A note on the changing relationship between fertility and female employment rates in developed countries

In this paper we look at a panel of OECD aggregate fertility and labor market data between 1970 and 1995 and we report some striking recent developments. Total Fertility Rates (TFR) were falling and Female Participation Rates (FPR) were increasing, conforming to a well known long-run trend. Along the cross-sectional dimension, the correlation between TFR and FPR was negative and significant during the 1970's and up to the early 1980's. This seemed consistent with secular comovements. However, by the late 1980's the correlation had become positive and equally significant. We discuss our findings within the framework of standard neoclassical models of fertility and labor supply adapted to macro data, as in Butz and Ward (1979). Received: 14 April 2000/Accepted: 29 December 2000 All correspondence to Pedro Mira. Namkee Ahn is grateful for financial support received from the Bank of Spain and from Spain's Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, grant SEC97-1249. We benefited from comments by two anonymous referees and by seminar participants at FEDEA, CEMFI and ESPE-98. All remaining errors are our own. Responsible editor: John F. Ermisch.     

“Don't Cry,You're Not a Baby!”: Emotion,Role and Hierarchy in Korean Language Socialisation Practice

I examine how South Korean children learn culturally specific emotional knowledge, especially affective hierarchy and the association between emotional displays and social roles, through participation in peer talk. An analysis of children's and teachers’ everyday emotional discourses shows that children, rather than passively adopting adult emotional discourses, creatively employ a range of linguistic and communicative features regarding emotions to construct their own culture‐laden emotional world. Findings articulate the role children's peer talk has in cultural reproduction and dynamic aspects of the language socialisation processes.     

Comparison of telephone RDD and online panel survey modes on CPGI scores and co-morbidities

The purpose of this study was to compare the influence of two survey modes – telephone random digit dialling (RDD) and stratified sampling of an online panel – on Canadian Problem Gambling Index (CPGI) scores and co-morbidities. An identical gambling survey was administered to 4000 South Koreans selected via random dialling of cell phone numbers and to 4330 South Korean members of an online panel. The online panelists were found to have significantly higher levels of tobacco use, drug or alcohol problems and mental health problems, higher employment status and lower happiness levels. However, even when controlling for these variables, CPGI scores for the online panel were significantly higher than those for the telephone interview. This appears to be due to higher levels of pathology among online panelists combined with potentially more valid self-reports due to enhanced anonymity.     

Environmental effects on perceptions of life quality in Korea

Both in industrialized and industrializing countries environment is widely believed to be an important contributing source of the quality which people seek to bring to their lives. Yet, quality of life researchers have made little effort to determine the exact nature of environmental effects on perceptions of quality of life. This paper examines the individual and joint effects of community, housing and household on the levels of satisfaction, dissatisfaction, pleasure, and worry which Korean people experience.     

Attribution of tumour lethality and estimation of the time to onset of occult tumours in the absence of cause-of-death Information

A new statistical approach is developed for estimating the carcinogenic potential of drugs and other chemical substances used by humans. Improved statistical methods are developed for rodent tumorigenicity assays that have interval sacrifices but not cause-of-death data. For such experiments, this paper proposes a nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation method for estimating the distributions of the time to onset of and the time to death from the tumour. The log-likelihood function is optimized using a constrained direct search procedure. Using the maximum likelihood estimators, the number of fatal tumours in an experiment can be imputed. By applying the procedure proposed to a real data set, the effect of calorie restriction is investigated. In this study, we found that calorie restriction delays the tumour onset time significantly for pituitary tumours. The present method can result in substantial economic savings by relieving the need for a case-by-case assignment of the cause of death or context of observation by pathologists. The ultimate goal of the method proposed is to use the imputed number of fatal tumours to modify Peto's International Agency for Research on Cancer test for application to tumorigenicity assays that lack cause-of-death data.     

A proportional-reduction-in-impurity measure of association for categorical variables

This paper presents a proportional-reduction-in-impurity (PRI) measure for categorical association, that employs application-dependent loss functions which make the measure widely applicable. The well-known proportional -reduction-in-error (PRE) measure is shown to be a special case of the new PRI measure. Moreover, the asymptotic variance of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the measure is derived to facilitate its use for statistical inference. An extension of the PRI measure to compositional association is made to show that it can have a variety of applications. Selected loss functions are treated to illustrate the derivation of the measure.     

Distance-based outlier detection for high dimension,low sample size data

Despite the popularity of high dimension, low sample size data analysis, there has not been enough attention to the sample integrity issue, in particular, a possibility of outliers in the data. A new outlier detection procedure for data with much larger dimensionality than the sample size is presented. The proposed method is motivated by asymptotic properties of high-dimensional distance measures. Empirical studies suggest that high-dimensional outlier detection is more likely to suffer from a swamping effect rather than a masking effect, thus yields more false positives than false negatives. We compare the proposed approaches with existing methods using simulated data from various population settings. A real data example is presented with a consideration on the implication of found outliers.     

Total shift during the first passages of Markov-modulated Brownian motion with bilateral ph-type jumps: Formulas driven by the minimal solution matrix of a Riccati equation

This article describes our study of the total shift during the first passages (one-sided and two-sided exit times) of Markov-modulated Brownian motion with bilateral ph-type jumps, which is referred to as MMBM. The total shift is defined as the value of a so-called shift process at the first passage epochs of the MMBM. The shift process, introduced by Bean and O’Reilly, behaves like a continuous Markovian fluid process; that is, it increases or decreases linearly with slopes regulated by the underlying Markov process that determines the path of the MMBM. Hence, the notion of total shift, which includes the first passage times of the MMBM as special cases, is useful for describing various performance measures of systems modeled by the MMBM. In this article, we present formulas for the Laplace–Stieltjes transform matrices of the total shift during various first passages of the MMBM. In particular, a Riccati equation is derived so that a matrix associated with the Laplace–Stieltjes transform of the total shift during the first return time of the MMBM is its minimal non-negative solution matrix. With this solution matrix, the Laplace–Stieltjes transform matrices can be obtained without much additional work. Furthermore, it is shown that the Riccati equation satisfies the conditions for the Newton scheme to have quadratic convergence, which enables us to use algorithms with quadratic convergence, such as Newton’s method and the Stochastic Doubling Algorithm, to compute the presented matrix-driven formulas. For the analyses, we take an approach based on approximating the MMBM with a sequence of scaled Markov-modulated fluid flows with bilateral ph-type jumps, referred to as MMFF, that weakly converge to the MMBM. Another contribution of this article is that duality results are derived in relation to the MMBM, which is an extension of the duality theorems developed by Ahn and Ramaswami for an MMFF without a jump.