in improved responsiveness. Supply chain managers should focus on integration within the supply chain – firstly internal and later external – to obtain returns on investments in AMT in the form of improved flexibility and more reliable and faster deliveries.     

Counting the Population or Describing Society? A Comparison of English and Welsh and French Censuses

Data collected at household level in censuses are used for a wide range of purposes including practical planning and academic analysis of changing social conditions. Comparability is a core demographic value, and to understand the limits of the comparability of census data across time and space, it is important to recognise if, how and why, concepts and definitions change between censuses. This paper examines definitions of the household in censuses in England and Wales (E&W) and France from 1960 to 2012 in order to investigate how census definitions have changed and to examine the drivers of such changes. Two research methods were used: (1) longitudinal analyses of census documentation since the 1960s and (2) in-depth interviews with key informants oriented around respondents’ roles in the collection and/or use of household data from censuses and surveys. We identify two contrasting national approaches to the data collection exercise that is called a census, which reflect political and institutional differences. These differences call into question the comparability of some aspects of census data across national boundaries, despite increased harmonisation of approaches to data collection. By comparing the evolution of the definitions of the “household” in censuses, we develop insight into the diversity of the priorities of census commissioners and designers, and consider the broader implications of this for producing comparable data.     

A Comparative Note about Estimation of the Fractional Parameter under Additive Outliers

In recent articles, Fajardo et al. (2009 Fajardo Molinares, F., Reisen, V.A., Cribari-Neto, F. (2009). Robust estimation in long-memory processes under additive outliers. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference 139:2511–2525.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Reisen and Fajardo (2012) propose an alternative semiparametric estimator of the fractional parameter in ARFIMA models which is robust to the presence of additive outliers. The results are very interesting, however, they use samples of 300 or 800 observations which are rarely found in macroeconomics. In order to perform a comparison, I estimate the fractional parameter using the procedure of Geweke and Porter-Hudak (1983 Geweke, J., Porter-Hudak, S. (1983). The estimation and application of long memory time series model. Journal of Time Series Analysis 4:221–238.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) augmented with dummy variables associated with the (previously) detected outliers using the statistic τ_d suggested by Perron and Rodríguez (2003 Perron, P., Rodríguez, G. (2003). Searching for additive outliers in nonstationary time series. Journal of Time Series Analysis 24(2):193–220.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Comparing with Fajardo et al. (2009 Fajardo Molinares, F., Reisen, V.A., Cribari-Neto, F. (2009). Robust estimation in long-memory processes under additive outliers. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference 139:2511–2525.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Reisen and Fajardo (2012), I found better results for the mean and bias of the fractional parameter when T = 100 and the results in terms of the standard deviation and the MSE are very similar. However, for higher sample sizes such as 300 or 800, the robust procedure performs better. Empirical applications for seven monthly Latin-American inflation series with very small sample sizes contaminated by additive outliers are discussed.     

Organizational refinements of Nash equilibrium

Theory and Decision - Strong Nash equilibrium (see Aumann, 1959) and coalition-proof Nash equilibrium (see Bernheim et al., 1987) rely on the idea that players are allowed to form coalitions and...     

Adaptive PORT–MVRB estimation: an empirical comparison of two heuristic algorithms

In this article, we deal with an empirical comparison of two data-driven heuristic procedures of estimation of a positive extreme value index (EVI), working thus with heavy right tails. The semi-parametric EVI-estimators under consideration, the so-called peaks over random threshold (PORT)–minimum-variance reduced-bias (MVRB) EVI-estimators, are location and scale-invariant estimators, based on the PORT methodology applied to second-order MVRB EVI-estimators. Trivial adaptations of these algorithms make them work for a similar estimation of other parameters of extreme events, such as the Value-at-Risk at a level p, the expected shortfall and the probability of exceedance of a high level x, among others. Applications to simulated data sets and to real data sets in the field of finance are provided.     

A bidimensional class of optimality criteria involving φp and characteristic criteria

A new biparametric class of criteria for Optimal Experimental Design generalizing the families of φ_p and Characteristic Criteria is presented. Some properties of the Characteristic Criteria are provided: in particular, differentiability, monotonicity and convexity. A statistical interpretation is also offered. Optimal designs with respect to Characteristic Criteria are obtained for polynomial and compartmental models and an extension of the Michaelis-Menten model. A thorough discussion for the trigonometric model is given. The computed optimal designs are shown to be quite efficient for A-, D- and D_s -optimality. Thus, some of them appear as a natural compromise between different optimality criteria. A simulation in multiple linear regression confirms the quality of Characteristic designs for discovering significant differences between parameters.