INFORMATION TRANSMISSION AND OWNERSHIP CONSOLIDATION IN AID PROGRAMS

We investigate the degree of leeway donors of foreign aid should grant to recipient governments when their preferences over how to implement the aid are different, and both the donor and recipient possess some private information about the most effective policies. Intuitively, our model shows that donors should stay in control of how their aid is spent when their own private information is more important than the private information of the recipient. Less obviously, an increase in the difference of preferences between donors and recipients can increase rather than decrease the leeway that donors should grant the recipients, as the recipients' information gains in importance relative to those of the donors, and recipients become less likely to communicate truthfully. We test the model using dyadic data for 28 bilateral aid donors and 112 recipients, over the 1995–2010 period. Our proxy for “centralized” aid is project aid, while budget aid leaves more leeway to the recipient and thus proxies for “decentralized” aid. In line with the model, misaligned interests and informational asymmetries indeed influence the shares of aid given as budget and project aid. (JEL C23, D82, F33,O1)     

Gambling and Adverse Life Events Among Urban Adolescents

This study explored the cross sectional association between adverse life events and gambling in a sample of 515 urban adolescents (average age 17, 55% male, 88% African American). Approximately half of the sample had gambled in the past year (51%); 78% of the gamblers gambled monthly and 39% had a gambling-related problem. On the other hand, 88% of the sample had experienced at least one life event in the past year, and those experiencing events tended to live in more disadvantaged neighborhoods. The mere acknowledgement of experiencing a stressful life event in the past year (yes/no) was not associated with an increase in odds of being a gambler, with gambling more frequently, or with having a gambling problem. However, when the context of the event was considered, an association was found between directly experiencing threatening and deviant/violent types of events and frequent gambling (OR > 2). Additionally, the probability of being a gambler increased as the number of events experienced increased (aOR = 1.07, 95% CI = 1.01, 1.13, P = 0.013), but problems among gamblers were not associated with the number of events experienced (aOR = 1.01, 95% CI = 0.92, 1.11, P = 0.876). During adolescence, life events appear to be connected more with the frequency of gambling rather than with problems related to gambling.     

Perceptions of rodent-associated problems: an experience in urban and rural areas of Yucatan,Mexico

Rodents are a threat to agriculture and homes, and are a public health risk. Local perceptions about rodents and the damage they cause are vital, as a first step, to the design and implementation of rodent control or educational programs. A total of 111 interviews were conducted in two urban neighborhoods and two rural villages in Yucatan, Mexico. More than 90% of the interviewed inhabitants perceived rodents as a problem. The fear of rodents (57%), damage to food and stocks (56%), and damage to clothes (34%), were the most cited problems. In the urban neighborhoods, the use of rodent control methods was more frequent (57%) than in the villages (33%) in this study. In addition, the percentage of damage to domestic appliances was lower in villages (10%) than in neighborhoods (33%). Our preliminary results suggest that rodent pests represent a threat to human health and to human food security in the studied sites.     

An Exploratory Study of Health Professionals' Attitudes about Robotic Telepresence Technology

This article presents the results from a video-based evaluation study of a social robotic telepresence solution for elderly. The evaluated system is a mobile teleoperated robot called Giraff that allows caregivers to virtually enter a home and conduct a natural visit just as if they were physically there. The evaluation focuses on the perspectives from primary healthcare organizations and collects the feedback from different categories of health professionals. The evaluation included 150 participants and yielded unexpected results with respect to the acceptance of the Giraff system. In particular, greater exposure to technology did not necessarily increase acceptance and large variances occurred between the categories of health professionals. In addition to outlining the results, this study provides a number of indications with respect to increasing acceptance for technology for elderly.     

Labor Market Penalties for Mothers in Italy

We use a large Italian employer-employee matched dataset to study how motherhood affects women’s working career in terms of labor force participation and wages. We confirm that the probability of exiting employment significantly increases for mothers of pre-school children; however, this is mitigated by higher job quality, human capital endowment and childcare accessibility. Most importantly, the availability of part-time jobs reduces their probability of moving out of the labor force. Women not leaving employment after becoming mothers experience lower wages than women with no pre-school child, and there are no signs of this gap closing 5 years after childbirth. Contrary to previous literature, the wage gap penalty emerges only among women working full-time, thanks to the high protection accorded to part-time jobs in Italy.     

Factors Associated with Employee Stress in Psychiatric Rehabilitation: Identifying Vulnerability and Resilience

ABSTRACT

Use of sick days related to mental stress and burnout is a growing problem in Germany. Since stress is related to work demands, there is a substantial need for suitable workplace health promotion programs. This study identifies several organizational and personal stress predictors and presents a predictive model for workers in the field of psychiatric rehabilitation. A cross-sectional design was utilized to collect the self-ratings of employees (n = 243) who typically work with patients. Univariate analyses show, overall, above average stress scores, below average scores in occupational self-efficacy, and a much higher proportion of a gratification crisis (that is, insufficient reward for work performance) compared to other people employed in health care. A multivariate model for predicting the heightened stress indicates the supposed pathogenetic and salutogenetic main effects for organizational variables, such as gratification crisis, and personal variables, such as occupational self-efficacy as well as an interaction of both types of variables. High occupational self-efficacy can attenuate the effect of an existing gratification crisis. Workplace health promotion programs in this field should address organizational and personal variables, in particular occupational self-efficacy and gratification crisis. Future research should focus on interaction effects based on a person-environment-interaction model.     

The Effect of a Multicomponent Dual-Modality Exercise Program Targeting Osteoporosis on Bone Health Status and Physical Function Capacity of Postmenopausal Women

Purpose: Exercise is important for the prevention of osteoporosis and the reduction of fracture risk because it improves muscle mass and strength, besides improving balance. We evaluated the effect of a specific exercise program on bone mass and quality and physical function capacity in postmenopausal women with low bone mineral density. Methods: Participants (N = 125) underwent a bone mass (Dual X-ray Absorptiometry), bone quality (osteosonography), and physical functional capacity assessment. Fifty-eight of them took part in an 11-month exercise program (E), that included a multicomponent (strength, aerobic capacity, balance, joint mobility) dual-modality (on ground and in the water; alternating group and home-based exercise periods) exercise regimen. The others represented a control group (C) that did not exercise. After the exercise program all participants were reevaluated. Results: After the training program: femoral neck T-score significantly improved in E; C significantly decreased all bone quality (osteosonography) parameters, whereas E showed no differences; E significantly improved all the physical function capacity parameters, while most of them decreased or did not change in C. Conclusions: A specific exercise program targeting osteoporosis improves physical function capacity, reduces physiological bone loss, and maintains bone quality in low bone mineral density postmenopausal women.     

Model Assessment for Predictive Classification Models

In this article, we present a novel methodology to assess predictive models for a binary target. In our opinion, the main weakness of the criteria proposed in the literature is not to take the financial costs of a wrong decision into account.

The objective of this article is to derive the optimal cut-off in predictive classification models and to improve model assessment on the basis of a general class of loss functions. We describe how our proposal performs in a real application on credit scoring.     

Fiducial distribution in a power series family

Abstract

In this article the interest is on finding the fiducial distribution of the parameter, when the probability distribution belongs to the power series family, as in Johnson et al. (1992 Johnson, N. L., S. Kotz, and A. W. Kemp. 1992. Univariate discrete distributions. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons. [Google Scholar]). Recently in Nájera and O’Reilly (2017 Nájera, E., and F. O’Reilly. 2017. On fiducial generators. Communications Statistics - Theory Methods 46 (5):2232–2248. doi:10.1080/03610926.2015.1040505.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) an argument is given to obtain a unique fiducial in the Bernoulli case. An attempt is made here to define some sort of invariance in a power series distribution so that, as was done in the Bernoulli case, one may find a unique invariant fiducial for the parameter. The Bernoulli case is reviewed in detail and the Poisson and negative binomial cases are addressed.