State employee bargaining legislation

The authors test competing hypotheses drawn from the public versus private interest theories of regulation to determine the status of bargaining rights of state employees. N-chotomous probit is employed to predict legislation which is characterized as an ordinal scale ranging from prohibition to prescribed bargaining. The presence of voter coalitions rather than intent to remedy monopsonistic production inefficiency explains liberal legislation.     

Selection among open population capture-recapture models when capture probabilities are heterogeneous

Selection of a parsimonious model as a basis for statistical inference from capture-recapture data is critical, especially when using open models in the analysis of multiple, interrelated data sets (e.g. males and females, with two to three age classes, over three to five areas and 10-15 years). The global (i.e. most general) model for such data sets might contain hundreds of survival and recapture parameters. Here, we focus on a series of nested models of the Cormack-Jolly-Seber type wherein the likelihood arises from products of multinomial distributions whose cell probabilities are reparameterized in terms of survival ( phi ) and mean capture ( p ) probabilities. This paper presents numerical results on two information-theoretic methods for model selection when the capture probabilities are heterogeneous over individual animals: Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC) and a dimension-consistent criterion (CAIC), derived from a Bayesian viewpoint. Quality of model selection was evaluated based on the relative Euclidian distance between standardized theta and theta (parameter theta is vector-valued and contains the survival ( phi ) and mean capture ( p ) probabilities); this quantity (RSS = sigma{(theta i - theta i )/ theta i } 2 ) is a sum of squared bias and variance. Thus, the quality of inference (RSS) was judged by comparing the performance of the two information criteria and the use of the true model (used to generate the data), in relation to the model that provided the smallest RSS. We found that heterogeneity in the capture probabilities had a negligible effect on model selection using AIC or CAIC. Model size increased as sample size increased with both AIC- and CAIC-selected models.     

Indigenous labor supply,sustenance organization,and population redistribution in nonmetropolitan america: An extension of the ecological theory of migration

The ecological theory of migration asserts that change in sustenance organization, to the extent that it produces changes in the opportunities for living, necessitates a change in population size. Migration may thus be viewed as a demographic response to the population’s need to reestablish a balance between its size and sustenance organization, thus attaining its best possible living standard. However, the levels of net in- or out-migration needed to restore the balance should be affected by the degree of positive or negative growth of the indigenous labor force population. We thus test the hypothesis that changes in opportunities for living will be balanced by net changes in the number of persons in the labor force, where this is a function of both indigenous labor supply and net migration.     

A multi-dimensional assessment of the health needs of homeless infants and pre-school children in Phoenix

The dual purpose of this study was to identify the comprehensive health needs of a selected group of homeless children in Phoenix, Arizona, and to utilize the findings in developing needed services. A non-random sample of 60 infants and pre-school children were given on-site physical, dental, developmental, behavioral, and nutritional assessments. The study included Medicaid's Early Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment procedures, complete oral screening, the Denver Developmental and Denver Articulation Screening Test, the Pre-school Behavior Inventory, and parental interviews. Fifty-eight of the 60 children screened needed further evaluation, treatment, or followup services. The most significant problems included low hematocrit readings, inadequate immunizations, and untreated medical and dental problems specific to this age group. Also identified were developmental delays and potential behavior problems. It is imperative that aggressive outreach and followup services be developed to reach homeless children and to insure that needed interventions are provided.     

Reply to comments on “artificial neural networks: an econometric perspective“

We briefly discuss the so called pseudo-GLS estimator in a standard linear regression model with nonsperical disturbances, and conclude that the potentiality for applications is higher than originally assumed by Fiebig Bartels and Krämer (1996).     

Sociology and social policy: from a love-hate relationship with the state to cynicism and pragmatism

Les sociologues québécois ont été au coeur de ce que Ton a appelé la Révolution tranquille. lis ont inspiré des réformes, animé des projets et joué le rôle d'éminences grises auprés du gouvernement. Cependant, au milieu des années '70, plusieurs sont devenus de plus en plus critiques de l'intervention de l'État en matiére de politiques sociales: non seulement L'État n'a-t-il pas réussi à redistribuer les ressources des plus riches vers les plus pauvres, mail il a aussi paralysé l'action des groupes communautaires et des autres mouvements sociaux. Le présent article recense les publications sur l'État et les politiques sociales depuis 1975. Les auteurs concluent que les sociologues québécois sont de moins en moins intéressés par l'État, concentrant davantage leur attention sur les groupes en besoin.
Quebec's sociologists have been at the heart of the so-called Revolution tranquille. They have inspired reforms, animated projects and served as 'grey eminences' to the government. Yet, by the mid 1970s, many had grown intensely critical of state intervention in social policies: not only was the state incapable of really redistributing resources from the rich to the poor, but it was also paralysing the action of community groups and other social movements. In this article, the francophone literature on the state and social policy since 1975 is reviewed. The authors conclude that Québec sociologists have become less fixated on the state, and are beginning to turn their attention more and more to specific social groups in need.     

1.5 Generation Internal Migration in the U.S.: Dispersion from States of Immigration?1

The issue of immigrant spatial concentration and the possibilities for immigrant dispersion through migration features in at least three interrelated debates about immigration. First, the ethnic enclave literature centers on the question of whether spatial concentration improves or harms the economic well‐being of immigrants. Second, spatial assimilation theory links immigrant relocation away from residential enclaves to socioeconomic gains. Although framed at an intra‐urban scale, we suggest that similar assimilation logics infuse thinking and expectations about immigrant settlement and spatial mobility at other scales. And third, immigrant clustering links to anxieties about the threats posed by non‐European origin newcomers to the traditional cultural fabric of the nation. In the current wave of immigration, research on questions of settlement geography and spatial mobility has so far been restricted to the first generation. But as the current wave of immigration matures there is a growing population of adults who are the children of immigrants. This article investigates the migration behavior of these adult children, specifically the 1.5 generation, seeking to answer the question of whether they will remain in the states in which their parent's generation settled or move on. It also assesses whether the out‐migration response of the 1.5 generation in states of immigrant concentration is similar to that of their parent's generation or the U.S.‐born population.