US and them: Job quality differences between natives and immigrants in Europe

Using microdata from the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) and aggregate indicators of labour market institutions, this article compares the job quality of native and non-native workers across European countries and analyses the impact of the institutional settings on the job quality differential between both groups. The LFS is used to measure a job quality index for the period 2005–2017. We find that some immigrant groups fare worse than natives, the contribution of the “composition effect” to explain this differential is large, and the institutional framework affects the immigration gap in job quality. In particular, some labour market institutions (more centralized wage bargaining, stricter employment protection legislation) tend to be detrimental for immigrants relative to natives, while integration policies seem to work well in reducing these differences.     

Bounds on Average and Quantile Treatment Effects on Duration Outcomes Under Censoring,Selection, and Noncompliance

Abstract

We consider the problem of assessing the effects of a treatment on duration outcomes using data from a randomized evaluation with noncompliance. For such settings, we derive nonparametric sharp bounds for average and quantile treatment effects addressing three pervasive problems simultaneously: self-selection into the spell of interest, endogenous censoring of the duration outcome, and noncompliance with the assigned treatment. Ignoring any of these issues could yield biased estimates of the effects. Notably, the proposed bounds do not impose the independent censoring assumption—which is commonly used to address censoring but is likely to fail in important settings—or exclusion restrictions to address endogeneity of censoring and selection. Instead, they employ monotonicity and stochastic dominance assumptions. To illustrate the use of these bounds we assess the effects of the Job Corps (JC) training program on its participants’ last complete employment spell duration. Our estimated bounds suggest that JC participation may increase the average duration of the last complete employment spell before week 208 after randomization by at least 5.6 log points (5.8%) for individuals who comply with their treatment assignment and experience a complete employment spell whether or not they enrolled in JC. The estimated quantile treatment effects suggest the impacts may be heterogeneous, and strengthen our conclusions based on the estimated average effects.     

What is Recklessness in Scientific Research? The Frank Sauer Case

On May 22, 2017, administrative law Judge Leslie Rogall of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Departmental Appeals Board, Civil Remedies Division, ruled in favor of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) concerning its decision to charge former University of California at Riverside biochemistry professor Frank Sauer with research misconduct for fabricating or falsifying digital image data included in three papers and seven grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health. More specifically, Sauer was deemed responsible for manipulating, reusing, and falsely labeling images of autoradiograms and gels in his research in epigenetics. One month after this decision, ORI announced its final ruling concerning Sauer, which barred him from serving in any advisory capacity to the Public Health Services and required him to retract affected papers. The case raises some interesting and important questions concerning research integrity because it focused on the legal issue of what constitutes recklessness in scientific research.     

The work process setting and situational contexts based on socially distributed cognition: an interactive,cognitive and social proposal of analysis

To carry out an ethnographic study on the work process in the sterilization unit of a hospital in Catalonia (Spain), we found the socially distributed cognition approaches of Hutchins and Kirsh useful. However, these approaches lack sufficient explanation on three important issues: (a) the pragmatic criteria for identifying and delimiting a relevant unit of analysis and therefore the setting and contexts of the work process; (b) the mechanisms and results of reciprocal influences between these levels of analysis; and (c) the relation between these levels. Therefore, we added several new elements to these approaches, in addition to Layder's model of contexts with some important modifications, with the aim of offering an interactive, cognitive and social proposal of analysis that clarifies these three issues, allowing a more exhaustive and broader empirical analysis that captures better the ‘social’ dimension embedded in the work processes.     

Employment Quality: Are There Differences by Types of Contract?

Measuring welfare state generosity in developing and transitional welfare states is often challenged not only by lack of comparative quantitative data, but also by issues of conceptual stretching. This paper demonstrates and discusses the use of one of the key measures of welfare entitlement generosity developed in the comparative welfare state research in the context of post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). With the new time series data provided by the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset CWED2, comparative approaches including the CEE countries have become feasible. This paper first discusses quantitative measures of welfare entitlement generosity in the tradition of the social rights of citizenship approach and how they can be applied for cross-country comparisons. It then demonstrates empirically how the emerging CEE welfare states’ generosity compares to mature “old” OECD welfare states. Finally, the paper shows the potential and the pitfalls of quantitative measures of welfare state generosity by discussing, to what extent do indicators of social security scheme generosity measure the same in established and emerging welfare states, which functional equivalents may be relevant in the context of emerging welfare states and how far can we stretch our theoretical concepts.     

Identifying the Confounders of Marginalization and Mortality in Mexico, 2003–2007

Social Indicators Research - Confounders alter any predicted outcome by modifying the relationship between cause and consequence. Confounders can appear in different proportions inside a population...     

Adult height and childhood disease

Taller populations are typically richer populations, and taller individuals live longer and earn more. In consequence, adult height has recently become a focus in understanding the relationship between health and wealth. We investigate the childhood determinants of population adult height, focusing on the respective roles of income and of disease. Across a range of European countries and the United States, we find a strong inverse relationship between postneonatal (ages 1 month to 1 year) mortality, interpreted as a measure of the disease and nutritional burden in childhood, and the mean height of those children as adults. Consistent with these findings, we develop a model of selection and stunting in which the early-life burden of undernutrition and disease not only is responsible for mortality in childhood but also leaves a residue of long-term health risks for survivors, risks that express themselves in adult height and in late-life disease. The model predicts that at sufficiently high mortality levels, selection can dominate scarring, leaving a taller population of survivors. We find evidence of this effect in the poorest and highest-mortality countries of the world, supplementing recent findings on the effects of the Great Chinese Famine.