Education,cognitive ability,and cause-specific mortality: A structural approach

Education is negatively associated with most major causes of death. Prior work ignores the premise that cause-specific hazards are interdependent and that both education and mortality depend on cognitive ability. We analyse Swedish men aged 18–63, focusing on months lost due to specific causes—which solves the interdependence problem—and use a structural model that accounts for confounding due to cognitive ability. In a standard Cox model controlling for Intelligence Quotient, improving education is associated with large decreases in mortality for major causes of death. In the structural model, improving education is associated with a small decrease in months lost for most causes and education levels. Among the least educated, however, improving education strongly reduces the months lost, mainly those lost from external causes, such as accidents and suicide. Results suggest that conventional analysis of education and mortality may be biased, even if accounting for observed cognition.     

Precarious intimacies – Europeanised border regime and migrant sex work

This article examines the meaning of borders – the spaces where immigration policies and restrictions are materially condensed – in the lives of migrant sex workers. I provide a theoretical and conceptual framework to discuss the role of borders in creating living and working conditions for sex workers within the European border regime. This regime both restricts and enables a structural background for migrant sex work. I argue that sex work scholars should pay closer attention to the heterogeneity of non-citizenship and the effects of different immigration statuses on the working conditions and forms of intimacies migrants create. Borders need to be viewed as institutions that produce social relations. I categorise these relations as precarious intimacies to describe the ways in which intimacy, commerce and borders often intertwine in the lives of migrants engaged in commercial sex work. The article draws upon 18-month ethnographic fieldwork among and interviews with migrant sex workers in Finland.     

Forced Migration and Mortality in the Very Long Term: Did Perestroika Affect Death Rates Also in Finland?

In this article, we analyze mortality rates of Finns born in areas that were ceded to the Soviet Union after World War II and from which the entire population was evacuated. These internally displaced persons are observed during the period 1971-2004 and compared with people born in the same region but on the adjacent side of the new border. We find that in the 1970s and 1980s, the forced migrants had mortality rates that were on par with those of people in the comparison group. In the late 1980s, the mortality risk of internally displaced men increased by 20% in relation to the expected time trend. This deviation, which manifests particularly in cardiovascular mortality, coincides with perestroika and the demise of the Soviet Union, which were events that resulted in an intense debate in civil society about restitution of the ceded areas. Because state actors were reluctant to engage, the debate declined after some few years, and after the mid-1990s, the death risk again approached the long-term trend. Our findings indicate that when internally displaced persons must adjust to situations for which appropriate coping behaviors are unknown, psychosocial stress might arise several decades after their evacuation.     

缺少的分享——喜马拉雅东部(中国云南西北部)作为“整体社会事实”的分享的仪式语言

中华人民共和国成立以前,云南西北部怒江、独龙江流域居住的独龙族、怒族等邻近族群之间存在着一种共通的"议式语言".这种仪式语言通过宗教祭祀活动以及分享杀牲后的肉食过程体现出来.在这一地域社会中,各种社会、政治和经济关系都依赖于这种仪式语言展开.虽然目前这种分享的仪式日渐式微,但分享的意识依然体现着族群内部的"社会结合"方式.通过独龙族仪式语言的个案分析,旨在与利奇关于克钦社会的"仪式语言"研究进行对话.     

International coopetition for innovation: Are the benefits worth the challenges?

International coopetition has rarely been studied in relation to innovation. Further exploration of effects of international coopetition, i.e. the pursuit of simultaneous cooperation and competition, on a firm’s innovation performance is especially important as such a relationship is challenging with a high propensity to fail. This observation formed the point of departure for this study, which aims to increase the understanding of the effects of international coopetition on firm innovativeness and how these effects are conditioned on the magnitude of the organizational adjustments a firm introduces. We use an unbalanced panel of 9839 firms that participated in four waves of the Swedish Community Innovation Survey between 2008 and 2014 as our empirical base. We illustrate that firms that cooperate with competitors internationally are more likely to exhibit higher propensity to introduce radical innovations, yet this effect is conditioned upon the magnitude of organizational adjustments. Overall, our study contributes to the understanding of the implications of international coopetition and what a firm needs to benefit from it.     

Divorce and parity progression following the death of a child: A register-based study from Finland

Most studies that have examined whether a child’s death influences parental relationship stability have used small-scale data sets and their results are inconclusive. A likely reason is that child loss affects not only the risk of parental separation, but also the risk of having another child. Hence parity progression and separation must be treated as two competing events in relation to child loss. The analysis in this paper used Finnish register data from 1971 to 2003, covering over 100,000 married couples whose durations of both first marriage and parenthood could be observed. We ran parity-specific Cox regressions in which process time started from the birth of each additional child. All marriages included women of childbearing age, none of whom had experienced any child death on entering the analysis. We find that child loss only modestly influences the divorce risk, whereas its effect on the risk of parity progression is considerable.     

Parental age and offspring mortality: Negative effects of reproductive ageing may be counterbalanced by secular increases in longevity

As parental ages at birth continue to rise, concerns about the effects of fertility postponement on offspring are increasing. Due to reproductive ageing, advanced parental ages have been associated with negative health outcomes for offspring, including decreased longevity. The literature, however, has neglected to examine the potential benefits of being born at a later date. Secular declines in mortality mean that later birth cohorts are living longer. We analyse mortality over ages 30–74 among 1.9 million Swedish men and women born 1938–60, and use a sibling comparison design that accounts for all time-invariant factors shared by the siblings. When incorporating cohort improvements in mortality, we find that those born to older mothers do not suffer any significant mortality disadvantage, and that those born to older fathers have lower mortality. These findings are likely to be explained by secular declines in mortality counterbalancing the negative effects of reproductive ageing.     

Die Finanzialisierung von Unternehmen

Since the 1990s the financialization of the enterprise is an increasingly important aspect of capitalist development also in Germany. However, more recently a growing number of scholars point at a problematic conceptual stretching of financialization. The term has been defined too differently and ambiguously and has not been distinguished sufficiently from seemingly similar concepts. Financialization has been prematurely identified with a set of fixed effects often condensed to stagist concepts of capitalist development. When analyzing effects financialization has been regarded in isolation without considering interaction effects with other structurations of fields and hence the multi-referentiality of the enterprise. In order to overcome these shortcomings the article proposes a concept for the analysis of firm level financialization which draws on a more general sociological concept of field structuration and dynamics in which the “multi-referential enterprise” operates. Based on this concept the article analyses episodes of financialization in Germany showing its dynamics and limits. Financialization of enterprises proves to be structurally limited, institutionally contested, and unfolds its effects in deferent actor constellations at firm level due to its multiple and contradictory embeddedness.     

CHAOTIC DYNAMICS IN CONTESTS

Under a myopic best‐reply dynamic, efforts in repeated contests may exhibit chaotic behavior. This may help explain, for example, why experimental data often show nonconvergence to one‐shot equilibrium efforts. (JEL C61, C72, D72, D74, D83)