What Is a Life Worth? Robustness of VSL Values from Contingent Valuation Surveys

The value of a statistical life (VSL) is a key input for estimating the benefits of policies that save lives. Several recent studies have obtained estimates of the VSL from contingent valuation surveys, i.e., by asking people to say how much they would pay to reduce their risk of dying. This article examines statistical factors that may influence the estimates of the VSL obtained from such surveys. We examine the importance of distributional assumptions, the choice of the welfare statistics of interest, the procedure for computing them, outliers, undesirable response effects, and internal validity of the willingness-to-pay (WTP) responses. We illustrate the importance of these factors using dichotomous-choice and open-ended WTP data from four recent contingent valuation surveys.     

Trajectories of effort-reward imbalance in Swedish workers: Differences in demographic and work-related factors and associations with health

ABSTRACT

The aim of the study was to identify trajectories of effort-reward imbalance (ERI), to examine these with respect to demographic (age, gender, socio-economic position) and work-related (employment contract, work hours, shift work, sector) factors, and to investigate associations with different health indicators (self-rated health, depressive symptoms, migraine, sickness absence). The study used four waves of data (N?=?6702), collected biennially within the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH). Using latent class growth modelling, we identified four trajectories: a stable low imbalance trajectory, which comprised 90% of all participants, and three change trajectories including a decreasing trajectory (4% of the participants), an inverted U-shaped trajectory and an increasing imbalance trajectory, both in 3% of the participants. Results indicate that a sizeable proportion of Swedish employees’ experience imbalance between efforts and rewards at work. The most favourable trajectory comprised relatively more men and was characterised by better work-related characteristics than the less favourable ERI trajectories. All change trajectories were dominated by women and employees in the public sector. Health developments followed ERI trajectories, such that less favourable trajectories associated with impaired health and more favourable trajectories associated with better health. Sickness absence increased among all ERI trajectories, most so for the decreasing and increasing ERI trajectory.     

Organization Community Embeddedness: The Social Impact of Enterprise Restructuring in the Post-Communist Czech Republic

The aim of this paper is to examine the impactof the enterprise restructuring process, which hastypified the experience of post-communist industry, onlocal communities. It is argued that restructuring has had differential impacts on communities,and one key factor in making this judgment is the natureof the enterprise community relationship inherited fromthe former state socialist regime. Conceptually, this relationship can be understood in terms ofthe social and institutional embeddedness of theenterprise in its local community. The paper draws uponresearch into three large former state enterprises in the now Czech Republic in order to examinethe effects of different degrees of embeddedness on theimpact of restructuring decisions to reduce enterpriseoverstaffing, and to unburden the enterprise of its social and welfare assets andactivities.     

Essential Tiedeman: Anchoring the North Star for Human Development

In quantum physics, whatever is observed is changed; therefore, it is all perception. Given those findings and to save Tiedeman from interpretation, in this article, he speaks for himself in 5 areas: (a) his professional credo, (b) the Harvard Studies in Career Development, (c) the 1983 Assembly to Advance Career, (d) statistics of vocational guidance, and (e) transformation in his thought.     

Response to Ermisch, Martin, and Wu

Our recent paper in Demography (Gray, Stockard, and Stone 2006) has attracted the close scrutiny of several prominent academics. Three sets of formal comments, authored independently by Ermisch, Martin, and Wu (EMW), appear in this issue of Demography. In this response we argue that the analysis and evidence of our 2006 paper have withstood the scrutiny of EMW. In particular, we find that a substantial part of the rising share of nonmarital births since 1970 is due to a selection effect associated with marriage. This same selection effect also explains how birth rates could rise in both groups, even though their combined birth rate did not. In sum, though we appreciate the opportunity to expand on several key aspects of our 2006 article, we see no reason to substantially revise any of our major conclusions based on the EMW comments.     

Interkulturelle Arbeitswelt

Due to globalization, the professional lives of many people have an intercultural flavor. Focusing on expatriates, this article presents challenges of intercultural working scenarios and introduces the reader to means by which organizations can support their employees. In this regard, special attention is dedicated to a relatively new form of support: coaching.     

National Identity,Globalization and the Discursive Construction of Organizational Identity*

This paper pursues two goals. First, it explores the connections between national identity and organizational globalization within the context of three British organizations' attempts to synchronize their corporate and organizational identities through diversity management initiatives. Second, it teases out the implications of these connections for current theorizing on organizational identity, looking in particular to extend Hatch and Schultz's (Human Relations, 55 (2002) , pp. 989–1018) processual model of image– culture dynamics. Based on a Foucauldian theoretical frame, and a data set comprising 36 in‐depth interviews, we show the complex and highly particular relationships between articulations of Britishness, and corporate, organizational and personal identities. Such complexity is suggestive of the contradictory connections between national and organizational identities, and of the disjointed, discursive and affective characteristics of organizational identity. Our contribution to the study of organizational identity lies in both an illumination of the local discursive dynamics of identity construction at the individual and collective levels, and an assertion of the ontological role of discourse(s) in structuring understandings and expressions of organizational identity.     

Erratum to “Progressively Type-II right censored order statistics from discrete distributions” [J. Statist. Plann. Inference 138 (2008) 845–856]

In this note, we correct the proof of Representation 1 of Balakrishnan and Dembińska [2008. Progressively Type-II right censored order statistics from discrete distributions. J. Statist. Plann. Inference 138, 845–856] which relates the joint distribution of progressively Type-II right censored order statistics corresponding to an arbitrary population to progressively Type-II right censored order statistics from the standard uniform distribution.