The Role of Temporary Help Agency Employment on Temp-to-Perm Transitions

This paper evaluates the impact of agency work on temporary workers’ posterior likelihood of being hired on a permanent basis. We use administrative data on two groups of temporary workers for whom we have complete work histories since they are first observed in 1998 until the year 2004. One group consists of workers employed through a temporary help agency (THA) at some point during the 7 year period under examination (treated group). The other group is composed of individuals employed as direct-hire temps at some point between 1998 and the year 2004, but never via a THA (control group). Using propensity score matching methods, we find that agency workers endure a lower likelihood of being hired on a permanent basis following their temporary assignment than their direct-hire counterparts. However, there are relevant differences for some groups of workers.

Governing the Circular Economy in the City: Local Planning Practice in London

ABSTRACT

There is interest in the circular economy as a framework for transition from a linear take-make-dispose model of production and consumption, to a circular model which decouples economic growth from resource consumption. However, there is limited understanding of how that applies to the city through governance lens. This paper examines evidence from 28 municipalities in London to unpack the ‘government’ and ‘governance’ of circular economy in the city. It examines the ‘governmentality’ of circular economy in planning practice and reflects on what austerity localism and scalar politics might mean for the planning and governance of circular economy in cities.     

Depression Amongst Chinese Adolescents in Hong Kong: An Evaluation of a Stress Moderation Model

Stress has an established association with depression. However, not all adolescents experiencing stressors become depressed and it is helpful to identify potential resilience factors. The current study tests a theoretical extension of a stress-diathesis model of depression in a Chinese context, with stress, coping, family relationships, and alexithymia as risk factors for depression. This community study involves 1,199 secondary school students (567 males and 632 females) aged between 14 and 20 from six high schools with different bandings in Hong Kong. The models tested confirm the relationship between stress and depression. Ability to identify of one’s feelings (alexithymia subscale), the adoption of problem solving coping and the rejection of non-productive coping all acted as protective factors (moderators) against depression in the presence of stress. Coping also partially mediated the relationship between alexithymia and depression. A stress-diathesis model received some support, however, a complex set of inter-relationship between all the explanatory variables was revealed. Problem solving coping and non-productive coping emerged as key factors in understanding adolescent depression.     

Inequality and education decisions in developing countries

In this paper we analyze the effect of inequality on school enrollment, preferred tax rate and expenditure per student in developing countries; when parents can choose between child labor, public schooling or private schooling. We present a model in which parents make schooling decisions for their children, weighing the utility benefit of having a child with formal public or private education versus the forgone income from child labor or household work. Parents vote over the preferred tax rate to finance freely provided public education. The utility benefit of an educated child is proportional to expenditure per student, so that there is congestion in public school. We find that when parents can send their children to work or to private school, high inequality leads to exit from public education at both ends of the income distribution. Thus high inequality reduces the support for public education, leading to a low tax rate and expenditure per student. Exit from public education results in both high child labor and a large fraction of students attending private school. In fact there is a threshold level of inequality above which there is no longer support for public education. In addition we explore the implications for the design of foreign aid. The results suggest that foreign aid policies should focus on promoting school attendance rather than increasing school resources, as the later policy might be offset by a reduction in the recipient country’s fiscal effort, with little impact on outcomes.      

Confronting collinearity in environmental regression models: evidence from world data

Statistical Methods & Applications - Despite the evidence, the correlation between environmental impact factors has mostly been neglected in econometric environmental models or treated with...     

Remittances as insurance: evidence from Mexican immigrants

We argue that remittances are, in part, transferred to the home country to purchase family-provided insurance and self-insurance. We use data on Mexican immigrants with work experience in the United States to capture the motives for sending remittances and use a novel approach to test for the insurance motive by relating host economy risk levels to remittance flows. We find that increases in income risk significantly raises both the propensity and the proportion of labor earnings sent home for family-provided insurance and for self-insurance.     

New evidence on the role of remittances on healthcare expenditures by Mexican households

Using Mexico’s 2002 wave of the Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares (ENIGH), we find that international remittances raise health care expenditures. Approximately 6 pesos of every 100 peso increment in remittance income are spent on health. The sensitivity of health care expenditures to variations in the level of international remittances is almost three times greater than their sensitivity to changes in other sources of household income. Furthermore, health care expenditures are less responsive to remittance income among lower-income households. Since the lower responsiveness may be partially due to participation of lower-income households in public programs like PROGRESA (now called Oportunidades), we also analyze the impact of remittances by health care coverage. As expected, we find that households with some kind of health care coverage—either through their jobs or via participation in PROGRESA—spend less of remittance income increments on health care than households lacking any health care coverage. Hence, remittances may help equalize health care expenditures across households with and without health care coverage.     

Cohort-level sex ratio effects on women’s labor force participation

It follows from a number of theoretical models of marriage that the scarcer women are relative to men, i.e., the higher the sex ratio, the less married women are likely to participate in the labor force. Such sex ratio effects may be stronger among less educated women. These predictions are tested using individual data from Current Population Surveys for four regions of the U.S. (Northeast, Midwest, South and West), and for the U.S. as a whole, covering the period 1965–2005 at 5-year intervals. Within-region sex ratio variation results from variation in cohort size (due principally to large fluctuations in number of births) and limited fluctuations in the difference between male and female age at marriage. As hypothesized, we find that sex ratios are inversely related to women’s labor force participation, reflecting that ceteris paribus women born in years of peak baby-boom are more likely to be in the labor force than women born in years of peak baby-bust. Additionally, weaker sex ratio effects are found among educated women in two of the four regions of the United States.

Making Muslims illegible: recoupling as an obstacle to religious enumeration in Germany

Theory and Society - Literature on categorization often invokes historical legacies to explain why states adhere to statistical categories that inadequately capture their population, and especially...     

Likelihood inference for exchangeable continuous data with covariates and varying cluster sizes; use of the Farlie–Gumbel–Morgenstern model

This article investigates the Farlie–Gumbel–Morgenstern class of models for exchangeable continuous data. We show how the model specification can account for both individual and cluster level covariates, we derive insights from comparisons with the multivariate normal distribution, and we discuss maximum likelihood inference when a sample of independent clusters of varying sizes is available. We propose a method for maximum likelihood estimation which is an alternative to direct numerical maximization of the likelihood that sometimes exhibits non-convergence problems. We describe an algorithm for generating samples from the exchangeable multivariate Farlie–Gumbel–Morgenstern distribution with any marginals, using the structural properties of the distribution. Finally, we present the results of a simulation study designed to assess the properties of the maximum likelihood estimators, and we illustrate the use of the FGM distributions with the analysis of a small data set from a developmental toxicity study.