Demography and housing demand—what can we learn from residential construction data?

There are obvious reasons why residential construction should depend on the population’s age structure. We estimate this relation on Swedish time series data and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development panel data. Large groups of young adults are associated with higher rates of residential construction, but there is also a significant negative effect from those above 75. Age effects on residential investment are robust and forecast well out-of-sample in contrast to the corresponding house price results. This may explain why the debate around house prices and demography has been rather inconclusive. Rapidly aging populations in the industrialized world makes the future look bleak for the construction industry.

Does parents’ valuation of children’s health mimic their valuation of own health?

A single latent variable model of health status and therapeutic health care utilization is estimated for parents and own children of 6,557 US households. The equation system that identifies latent health status simultaneously determines a number of indicators of general health, including presence of morbidity symptoms, mobility limitations, medication needs, and utilization of therapeutic health care services. The main goal of the paper was to obtain an unbiased estimate of parents’ marginal substitution rate between own and child health. Results indicate that parents’ valuation of their children’s health exceeds their valuation of own health by almost twofold on average.

Editors' Introduction

Population Research and Policy Review -     

Employment and earnings of foreign-born scientists and engineers

Population Research and Policy Review -     

Chinatown 2.0: the difficult flowering of an ethnically themed shopping area

Right in Amsterdam’s picturesque Canal Zone, on and around Zeedijk, Chinese entrepreneurs have carved out a presence in what seems like the local Chinatown. The businessmen have been targeting Asian and non-Asian customers by offering products that – to an extent – can be associated with Asia, China in particular. Since the early 1990s, individual entrepreneurs and their business organisations have campaigned for official acknowledgement of Zeedijk as an ethnic-only district and for governmental support of the enhancement of Chineseness. Following Hackworth and Rekers. [(2005). “Ethnic Packaging and Gentrification. The Case of Four Neighborhoods in Toronto.” Urban Affairs Review 41 (2): 211–236], we argue that this case challenges traditional understandings of ethnic commercial landscapes. In sharp contrast to the current orthodoxy, which would conceive the proliferation of such an ‘ethnic enclave’ as part of a larger process of assimilation, we have approached Amsterdam’s Chinatown first and foremost as a themed economic space: Chinese and other entrepreneurs compete for a share of the market and in doing also for the right to claim the identity of the area. What is the historical development of the Zeedijk area, how did Chinese entrepreneurs and their associations try to boost Chinatown and negotiate public Chineseness, and how did governmental and non-governmental institutional actors respond to those attempts?     

Gespensterdebatte oder was ist soziologische Aufklärung?

We reply to the critical comments of Richard Münch and the author group Jansen, Heidler and von Goetz on our article “Emergence of an Academic Elite? The Impact of Universities’ Size and Reputation on Research Funding” published in this journal. After reviewing some other sociologists’ statements on Münch’s thesis about the academic elite we reinforce the gain of our empirical analyses of hypotheses of the sociology of science in general, on the Matthew-Effect, and on trends to a possible cartelization and monopolization in the German science system. The main critic of unsuited data (we used applications for single grants submitted to the German Research Foundation) does not adequately consider the postulated scope of the investigated theses and our analyses do not aim at a general evaluation of the “Initative of Excellence”.     

What Fills the Gaps Left by Employer-Provided Insurance?

Employer-provided insurance is the leading source of medical insurance for non-elderly Americans. However, it leaves many without coverage. Evidence suggests that the non-group insurance market does a poor job of filling in these gaps, for those with both short- and long-term uninsurance. It does so for all income and age groups, as well as for both genders. It does fill some of the gaps in employer-provided coverage for those with middle and high incomes, though very incompletely.     

Segregation and protectionism: Institutionalised views of Aboriginal rurality

Rurality is a complex and contested term, with multiple notions and gazes amid calls for theoretical pluralism. In Australia, the spatial categories of ‘remote’, ‘rural’, ‘regional’ and ‘urban’ are applied to places that vary in their distance from an economic and political core and have differing population densities. We argue that natural resources institutions in rural Australia demand an ‘authentic’ performance of Aboriginality that is framed within orthodox and stable constructions of an Indigeneity associated with the remote category. Dominant representations of remote Aboriginal people living on traditional homelands and engaged in ‘traditional’ environmental protection are assumed to hold for all places and transposed when natural resources institutions satisfy compulsory Indigenous engagement. Such institutional requirements for authenticity exclude alternative and multiple Indigenous voices in natural resources management. Rather, Aboriginal people seek engagement across a portfolio of natural resources activities typically found in rural areas (such as mining, grazing, forestry, water allocation planning, and natural resources service delivery and enterprise development), and not just isolated in natural and cultural heritage conservation. This broad participation would more completely match their expressed aspirations and the multiple lived realities of their fluid and networked rural worlds. Using the rural town of Eidsvold in Australia as a case study, we discuss the findings of participant observation and semi-structured interviews with Indigenous people at regional natural resources management meetings and at ‘home’ in Eidsvold. Rather than a generic institutional approach, a place-based approach to understanding the complex ruralities of Aboriginal people is needed.