Cooking behaviours: a user observation study to understand energy use and motivate savings

Electric cookers are one of the highest energy consuming domestic appliances, and there are several aspects that can influence the amount of energy used when preparing a meal. Appliance characteristics are shown to influence consumption, but human factors play an important role in the overall electricity usage. A user observation study was conducted among university students to understand how they use electric cookers. They were asked to perform a specific cooking task, and the electricity usage was measured. Participants' behaviours were analysed and compared with a set of energy saving techniques. Appliance characteristics that influenced how students use energy were also investigated. The results show that users performed the task in several different ways, presenting diverse energy consumption, the average being 3 times above the necessary to complete the task. This information is now informing the design of interventions to motivate people to change their behaviours whilst cooking.     

International governance mode choice: Evidence from Brazilian franchisors

The purpose of this article is to test a novel, integrative theory of governance mode selection in the context of international franchising from Brazil. Given the Brazilian emerging market context, we added and tested another variable in the model relating to environmental distance between the home (Brazil) and host countries. To test the theory, we employed two logistic regression models and representative data from the Brazilian Franchising Association in addition to the World Bank's Doing Business index, and the CEPII (Centre d'études prospectives et d'informations internationales). Findings show that three factors influence Brazilian franchisors' choices regarding international governance modes: the environmental uncertainty of the host countries, their behavioral uncertainty, and the franchisors' financial capacity. However, the environmental distance does not influence internationalization strategies of Brazilian firms. Emerging markets firms' governance modes of entry can be adequately explained with the existing model despite contextual differences.     

Reports of Wins and Risk Taking: An Investigation of the Mediating Effect of the Illusion of Control

Two experiments examined the relationships between the knowledge that another person has won in a gamble, the illusion of control and risk taking. Participants played a computer-simulated French roulette game individually. Before playing, some participants learnt that another person won a large amount of money. Results from a first experiment (n = 24) validated a causal model where the knowledge of another person’s win increased the illusion of control, measured with betting times, expectancy and self-reports on scales, which in turn encourages risk taking. In the second experiment (n = 36), some participants were told the previous player acknowledged the win to be fortuitous. The suppression of the belief that the previous winner had himself exerted control over the outcome resulted in lower rates of risk-taking behaviors. This suggests that it was not the knowledge of another person’s win in itself that increased risk taking, but rather, the belief that the other person had some control over the gamble’s outcome. Theoretical implications for the study of social mechanisms involved in gambling behavior are discussed.     

Inference on Counterfactual Distributions

Counterfactual distributions are important ingredients for policy analysis and decomposition analysis in empirical economics. In this article, we develop modeling and inference tools for counterfactual distributions based on regression methods. The counterfactual scenarios that we consider consist of ceteris paribus changes in either the distribution of covariates related to the outcome of interest or the conditional distribution of the outcome given covariates. For either of these scenarios, we derive joint functional central limit theorems and bootstrap validity results for regression‐based estimators of the status quo and counterfactual outcome distributions. These results allow us to construct simultaneous confidence sets for function‐valued effects of the counterfactual changes, including the effects on the entire distribution and quantile functions of the outcome as well as on related functionals. These confidence sets can be used to test functional hypotheses such as no‐effect, positive effect, or stochastic dominance. Our theory applies to general counterfactual changes and covers the main regression methods including classical, quantile, duration, and distribution regressions. We illustrate the results with an empirical application to wage decompositions using data for the United States. As a part of developing the main results, we introduce distribution regression as a comprehensive and flexible tool for modeling and estimating the entire conditional distribution. We show that distribution regression encompasses the Cox duration regression and represents a useful alternative to quantile regression. We establish functional central limit theorems and bootstrap validity results for the empirical distribution regression process and various related functionals.     

Lifting the Lid: Perspectives on and Activity within Student Supervision

Practice teaching is central to social work education. Significant changes have occurred in the past 10 years affecting social work education in Scotland. This article reports on the findings of a small-scale study involving the audio recording of supervision sessions and the interviewing of students and practice teachers engaged in a 65-day assessed placement. The research reveals a high level of congruence between students and practice teachers in perspectives on the supervisory relationship, confirms the findings of other studies concerning effective supervision and provides some vivid evidence of practice teacher and student activity within supervision perceived to be conducive to student learning. A specific finding was the association between the use of ‘exploring’ by practice teachers and students engaging in practice analysis. It is concluded that the changes affecting social work education over the past 10 years, on the evidence of this small sample, overall have had a positive impact on the supervisory relationship within practice learning. One area suggested for further study is the potential link between ‘expressing opinion’ by practice teachers and students within supervision and the development of evidence-based practice.     

Social protection assessment‐based national dialogue exercises: Cambodia,Indonesia, Thailand,Viet Nam

Between 2011 and 2013, the International Labour Organization, in collaboration with governments and several United Nations agencies working as part of the Social Protection Floor Initiative, conducted social protection assessment‐based national dialogue (ABND) exercises in Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Viet Nam. The exercises were carried out in order to take stock of existing social protection realities in the respective countries, including social insurance, social assistance and anti‐poverty programmes. These inventories present a comprehensive picture of what elements of national social protection floors (SPFs) are in place, where “holes” in national floors exist, and provide a framework within which to propose recommendations for the further design and implementation of social protection provisions that guarantee at least the SPF to the entire population. This article describes the methodology for conducting ABND exercises, the situational analysis of the SPF in four countries, and the policy recommendations that were formulated for achieving basic health care and income security for children, the working‐age population and the elderly. The results of preliminary calculations of the cost of implementing proposed policy options are also outlined.     

"Active" and "Passive" Resettlement: The Influence of Support Services and Refugees' own Resources on Resettlement Style

This paper explores the process of resettlement among recent refugees in Perth, Western Australia. We propose four refugee resettlement styles created through the interaction of a number of factors. These factors can be clustered as: (1) the social features of refugees (their human, social, and cultural capital), and (2) the host society's responses to refugee settlers (Australia's resettlement policy and services and the broader influence of the host society's responses to refugees). We propose that refugees approach their resettlement in predominantly active (“achievers” and “consumers”) or passive (“endurers” and “victims”) ways and that these are differentially successful strategies. Medicalization of the refugee experience in Australia is a factor that may influence refugees to adopt a passive “victim role”, so we propose that a greater emphasis during early resettlement should be placed on refugees' own culturally defined priorities such as employment and stable housing. The argument developed in this paper is supported by data from two qualitative research projects conducted in Western Australia. The fieldwork consisted of interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, and targeted refugees from the former Yugoslavia and the Horn of Africa who arrived in Australia during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as resettlement service providers.     

Does the Representation of Household Behavior Matter for Welfare Analysis of Tax-benefit Policies? An Introduction

A widely shared intuition holds that individual control over money matters for the decision process within the household and the subsequent distribution of resources and welfare. As a consequence, there are good reasons to depart from the unitary model of the household and to explore the possibilities offered by models of the family accounting for several decision makers in the household and for the potential impact of tax reforms on the balance of power. This paper summarizes both the methodological and empirical findings presented in the next three papers of this special issue of the Review of the Economics of the Household. This series of contributions primarily entails a concrete comparison of the policy implications of the choice between the unitary and a particular multi-person representation: the collective representation. On the one hand, it suggests a methodology to implement the collective model of labor supply in a realistic context where participation is modeled together with working hours, and where the full tax-benefit system is accounted for. On the other hand, the empirical part relies on comprehensive simulations of tax reforms in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and allows to quantify the distortions that may affect policy recommendations based on the unitary model.

Quantile and Probability Curves Without Crossing

This paper proposes a method to address the longstanding problem of lack of monotonicity in estimation of conditional and structural quantile functions, also known as the quantile crossing problem (Bassett and Koenker (1982)). The method consists in sorting or monotone rearranging the original estimated non‐monotone curve into a monotone rearranged curve. We show that the rearranged curve is closer to the true quantile curve than the original curve in finite samples, establish a functional delta method for rearrangement‐related operators, and derive functional limit theory for the entire rearranged curve and its functionals. We also establish validity of the bootstrap for estimating the limit law of the entire rearranged curve and its functionals. Our limit results are generic in that they apply to every estimator of a monotone function, provided that the estimator satisfies a functional central limit theorem and the function satisfies some smoothness conditions. Consequently, our results apply to estimation of other econometric functions with monotonicity restrictions, such as demand, production, distribution, and structural distribution functions. We illustrate the results with an application to estimation of structural distribution and quantile functions using data on Vietnam veteran status and earnings.     

La mortalité violente selon l'âge, le sexe et la cause: un essai de classification des pays industrialisés, 1985–1989

Violent death varies substantially according to age, reflecting the riskfactors which confront individuals at different stages in their lives.International comparison of the age-distribution of deaths by violence showsgreat variation from one region to another. Using cluster analysis, groupingsof countries can be made on the basis of the level of violent death, itsage-composition and its causes. It is possible to show that some countrieswith heavy and with light burdens of violent death have characteristicprofiles of mortality according to age and to cause of death. For example,surmortality in some Eastern (Hungary and Czechoslovakia) and in someNorthern and Western countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France,Norway and Switzerland) produces a kind of horizontal corridor in Europe.Differences between countries in respect of mortality from motor vehicletraffic accidents, falls and suicide account to a considerable degree for thepatterns observed.