Effects of 360° video on attitudes toward disaster communication: Mediating and moderating roles of spatial presence and prior disaster media involvement

Visual media technologies such as 360° video, augmented reality, and virtual reality are on the rise for immersive storytelling in a variety of public relations contexts. Yet there is a profound lack of scholarly research in public relations, crisis communication, and disaster communication to explore the effects of content displayed using these delivery formats on publics’ responses. To begin addressing the knowledge gap, this work reports results from a laboratory experiment investigating effects of media modality (traditional unidirectional video content vs. 360° omnidirectional video content) on attitudes toward the disaster communication content. Results demonstrate that 360° video featuring the aftermath of a natural disaster yields enhanced attitudes toward the helpful impact of the content. Importantly, mediation analyses show that (1) a sense of spatial presence underlies these effects, and (2) the mediating effects of spatial presence are attenuated by involvement with similar disaster media coverage (indirect experience).     

Korean students’ minority schooling experience in Japan

A qualitative study conducted in western Japan examined the perceptions of Korean students in Japanese junior high school to identify factors contributing to a consistently low high school advancement rate compared to mainstream Japanese students. Fourteen people were interviewed about their Korean students’ experiences in Japan. The findings of this study suggest that factors contributing to the low high school advancement rate among Korean students cluster around three themes: (1) discrimination experienced in society at large and at school, (2) assimilation to become more like the Japanese, and (3) inconsistent cultural and insufficient academic support given by the school and teachers. Findings from this study indicate how the power structure in a social context of schooling influences minority students’ learning and also confirmed in part Ogbu and Cummins’ theories of how power relations between the subordinated and the dominant affect minority students’ schooling experiences and learning.     

Emancipation under the great recession in Spain

In this paper we document the behavior of emancipation over one of the biggest boom–bust cycles experienced by the Spanish economy. In principle, the economic difficulties faced by the Spanish youth during the last recession would have hampered a normal emancipation pace. However, we find that the proportion living away from parents among those aged 18–40 has not decreased but increased from 44 % during the boom (2005–2008) to 46 % during the bust (2009–2013). A simple decomposition reveals that this is mainly driven by the substantial rise in the emancipation rate among the full-time employed workers during the bust. To explain this change we discuss several factors such as macroeconomic conditions, rental subsidy policy, higher labor mobility, selection bias, reverse causation, time-lag in adjustment and secular trend.     

Empirical Likelihood‐Based Inference in Conditional Moment Restriction Models

This paper proposes an asymptotically efficient method for estimating models with conditional moment restrictions. Our estimator generalizes the maximum empirical likelihood estimator (MELE) of Qin and Lawless (1994). Using a kernel smoothing method, we efficiently incorporate the information implied by the conditional moment restrictions into our empirical likelihood‐based procedure. This yields a one‐step estimator which avoids estimating optimal instruments. Our likelihood ratio‐type statistic for parametric restrictions does not require the estimation of variance, and achieves asymptotic pivotalness implicitly. The estimation and testing procedures we propose are normalization invariant. Simulation results suggest that our new estimator works remarkably well in finite samples.     

CAPACITY CONSTRAINED EXPORTERS: IDENTIFYING INCREASING MARGINAL COST

This study revisits a central assumption of standard trade models: constant marginal cost technology. The presence of increasing marginal costs for exporters introduces significant market interdependence across borders missing from traditional models of international trade that rely on constant marginal cost technology. Such market interdependence represents an additional channel through which local shocks are transmitted globally. To identify increasing marginal cost at the level of the firm, we build in flexible production assumptions that nest increasing, decreasing, and constant marginal cost technology to an otherwise standard international trade model. We derive an estimating equation that can be taken directly to the data. Our structural equation explicitly guides our inference on the shape of the marginal cost curve from estimated coefficients. The results suggest that increasing marginal cost is predominant at the firm level. Moreover, utilizing plant‐level information on physical and financial capacity constraints, we find that the degree of increasing marginal cost is significantly exacerbated by both types of constraints. The evidence suggests that access to larger markets through greater international integration may not have the expected welfare gains typically predicted in standard models. (JEL F12, F14)     

Social investment,social service and the economic performance of welfare states

This article begins with an examination of the role of social services as the key instrument of social investment strategy, presenting an empirical analysis of its impact on economic performance. A pooled time series, cross‐section analysis was conducted with the data of 15 welfare states from 1990 to 2007 under the ‘social investment hypothesis’ that more social service orientedness brings about a greater positive effect on the economy. The results show that a larger share of social service spending in the total social expenditure – more social service orientedness – contributes to economic growth and labour market performance, whereas a larger aggregate size of the welfare state may have a negative effect on employment. In conclusion, this study suggests that the relatively ambiguous welfare strategy of social investment could be clarified as a ‘transition from income security to livelihood security’ in which emphasis is placed on social service. Key Practitioner Message: ● This study suggests that the key instrument of social investment strategy is social service; ● The results show that more social service orientedness contributes to economic growth and labour market performance.     

Preference for Flexibility and Random Choice

We study a two‐stage model where the agent has preferences over menus as in Dekel, Lipman, and Rustichini (2001) in the first period and then makes random choices from menus as in Gul and Pesendorfer (2006) in the second period. Both preference for flexibility in the first period and strictly random choices in the second period can be, respectively, rationalized by subjective state spaces. Our main result characterizes the representation where the two state spaces align, so the agent correctly anticipates her future choices. The joint representation uniquely identifies probabilities over subjective states and magnitudes of utilities across states. We also characterize when the agent completely overlooks some subjective states that realize at the point of choice.     

Recent books on HRD

Abstract

The growing potential and need for knowledge and information have had a profound impact on Korea as it strives to develop strategies for national human resource development (NHRD). Within Korea, one strategy for developing NHRD is through regional efforts. However, there is little research regarding regional HRD (RHRD), in spite of the importance of such a focus. This article explores directions and policy-making strategies for RHRD in Busan. 1 1 Busan is often written as Pusan in English, though Busan is preferred in Korea.      

A quadratically convergent algorithm for first passage time distributions in the Markov-modulated Brownian motion

A Markov-modulated Brownian motion (MMBM) is a substantial generalization of the classical Brownian Motion and is obtained by allowing the Brownian parameters to be modulated by an underlying Markov chain of environments. As with Brownian Motion, the time-dependent analysis of the MMBM becomes easy once the first passage times between levels are determined. However, in the MMBM those distributions cannot be obtained explicitly, and we need efficient algorithms to compute them. In this article, we provide a powerful approach based on approximating the MMBM with a sequence of scaled Markov-modulated fluid flows without Brownian components that weakly converge to the MMBM. Our main result is a Riccati equation for an associated matrix of transforms that satisfies conditions for the Newton scheme to have quadratic convergence and thus yields a very practical tool. The solution of that Riccati equation determines needed first passage times in the MMBM without much additional work. The success of our approach, which is based essentially on first-order fluid flows and a stochastic limit process, is argued to be due to the way we have isolated certain terms involving the quadratic variation effects of the Brownian. As an illustration of our algorithm, we present a numerical example of time-dependent results for a MMBM considered by Asmussen for which he determined (only) the eventual first return probabilities which we use here as an accuracy check.     

Stratified proportional subdistribution hazards model with covariate-adjusted censoring weight for case-cohort studies

The case-cohort study design is widely used to reduce cost when collecting expensive covariates in large cohort studies with survival or competing risks outcomes. A case-cohort study dataset consists of two parts: (a) a random sample and (b) all cases or failures from a specific cause of interest. Clinicians often assess covariate effects on competing risks outcomes. The proportional subdistribution hazards model directly evaluates the effect of a covariate on the cumulative incidence function under the non-covariate-dependent censoring assumption for the full cohort study. However, the non-covariate-dependent censoring assumption is often violated in many biomedical studies. In this article, we propose a proportional subdistribution hazards model for case-cohort studies with stratified data with covariate-adjusted censoring weight. We further propose an efficient estimator when extra information from the other causes is available under case-cohort studies. The proposed estimators are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. Simulation studies show (a) the proposed estimator is unbiased when the censoring distribution depends on covariates and (b) the proposed efficient estimator gains estimation efficiency when using extra information from the other causes. We analyze a bone marrow transplant dataset and a coronary heart disease dataset using the proposed method.