Income in jeopardy: How losing employment affects the willingness to take risks

Identifying the determinants of risk-taking is crucial for our understanding of a variety of choices. Using German panel data, we find that people become more risk-averse when losing work. The immediate income loss does not mediate this effect. It seems also unrelated to the loss of non-monetary benefits of work and to changes of worker’s emotional state. However, we find that risk aversion responds the more strongly to losing work the more future income is at stake, and that the effect manifests itself already on the eve of job loss when people do not yet suffer from the consequences of the event. We conclude that lower future income expectations and more uncertainty about future incomes may explain the effect of job loss on risk attitude. Our results might imply that a recession may reinforce itself as it induces people to fear job loss, which raises their risk aversion and might therefore reduce the willingness to invest in risky projects. Moreover, self-assessed risk attitude seems to measure absolute risk aversion and thus not only an underlying risk preference parameter.     

Testing for Full Insurance Using Exogenous Information

We strongly reject the full-insurance hypothesis, using testing variables that are not decision variables for the households under investigation. We find that households are not insured against changes in the unemployment rate associated with the household head's occupational category. Using this exogenous information, we also investigate the appropriateness of exogeneity assumptions on idiosyncratic variables that have been used as testing variables in the full-insurance literature. It is shown that several exogeneity assumptions made in the existing literature are potentially problematic.     

Custody Recommendations of Israeli Social Workers

Abstract

This study examines the custody recommendations of a sample of Israeli social workers who advise the courts. It looks at their recommendations in relation to the child's wishes and the workers' assessments of the children's expected quality of life with each of the parents. The findings show that the social workers based their recommendations mainly on the child's preference where that was clear, and, where it was not, on the child's expected quality of life with the two parents. With this, maternal custody remained the default recommendation and paternal custody was recommended only when the quality of life the father was expected to enable was significantly higher than that the mother was expected to enable.     

Child Protection and Child Custody

Abstract

A child'S need for safety should trump any and all other considerations in family law. Child-service agencies cannot be expected to both promote reunification and child protection simultaneously. The author asserts that legislatures need to change the laws such that it is clear to the court that children come first and that safety is paramount. Although visitation between child and parent is considered to be a fundamental right, this right can and should be abrogated when initial evidence shows that such contact poses a risk of danger to the emotional or physical health and safety of the child. A new and specially trained court dealing only with issues of family violence and abuse may need to be considered.     

Sexually Abused Children's Opposition to Psychotherapy

As children enter therapy, they form beliefs (conceptualizations) about the reasons for their attendance. Some of these conceptualizations may lead to premature termination of therapy or impede its progress. Four of these conceptualizations are explored in this paper: therapy as an indication of illness, therapy as punishment, therapy as an accusation, and therapy as another form of abuse. The process of the formation of these conceptualizations is outlined. The ways in which sexually abused children's experiences may make them particularly prone to form these conceptualizations are discussed. The benefits of exploring the child's resulting opposition to therapy are also explored.     

浅谈媒介素养教育与儿童社会化的关系

在现代社会。媒介已成为儿童社会化的主体之一。它在儿童成长与适应社会的过程中扮演着越来越重要的角色。本文力求客观地评价传播媒介对儿童社会化的作用和影响，说明推行媒介素养教育、培养儿童媒介素养对儿童社会化的必要性及重要意义。     

Child Welfare and Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment (AOD): Bridging the Gap to Comprehensive Services

ABSTRACT

Chemical addiction is a significant factor in child abuse and neglect (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [DHHS], 1999). Although research has indicated that an alliance between the child welfare and alcohol and other drugs (AOD) treatment fields is the best way to effectively address chemical addiction within families, collaboration has not generally been established. The lack of collaborative relationships between the child welfare and AOD fields can be attributed to a number of different factors. Similarities in proposed interventions for collaborative efforts between AOD treatment and child welfare agencies can be found throughout the literature. The establishment of a truly collaborative partnership between AOD treatment and the child welfare system is a necessary step towards achievement of functional and healthy families, a goal common to both disciplines.     

Interpersonal risk assessment and social preferences: An experimental study

We investigate interpersonal risk assessment, that is how individuals use either their own or their partner’s monetary resources to offset the risk that affects them or their partner. The observed behavior is in line with the predictions of a simple piecewise linear model of social preferences. Overall, individuals opportunistically draw from others’ resources to offset risk; furthermore, they display higher levels of risk aversion when delegated to choose for others rather than when choosing for themselves. However, different social types differ in the assessment of interpersonal risk. Considering our results, we suggest that studies dealing with interpersonal risk assessment should not only focus on risk preferences, but also take into account social preferences.     

GSH Dependence Modeling with an Application to Risk Management

The generalized secant hyperbolic distribution (GSH) can be used to represent financial data with heavy tails as an alternative to the Student-t, because it guarantees the existence of all moments, also with a high kurtosis value. In order to obtain a multivariate extension of the GSH distribution, in this article we present two approaches to model the dependence, the copula approach and independent component analysis. Since the methodologies considered allow to simulate the GSH dependence, we show also the empirical results obtained in the estimation of risk of a financial portfolio by the Monte Carlo method.     

The rights of the child enabling community development to contribute to a valid social work practice with children at risk

This paper presents a way of thinking about and doing child protection work using community development (CD) principles to guide practice. It suggests that a useful addition to CD can be found within the rights of the child provisions in Human Rights conventions. Using examples from the authors' three countries to illustrate the work that practitioners do in their work with children at risk, we argue that social work practice can be enhanced by the inclusion of these principles and practices which are essentially core generic social work practice. However, much of social work with the protection of children is bound by ‘risk’ perceptions which result in investigatory approaches being used as a first action, often to the exclusion of preventive approaches. This article demonstrates that in very different situations from different environments, CD in concert with the principles of the rights of the child can assist good outcomes with children at risk. A model is presented for unifying the worldview of human/children's rights with social work's core concern, the protection of children, using generic social work skills.