Formative Indicators and Effects of a Causal Model for Household Human Capital with Application

Dagum and Slottje (2000 Dagum , C. , Slottje , D. J. ( 2000 ). A new method to estimate the level and distribution of the household human capital with applications . Journal of Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 11 : 67 – 94 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) estimated household human capital (HC) as a latent variable (LV) and proposed its monetary estimation by means of an actuarial approach. This paper introduces an improved method for the estimation of household HC as an LV by means of formative and reflective indicators in agreement with the accepted economic definition of HC. The monetary value of HC is used in a recursive causal model to obtain short- and long-term multipliers that measure the direct and total effects of the variables that determine household HC. The new method is applied to estimate US household HC for year 2004.     

Do media play a role in promoting vocational education and training? The case of MasterChef

It is often suggested that vocational education and training (VET) could be key to cut youth unemployment. VET programmes may provide young people with specific professional qualifications that enable them to successfully compete in the labour market. However, despite the great emphasis placed by governments and other institutions on these programmes, VET appears to be far from reaching its full potential in many countries. One barrier preventing students from pursuing this type of education is the stigma associated with VET. This paper looks at the role of media in changing the negative social perceptions of VET. Specifically, it examines whether in Italy the growing popularity of the cooking television reality show MasterChef has led to an increase in the number of students willing to study for a vocational qualification in hospitality and catering. The empirical results show that an increase in the number of MasterChef's viewers is associated with a higher proportion of students willing to attend hospitality and catering schools. This finding suggests that popular television cooking series like MasterChef may be a vehicle through which the image and the attractiveness of VET can be improved.     

Recipes for Attention: Policy Reforms,Crises, Organizational Characteristics,and the Newspaper Coverage of the LGBT Movement, 1969–2009

Why do some organizations in a movement seeking social change gain extensive national newspaper coverage? To address the question, we innovate in theoretical and empirical ways. First, we elaborate a theoretical argument that builds from the political mediation theory of movement consequences and incorporates the social organization of newspaper practices. This media and political mediation model integrates political and media contexts and organizations' characteristics and actions. With this model, we hypothesize two main routes to coverage: one that includes changes in public policy and involves policy‐engaged, well‐resourced, and inclusive organizations and a second that combines social crises and protest organizations. Second, we appraise these arguments with the first analysis of the national coverage of all organizations in a social movement over its career: 84 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and AIDS‐related organizations in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal from 1969 to 2010. These analyses go beyond previous research that provides either snapshots of many organizations at one point in time or overtime analyses of aggregated groups of organizations or individual organizations. The results of both historical and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses support our media and political mediation model.     

From bias to coverage: What explains how news organizations treat social movements

Why do newspapers cover social movement actors, and why is this coverage sometimes favorable? Early scholarship saw the news media mainly as a source of data on collective action, and sought to ascertain its biases, but scholarship has increasingly focused directly on why movements gain coverage, especially coverage that can advance their goals. To understand why and how newspapers cover movement actors, we start with the insight that movements rely on the news media for many reasons, but their coverage is largely in the control of news institutions. In this review, we focus on perspectives that specify 3‐way interactions between the characteristics of newspapers, social movement actors, and the social and political contexts, but we begin with how news media institutions are organized. We conclude with suggestions for future research that take advantage of the digital revolution of the last generation.     

Spatial effects in dynamic conditional correlations

The recent literature on time series has developed a lot of models for the analysis of the dynamic conditional correlation, involving the same variable observed in different locations; very often, in this framework, the consideration of the spatial interactions is omitted. We propose to extend a time-varying conditional correlation model (following an autoregressive moving average dynamics) to include the spatial effects, with a specification depending on the local spatial interactions. The spatial part is based on a fixed symmetric weight matrix, called Gaussian kernel matrix, but its effect will vary along the time depending on the degree of time correlation in a certain period. We show the theoretical aspects, with the support of simulation experiments, and apply this methodology to two space–time data sets, in a demographic and a financial framework, respectively.     

An Adaptive Simulation Framework for the Exploration of Extreme and Unexpected Events in Dynamic Engineered Systems

The end states reached by an engineered system during an accident scenario depend not only on the sequences of the events composing the scenario, but also on their timing and magnitudes. Including these additional features within an overarching framework can render the analysis infeasible in practical cases, due to the high dimension of the system state‐space and the computational effort correspondingly needed to explore the possible system evolutions in search of the interesting (and very rare) ones of failure. To tackle this hurdle, in this article we introduce a framework for efficiently probing the space of event sequences of a dynamic system by means of a guided Monte Carlo simulation. Such framework is semi‐automatic and allows embedding the analyst's prior knowledge about the system and his/her objectives of analysis. Specifically, the framework allows adaptively and intelligently allocating the simulation efforts preferably on those sequences leading to outcomes of interest for the objectives of the analysis, e.g., typically those that are more safety‐critical (and/or rare). The emerging diversification in the filling of the state‐space by the preference‐guided exploration allows also the retrieval of critical system features, which can be useful to analysts and designers for taking appropriate means of prevention and mitigation of dangerous and/or unexpected consequences. A dynamic system for gas transmission is considered as a case study to demonstrate the application of the method.     

%Gra: an SAS macro for generalized redundancy analysis

In the framework of redundancy analysis and reduced rank regression, the extended redundancy analysis model managed to account for more than two blocks of manifest variables in its specification. A further extension, the generalized redundancy analysis (GRA), has been recently proposed in literature, with the aim of incorporating external covariates into the model, thanks to a new estimation algorithm that manages to separate all the contributions of the exogenous and external covariates in the formation of the latent composites. At present, software to estimate GRA models is not available. In this paper, we provide an SAS macro, %GRA, to specify and fit structural relationships, with an application to illustrate the use of the macro.     

University Quality and Labour Market Outcomes in Italy

Abstract. This paper uses proxies for university quality derived from Performance Indicators to evaluate the impact of university quality on the early labour market outcome of a cohort of recent Italian graduates. Institutional research quality is found to have a negative effect on the probability that both male and female graduates will be overeducated. Additionally, research inputs are positively related to men's wages. In contrast, teaching quality does not appear to enhance students’ economic success.