Determinants of management’s organizational structure in the public sector

A model is developed to identify factors that are important in determining whether a municipality employs a labor relations specialist as chief negotiator and, if not, whether a municipality has a labor relations specialist on its collective bargaining team. Results indicate that municipal organizational structure for collective bargaining is influenced by the economic and legal environments within which collective bargaining occurs, the complexity of municipal collective bargaining, and various other demographic characteristics of the municipality.     

Caregiving and cost of health care for later life families

In the future, the number of families providing care for elderly relatives as well as the costs associated with health care will continue to increase. The caregiving triad—individual, family and government—will need to balance the resources to meet the needs of the elderly. Public policy changes can assist older persons and their families as they address caregiving in the later years.     

Who is responsible for household tasks in long term marriages of the “young-old” elderly?

Little is known about the way in which golden anniversary couples divide the responsibility for household tasks. This article examines the division of responsibility for 12 households tasks within a sample of 18 couples. At least one partner is under 75 years of age, the findings indicate that these young-old couples have developed interdependent, gender differentiated divisions of household tasks, although they share several tasks. There is congruence between what they expect and how they actually divide the responsibility for household tasks.     

COOPERATION IN PUBLIC GOODS GAMES PREDICTS BEHAVIOR IN INCENTIVE-MATCHED BINARY DILEMMAS: EVIDENCE FOR STABLE PROSOCIALITY

We report the results of an experiment in which subjects completed second mover public goods game tasks and second mover binary social dilemma tasks. Each task was completed under three different incentive structures which were matched across tasks. The use of nonlinear incentive structures, along with a novel categorization method, allowed us to identify behavioral subtypes that cannot be distinguished using conventional linear incentive structures. We also examined how well behavior could be predicted across tasks. Subjects' average conditional cooperation levels showed significant cross-task predictability and stability. However, almost a third of responses (28%) demonstrated unambiguous preference reversals across tasks. We argue that prosociality is best described as an individual-level trait, similar to risk aversion in choice under risk. (JEL C7, C91, H41)     

Muir,Roosevelt, and Yosemite National Park as an Emergent Sacred Symbol: An Interaction Ritual Analysis of a Camping Trip

We argue that interaction ritual (IR) theory provides a temporal and interactional point of origin from which to trace an influential IR chain that became a deciding factor in the unification of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove under federal control within present‐day Yosemite National Park. The emotions generated by the rituals of Roosevelt's and Muir's camping trip in May, 1903 in the short term, however, failed to result in a lasting consensus on ideology. This is a point that Roosevelt's lack of support for Muir in the subsequent controversy over the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley clearly documents. A video abstract is available at http://tinyurl.com/myv74yd