Macroeconomic conditions, institutional factors and demographic structure: What causes welfare caseloads?

Some of the possible determinants of changes observed in welfare caseloads are analysed in this study. The paper attempts to explain variations in welfare caseloads on the basis of four different factors: macroeconomic conditions, interactions with other income maintenance programmes, changes in the programme's parameters and changes in the demographic structure. Different models are tested by applying time series techniques. The data employed are of an administrative nature and cover the whole period that the Madrid programme has been in operation. The results show that the effects of both unemployment and institutional variables are strong and significant. Macroeconomic effects on caseloads could be offset or reinforced by changes in unemployment protection and reforms of the programme's parameters. The significant effects found for the share of lone-parent applicants also show that demographic shifts could shape the trends of welfare rolls regardless of the changes in unemployment or the implementation of institutional reforms. The authors would like to thank Juan Gabriel Rodríguez, Minoru Kunizaki, Miguel Angel Malo and three anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. Financial and technical support from the Spanish Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Inter-ministerial Commission on Science and Technology (SEC 2001-0746) and the Social Services Department of the Madrid Government is also gratefully acknowledged. Responsible editor: Christian Dustmann.     

Religion as a Meaning System: Policy Implications for the New Millennium

The development of social policy related to religion has received increasing focus in recent years, yet psychology continues to play a relatively minor role in this important domain. In the current article, religion's positive and negative influences as a meaning system on individual, community, and societal well-being are delineated. The challenges facing psychology in contributing to public policy development in the religious arena are examined, challenges that stem from profound differences in the meaning systems of religion, government, and psychology. These challenges notwithstanding, a number of different pathways in the domains of applied research, community practice, and policy development are delineated through which psychology can help to maximize positive, and minimize negative, outcomes in the religion and social policy arena.     

Violence Exposure and Drug Use in Central American Youth: Family Cohesion and Parental Monitoring as Protective Factors

Associations between witnessing serious violence and drug use, and the protective influences of family cohesion and parental monitoring, were investigated among 9,840 adolescents (50.5% female, M age=15.29 years, SD=1.76) living in Panama and Costa Rica. After accounting for demographics and parental and sibling substance use, witnessing serious violence was associated with greater drunkenness, tobacco use, number of illicit drugs used, and problems with drugs and alcohol. In every analysis, exposure to violence was associated with more drug use, while family cohesion and parental monitoring attenuated risk. Further, family cohesion and parental monitoring exerted a protective‐stabilizing effect on number of illicit drugs used and on problems with drugs and alcohol. There were few interactions with age. Implications for prevention are discussed.     

Income and Power Inequality as Determinants of Environmental and Health Outcomes: Some Findings*

Objective. The article corrects for two main shortcomings in conventional economic analyses of environmental change. First is the overemphasis placed on income growth, and general disregard for other socioeconomic factors. Second is economists' often oversimplified view of the environment, where distinctions between environmental necessities such as potable water and so‐called environmental luxuries are ignored. I test for the effectiveness of power inequality in explaining access to sanitation and safe water as well as their health consequences. Methods. I develop a two‐stage model seeking first to explain changes in the environmental variables and then population health. I employ ordinary least squares regressions on international cross‐sectional data. Results. Some dimensions of power inequality outperform per‐capita income as possible determinants of population health. Neither power inequality nor income is clearly superior at explaining environmental quality. Conclusion. The study casts further doubt on the importance of per‐capita income in explaining environmental and health outcomes.     

Public Life and Globalization as Cultural Vision*

Dans cette étude, nous examinons les répercussions sociales de la mondialisation dans une perspective culturelle. Notre analyse porte sur le conflit qui existe entre le discours sur la mondialisation et les priorités locales, entre les droits de l'individu et les engagements des pouvoirs publics ainsi que sur la difficulté de trouver de nouveaux points d'ancrage de l'identité culturelle dans un contexte où les frontières territoriales entre les États s'effacent et où les idées de progres, de modernité et d'évolution se sont érodées. Ces traits accompagnent la transformation amorcée dans le cadre des relations complexes et hégémoniques qui caractérisent aujourd'hui le système mondial. Ce conflit et ces problèmes demeurent un axe fondamental du débat politique. Nous suggérons que les différentes formes de participation se traduisent de diverses façons dans le champ de l'expression politique et dans Interprétation des exigences sociales et des droits, et influent sur la vie publique à la veille du XXI^esiécle. This article explores the social implications of globalization as cultural vision. Discussion bears upon the tension between the discourse of globality and local priorities, of individual rights and public commitments, and upon the problems of finding new ways for grounding identities as territorial state boundaries are weakened and the ideas of progress, modernity and evolutionary perspectives are eroded as part of a process of change initiated in the developed and hegemonic settings of the world system. It is claimed that these tensions and problems remain a crucial axis of political debate. It is suggested that different patterns of participation meld in manifold ways into recreated forms of political will and varied interpretations of social claims on and rights to affect the shaping of public life at the turn of the century.     

A Semi-parametric Bayesian Analysis of Survival Data Based on Lévy-driven Processes

In the presence of covariate information, the proportional hazards model is one of the most popular models. In this paper, in a Bayesian nonparametric framework, we use a Markov (Lévy-driven) process to model the baseline hazard rate. Previous Bayesian nonparametric models have been based on neutral to the right processes, which have a number of drawbacks, such as discreteness of the cumulative hazard function. We allow the covariates to be time dependent functions and develop a full posterior analysis via substitution sampling. A detailed illustration is presented.     

Identifying Preferences for Conditional Cooperation Using Individual Beliefs

The relationship between contributions and elicited beliefs in a repeated two-person public good experiment is modeled with the help of a parsimounious random-utility function that allows for conditionally cooperative, opportunistic, and altruistic patterns of behavior. Under standard assumptions, a latent-class mixed logit specification with three sub-populations is shown to capture well heterogeneity in individual contribution levels over time, while also accomodating for different degrees of heteroscedasticity. The estimation results are consistent with the conjecture that the majority of players in public goods games are strongly conditional cooperators, with smaller fractions of the population leaning to opportunistic or altruistic behavior.     

Size does matter: Passive sampling in urban parks of a regional bat assemblage

Urban Ecosystems - We studied the occurrence of bats in urban parks in the city of Madrid (Spain), and the resulting patterns were compared with bat occurrence in the surrounding region. In this...