Does educational inequality predict exercise of users' choice? Survey evidence from domiciliary care services among elderly in Oslo,Norway

The traditional goal of equality in services remains at the heart of the Scandinavian welfare model; however, in recent decades, policymakers have also placed increased emphasis on user influence over services. Voice and choice are two channels to achieve this goal. The possibility to give feedback and voicing dissatisfaction to service providers (voice) is a well-established channel of service users' influence, however it is increasingly supplemented by user choice schemes (choice), where one can choose between different public and private service providers. We use the case of domiciliary care for the elderly to examine how the traditional goal of user equality is associated with the growing emphasis on user influence through voice and choice. The analyses are based on user surveys carried out by the municipality in the city of Oslo, which is arguably the only municipality in Norway where user choice plays a significant role in elderly care. Since the municipality subsidizes the private providers, individual economic resources should have less relevance. However, voicing dissatisfaction and choosing between different providers may anticipate cognitive resources that are not equally distributed among the users. The survey data indicate that there is an association between level of education and propensity to exploit all channels of user influence. Expanding user influence by introducing user choice thus confirms the differences between highly educated and less educated.     

Who Is Poorest? An Asset‐based Analysis of Multidimensional Wellbeing

Recent studies have endorsed asset‐based approaches as a strategy for attaining the Millennium Development Goals. This article discusses asset indices as a diagnostic tool for these policies, systematically breaking them down into separate dimensions of private household wealth and basic public‐goods access and discussing how shortfalls in public‐goods supply can be related to deprivations in basic human capabilities under the asset framework. It then illustrates how asset indices can be used for the targeting of public infrastructure investments and private asset‐accumulation policies, with the help of a detailed case study of deprivations in household wealth and public‐service supply in Madagascar.     

Unequal on top: Gender profiling and the income gap among high earner male and female professionals

We develop a comprehensive, multi-level model of income inequality between high earner men and women during the early career stages. We argue that young women are routinely subjected to “gender profiling” by employers—women’s potential contribution to the organization is interpreted through the lens of social stereotypes and cultural norms that attribute to them weaker labor market commitment than men. We investigate two specific mechanisms that arise from this profiling and lead to income inequality: First, women have diminished access to resources and advancement opportunities within the firm which results in lower returns to tenure for women than for men. Second, external mobility is greatly beneficial for men but much less so for women because it reinforces the image of weak commitment. Salary regressions of early career history data of young MBA alumni of a prestigious U.S. business school accord with our conjectures.     

A (Semi)Parametric Functional Coefficient Logarithmic Autoregressive Conditional Duration Model

In this article, we propose a class of logarithmic autoregressive conditional duration (ACD)-type models that accommodates overdispersion, intermittent dynamics, multiple regimes, and asymmetries in financial durations. In particular, our functional coefficient logarithmic autoregressive conditional duration (FC-LACD) model relies on a smooth-transition autoregressive specification. The motivation lies on the fact that the latter yields a universal approximation if one lets the number of regimes grows without bound. After establishing sufficient conditions for strict stationarity, we address model identifiability as well as the asymptotic properties of the quasi-maximum likelihood (QML) estimator for the FC-LACD model with a fixed number of regimes. In addition, we also discuss how to consistently estimate a semiparametric variant of the FC-LACD model that takes the number of regimes to infinity. An empirical illustration indicates that our functional coefficient model is flexible enough to model IBM price durations.     

A sociology of impairment

Impairment has a ubiquitous and troublesome position within disability studies. The absence of an effective theoretical understanding of impairment has been a major problem for the field. One way out of this impasse is to situate impairment sociologically. By regarding impairment as a thoroughly social dynamic, and examining it though a sociological lens, it is possible to develop a richer understanding of the experiences, politics, and identities of disabled people. Some of the key elements of a sociology of impairment include: using a socially-embedded phenomenology; exploring the social creation of impairment through inequality; deconstructing the cultural construction of impairment; critically examining diagnosis; and analyzing the personal and political significance of impairment identities.     

具阻尼项的偶阶中立型微分不等式最终正解的不存在性

本文讨论具连续偏差变元与阻尼项的偶数阶中立型微分不等式,利用广义Riccati变换、积分平均技巧及Schwarz不等式,建立了该微分不等式的最终正解不存在的若干新的充分条件,推广和改进最近文献的结果.     

New Robust Variable Selection Methods for Linear Regression Models

Motivated by an entropy inequality, we propose for the first time a penalized profile likelihood method for simultaneously selecting significant variables and estimating unknown coefficients in multiple linear regression models in this article. The new method is robust to outliers or errors with heavy tails and works well even for error with infinite variance. Our proposed approach outperforms the adaptive lasso in both theory and practice. It is observed from the simulation studies that (i) the new approach possesses higher probability of correctly selecting the exact model than the least absolute deviation lasso and the adaptively penalized composite quantile regression approach and (ii) exact model selection via our proposed approach is robust regardless of the error distribution. An application to a real dataset is also provided.     

Relative Price Changes and Inequality in the Size Distribution of Various Components of Income

This article uses a comprehensive model of economic inequality to examine the impact of relative price changes on inequality in the marginal distributions of various income components in which the marginal distributions are derived from a multidimensional joint distribution. The multidimensional joint distribution function is assumed to be a member of the Pearson Type VI family; that is, it is assumed to be a beta distribution of the second kind. The multidimensional joint distribution is so called because it is a joint distribution of components of income and expenditures on various commodity groups. Gini measures of inequality are devised from the marginal distributions of the various income components. The inequality measures are shown to depend on the parameters of the multidimensional joint distribution. It is then shown that the parameters of the multidimensional joint distribution depend on the relative prices of various commodity groups and several other specified exogenous variables. Thus, knowledge of how changes in relative prices affect the parameters of the multidimensional joint distribution is deductively equivalent to knowledge of how changes in relative prices affect inequality in the marginal distributions of various components of income. It is found that relative price changes have a statistically significant impact on inequality in various components of income.     

金融素养降低农户消费不平等了吗?——基于金融行为的中介效应分析

随着新发展格局战略的持续推进,激发农户消费需求和降低消费不平等、扩大内需对于促进经济良性循环畅通意义重大。基于山东省农户调查数据,采用OLS和2SLS方法探究了金融素养对农户消费不平等的影响,运用Bootstrap中介效应模型检验了金融素养影响农户消费不平等的作用机制,利用分位数回归模型剖析了金融素养对农户消费不平等的异质性影响。结果表明,一是金融素养显著降低了农户消费不平等,对生活性消费不平等的抑制作用大于对生产性消费不平等的抑制作用。二是金融素养通过信贷平滑、理财增值和保险保障机制影响农户消费不平等。三是金融素养影响农户消费不平等具有异质性,对消费差异高的农户影响更为明显。     

Neuroticism, Education and Self-Assessed Health in the General Population of the United States. Can Smoking Behaviour Explain the Associations?

In this study we investigate the interrelation between neuroticism, education, smoking and health. Two lines of research are brought together: one studying the relationship between neuroticism and health and the other studying the association between education and health. As lower educated people more often score high on neuroticism, we study the relationships of education and neuroticism with health simultaneously. Moreover, we hypothesize that smoking behaviour is a common explanatory factor in these associations. A 1996 US general population sample is employed to test the hypotheses. The associations between education and neuroticism on the one hand and self-assessed health on the other hand proved to be substantially smaller when education and neuroticism are mutually controlled for. Yet, the hypothesis that smoking behaviour provides an explanation for educational differences in health was only supported for men.