Integrating Individual Differences in Career Assessment: The Atlas Model of Individual Differences and the Strong Ring

Career assessment methods often include measures of individual differences constructs, such as interests, personality, abilities, and values. Although many researchers have recently called for the development of integrated models, career counseling professionals have long faced the challenge of integrating this information into their practice. The authors examine the use of integrated models to enhance the career counseling process, including Armstrong, Day, McVay, and Rounds's (2008) RIASEC‐based Atlas Model of Individual Differences (using Holland's 1997, typology of 6 interest types: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional [RIASEC]) and Armstrong, Smith, Donnay, and Rounds's (2004) basic interests‐based Strong Ring. These models provide a structured framework for presenting clients with assessment feedback that emphasizes connections between interests, personality, and abilities.     

Incentive pay: Productivity,sorting, and adjacent rents

I model and empirically test the hypothesis that higher-quality workers prefer performance pay to time-rate based pay because they realize rent upon two different dimensions: Explicit and implicit rents. First, higher-quality workers are outright more productive than their lower-quality counterparts, earning them explicit rent (Curme and Stefanec, 2007). Second, these same factors of production facilitate the unobserved heterogeneity for incentive workers, earning them implicit rent because they can produce a given level of output with less effort. I find strong empirical evidence to confirm that these implicit rents exist and I measure them at 1.5–3.4 percent of average real hourly earnings.     

A Dynamic Model of Demand for Houses and Neighborhoods

This paper develops a dynamic model of neighborhood choice along with a computationally light multi‐step estimator. The proposed empirical framework captures observed and unobserved preference heterogeneity across households and locations in a flexible way. We estimate the model using a newly assembled data set that matches demographic information from mortgage applications to the universe of housing transactions in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1994 to 2004. The results provide the first estimates of the marginal willingness to pay for several non‐marketed amenities—neighborhood air pollution, violent crime, and racial composition—in a dynamic framework. Comparing these estimates with those from a static version of the model highlights several important biases that arise when dynamic considerations are ignored.     

Time‐Varying Risk Premium in Large Cross‐Sectional Equity Data Sets

We develop an econometric methodology to infer the path of risk premia from a large unbalanced panel of individual stock returns. We estimate the time‐varying risk premia implied by conditional linear asset pricing models where the conditioning includes both instruments common to all assets and asset‐specific instruments. The estimator uses simple weighted two‐pass cross‐sectional regressions, and we show its consistency and asymptotic normality under increasing cross‐sectional and time series dimensions. We address consistent estimation of the asymptotic variance by hard thresholding, and testing for asset pricing restrictions induced by the no‐arbitrage assumption. We derive the restrictions given by a continuum of assets in a multi‐period economy under an approximate factor structure robust to asset repackaging. The empirical analysis on returns for about ten thousand U.S. stocks from July 1964 to December 2009 shows that risk premia are large and volatile in crisis periods. They exhibit large positive and negative strays from time‐invariant estimates, follow the macroeconomic cycles, and do not match risk premia estimates on standard sets of portfolios. The asset pricing restrictions are rejected for a conditional four‐factor model capturing market, size, value, and momentum effects.     

Researchers experience of misconduct in research in Malaysian higher education institutions

This article offers a qualitative analysis of research misconduct witnessed by researchers during their careers, either by research students or fellow researchers, when conducting or supervising research in their respective departments. Interviews were conducted with 21 participants from various research backgrounds and with a range of research experience, from selected universities in Malaysia. Our study found that misbehavior such as manipulating research data, misrepresentation of research outcomes, plagiarism, authorship disputes, breaching of research protocols, and unethical research management was witnessed by participants among junior and senior researchers, albeit for different reasons. This indicates that despite the steps taken by the institutions to monitor research misconduct, it still occurs in the research community in Malaysian institution of higher education. Therefore, it is important to admit that misconduct still occurs and to create awareness and knowledge of it, particularly among the younger generation of researchers. The study concludes that it is better for researchers to be aware of the behaviors that are considered misconduct as well as the factors that contribute to misconduct to solve this problem.     

“Build a wall”. “Tax a shed”. “Fix a debt limit”. The constructive and destructive potential of populist anti-statism and “naïve” statism

ABSTRACT

Populist surges, movements and parties often centre around radically simplifying policy proposals, sometimes anti-statist in intent (e.g. fix a limit to state borrowing in cash terms), and at other times pushing naïve statist solutions (e.g. build a giant wall to keep out migrants; or tax companies' activities in a given shed, not their profits). Most liberal political science condemns the crudity and often unrestrained vigour of populist “solutions”. But on occasion, they can have value in counteracting the increasing complexities that elites often build into public policies. Two case studies show populist pressure for simplification working effectively in one instance – the “tax shaming” campaign against multinationals avoiding corporation taxes; and engendering only disorder in another instance – the effort to enforce national debt limits in nominal terms in the USA.     

Depressive symptoms and help‐seeking behaviors among Korean Americans

Cheung M, Leung P, Cheung A. Depressive symptoms and help‐seeking behaviors among Korean Americans Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: 421–429 © 2010 The Author(s), International Journal of Social Welfare © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. Korean Americans represent the fifth largest group of Asian Americans in the USA. This exploratory survey of 205 Korean Americans (92.2 percent foreign born) found that those with depressive symptoms tend to be younger, have lower incomes, and are more concerned about their basic needs, community/social needs, family relationship issues, and healthcare issues than those without depressive symptoms. Income, healthcare concerns, and anxiety were significant predictors of depression. The likelihood of having depressive symptoms among Korean Americans with anxiety was 240 times higher than among those without anxiety, but acculturation was not a significant contributing factor. Most respondents tended to seek advice about their mental health problems from physicians and non‐mental health professionals (friends and religious healers). Implications for social work education, research, practice, and policy are discussed in relation to the need to use evidence‐based practice data to plan culturally relevant services for ethnic minorities.     

The Civilizing Process of Trust: Developing Quality Mechanisms which are Local,Professional‐led and thus Legitimate

‘Quality’ and ‘performance’ have become defining concepts for policymakers and health‐care systems alike. Yet whilst these principles are of fundamental importance, their practical implementation and assurance are far from straightforward. This commentary analyses the difficulties faced in enhancing quality and performance in the English NHS. Many recent initiatives have been driven through incentives and external auditing of the professionals providing health care on the frontline. Drawing on recent literature and research findings, we argue that this checking‐based ‘audit culture’ is fundamentally flawed in driving quality and performance. Many targets and measures are too crude to reflect important aspects affecting patient outcomes and therefore these frameworks lack legitimacy amongst professionals. An alternative, trust‐based model is proposed – one more capable of acknowledging the meaning, complexity and specificities inherent to professional work. Quality mechanisms developed locally by professionals are able to produce the legitimacy crucial for their effectiveness. It is argued that the normative obligation of approaches based on conditional trust is a more compelling incentive towards good practice than targets and sanctions. This governance by ‘the social’ is able to motivate a more holistically enlightened and consistent reflexivity towards practice, though it is only able to flourish in the absence of purposive‐rational systems.     

Partitioning large signed two-mode networks: Problems and prospects

While a substantial amount of attention within social network analysis (SNA) has been given to the study of one-mode networks, there is an increasing consideration of two-mode networks. Recent research on signed networks resulted in the relaxed structural balance (RSB) approach and its subsequent extension to signed two-mode networks involving social actors and social objects. We extend this approach to large signed two-mode networks, and address the methodological issues that arise. We develop tools to partition these types of networks and compare them with other approaches using a recently collected dataset of United Nations General Assembly roll call votes. Although our primary purpose is methodological, we take the first step towards bridging Heider's structural balance theory with recent theorizing in international relations on soft balancing of power processes.