Racial disparity in Minnesota's child protection system

Minnesota has been recognized by several studies as a state with a significant amount of racial disparity in its child protection system. This study, using 2001 data from Minnesota's Social Services Information Service, was conducted to determine at which of the six decision points in Minnesota's child welfare system racial disparities are statistically significant. The authors employ a nested model to examine a child's journey through the Minnesota child protection system. Using binary logistic regression, they are able to determine the odds that a child belonging to a particular racial or ethnic group would progress to the next decision point.     

The impact of women's status on infant mortality rate: A cross-national analysis

A number of prior studies have attempted to account for cross-national differences in infant mortality rate using a variety of economic, demographic, and health related variables. These studies have given relatively little attention to the impact of predictors measuring the status of women. The present study, based on a sample of 96 less developed countries circa 1990, tests a series of hypotheses derived from gender stratification theory and industrialism theory. Evidence is presented of an inverse relationship between the status of women and infant mortality rate. The present study shows that it makes a difference whether we use relative or absolute measures of women's status and it shows that in addition to women's educational status, other dimensions of women's status particularly economic status and autonomy are also important predictors of infant mortality rate.     

The shadow of the past: how experience affects behavior in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma experiment

We study the development of cooperation in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiment with teams as players, unknown length and unknown continuation probability as it could happen between traders regularly. To characterize real-world frictions our players are rematched with a new team twice. In such a situation—often found outside the laboratory—agents can get an idea on the likely duration of future interactions by relying on prior experience. Our main finding is that participants apparently transform the infinite-horizon situation into a finite-horizon situation. Not only do we observe decay in cooperation but also unraveling towards the end of a matching. We found a pronounced restart effect of cooperation that induces a steady rise in average cooperation over matchings. Such an effect is not observed after the unexpected continuation of the third match. Stable cooperation paths of considerable length are induced when both players start the matching with joint cooperative moves. We can draw some interesting conclusions from the behavior of the partners for commercial market situations.     

Gender Differences in Lifelong Learning: An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Marriage and Children

We use recent advances in the statistical analysis of Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions for non‐linear models to analyse the contribution of individual variables to total gender differences in training participation and duration. Results suggest that effects stemming from the intra‐household division of labour contribute significantly to gender differences, but that segregation of the labour market as well as differences in the access to training by tenure, age, occupation, profession and sectors are more important.     

Speaking Acquaintances or Helpers in Need: Participation in Civic Associations and Individual Social Capital

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - It is widely believed that civic associations are capable to produce social capital, here understood as an individual...     

Longitudinal network models and permutation-uniform Markov chains

Consider longitudinal networks whose edges turn on and off according to a discrete-time Markov chain with exponential-family transition probabilities. We characterize when their joint distributions are also exponential families with the same parameter, improving data reduction. Further we show that the permutation-uniform subclass of these chains permit interpretation as an independent, identically distributed sequence on the same state space. We then apply these ideas to temporal exponential random graph models, for which permutation uniformity is well suited, and discuss mean-parameter convergence, dyadic independence, and exchangeability. Our framework facilitates our introducing a new network model; simplifies analysis of some network and autoregressive models from the literature, including by permitting closed-form expressions for maximum likelihood estimates for some models; and facilitates applying standard tools to longitudinal-network Markov chains from either asymptotics or single-observation exponential random graph models.