The Effect of Care Setting on Elder Abuse: Results from a Michigan Survey

This study compares abuse rates for elders age 60 and older in three care settings: nursing home, paid home care, and assisted living. The results are based on a 2005 random-digit dial survey of relatives of, or those responsible for, a person in long-term care. Nursing homes have the highest rates of all types of abuse, although paid home care has a relatively high rate of verbal abuse and assisted living has an unexpected high rate of neglect. Even when adjusting for health conditions, care setting is a significant factor in both caretaking and neglect abuses. Moving from paid home care to nursing homes is shown to more than triple the odds of neglect. Furthermore, when computing abuse rates by care setting for persons with specified health conditions, nursing homes no longer have the highest abuse rates.     

Identification and Inference in Ascending Auctions With Correlated Private Values

We introduce and apply a new nonparametric approach to identification and inference on data from ascending auctions. We exploit variation in the number of bidders across auctions to nonparametrically identify useful bounds on seller profit and bidder surplus using a general model of correlated private values that nests the standard independent private values (IPV) model. We also translate our identified bounds into closed form and asymptotically valid confidence intervals for several economic measures of interest. Applying our methods to much studied U.S. Forest Service timber auctions, we find evidence of correlation among values after controlling for a rich vector of relevant auction covariates; this correlation causes expected profit, the profit‐maximizing reserve price, and bidder surplus to be substantially lower than conventional (IPV) analysis of the data would suggest.     

2013-2014年中国宏观经济预测与分析

“中国季度宏观经济模型(CQMM)”课题组基于2013年2月底国家统计局最新发布的中国宏观经济季度数据,调整并估计CQMM,对2013年和2014年中国宏观经济运行趋势展开预测.结果表明,尽管存在外部市场的不确定性,2013年中国经济增长仍将继续保持稳定增长的态势,GDP预计增长8.23％,CPI可保持在3.11％的水平.经济的稳定增长为进一步调整经济结构及深化改革创造了良好条件.课题组认为,控制政府收入增长速度,与经济增长保持适当比例,提高居民收入水平尤其是中低收入阶层的收入,是调整现有国民收人结构失衡,进而转变经济发展方式的重要政策切入点.     

How Job Characteristics Affect International Migration: The Role of Informality in Mexico

Despite the importance given to employment opportunities as a primary motive for migration, previous studies have paid insufficient attention to the kinds of jobs that are more likely to retain workers in their countries of origin. We use information from a panel survey of Mexican adults to examine how job characteristics affect the risk of international migration. The sampling strategy and overall size of the survey allow us to analyze the effect of employment characteristics on migration from urban areas, which have much greater labor market diversity, and to separate our analysis by gender. We also distinguish migrants according to whether they migrate for work or for other reasons. We find informality to be a significant predictor of international migration. Even after controlling for individual factors including workers’ wages, as well as various household- and community-level predictors, we find that workers employed in the informal sector have significantly higher odds of migrating than their counterparts in the formal sector. The pervasive nature of informality in many developing countries from which a high proportion of international migrants originate may therefore create a constant supply of workers who are predisposed to migrate. Our findings thus have important implications for a proper understanding of the effects of economic development on migration.     

Sexual Anxieties and Rampant Masculinities in Postcolonial Kenyan Literature

Postcolonial African society has been characterised as one in transition. Institutions, communities and individuals experienced (and some continue to experience) rapid political, social, economic and cultural changes with differing consequences. The independence era in many African countries, the 1960s, unleashed freedoms and liberties that had been unimaginable to a majority of native Africans during the colonial era. These freedoms changed the nature of the social space and relationships, especially between men and women. As men jostled for and won political positions and power, the public and domestic space became highly masculinised. Men, who were seen as conquerors of the colonial establishment, seemed to transfer this masculinised mentality into the social fabric of the new nation-state in which ‘charged’ sexuality and virility was projected to ‘conquer’ their womenfolk. Postcolonial fiction from Kenya seems to suggest that urban working men indulged in hedonistic pursuits, primarily sex as a form of performing their new-found freedom, often to the detriment of their own lives and those of their families. These behaviours reflect the anxieties experienced by individuals when collective and individual freedoms suddenly became available.     

Discursive strategies in the construction of national identity: A critical discourse analysis of the Gibraltar issue in the printed media

Gibraltar is a community in which political conflicts are common, but has quite frequently been ignored in the academic world, despite its great interest and uniqueness. The present research offers a new perspective into the study of the Gibraltarian identity as it adheres to the theoretical paradigm known as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which analyses language in relation to the social context in which it appears, aiming at providing social criticism based on linguistic evidence. This article focuses on the representation of the Gibraltar issue in a crucial moment for this community – namely the 2002 referendum. The textual corpus consists of editorial articles drawn from Gibraltarian newspapers examining how the Gibraltarian community was perceived and represented. Hence, the present CDA of editorial articles in relation to the referendum held in Gibraltar sheds light on a controversial situation: the Gibraltarian community and its distinctive identity.     

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.     

Education and Cohabitation in Britain: A Return to Traditional Patterns?

Cohabitation is sometimes thought of as being inversely associated with education, but in Britain a more complex picture emerges. Educational group differences in cohabitation vary by age, time period, cohort, and indicator used. Well‐educated women pioneered cohabitation in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. In the most recent cohorts, however, the less educated have exceeded the best educated in the proportions ever having cohabited at young ages. But the main difference by education currently seems largely a matter of timing—that is, the less educated start cohabiting earlier than the best educated. In Britain, educational differentials in cohabitation appear to be reinstating longstanding social patterns in the level and timing of marriage. Taking partnerships as a whole, social differentials have been fairly stable. Following a period of innovation and diffusion, there is much continuity with the past.     

篇终接混茫——从《吊床》一诗谈詹姆斯·赖特的艺术之路

《在明尼苏迭松树岛,躺在威廉·达菲农场的吊床上》是美国“深层意象”派代表诗人詹姆斯·赖特的名作。谈诗突兀而抽象的结尾句“我浪费了我的生命”一直是学界争议的焦点。实际上,诗人的生命之叹消融于其物质生命、艺术生命与情感生命的历史轨迹。反过来看,当我们了解赖特的成长过程、艺术风格的形成与转变、以及浓烈的家因意识后,就能从本质上全面领悟该诗的意蕴和结尾句的旨趣。     

The nature of bank money,a case study of transformation in the Czech banking sector

The article examines the nature of bank money on two complementary levels. The first level deals with theoretical considerations. Here, the departure point is Social Positioning Theory, which provides a framework to investigate the nature of money. Within the theory, the paper situates bank money in credit-debt relations, that are themselves integral part of a wider productive-consumptive nexus of the economy. In this perspective, bank money is the relation, accounting economic positions of participating members, resulting from their economic activities realized within the context of the overall society. The second level uses the methods of Oral History and Memory Studies and, through semi-structured interviews, provides empirical material illustrating ideas about the nature of money in a specific historical form. The article thus explores the contrasting experiences of banking in the context of a centrally planned economy and banking in the transformation to a market economy. These two contrasting episodes are illustrative because of the significant change in the form of bank money, which brings to light various aspects of its nature. Moreover, the article utilizes interviews that present the lived experience of bankers with years of involvement in the sector, enriching the perspective on the issue under study.