The behaviour towards malaria care—a multinomial logit approach

This paper attempts to estimate a disease specific demand function to study the determinants of utilisation of the services of a health care provider or a treatment regiment for malaria. The study adapts a multinomial logit framework to look at both facility characteristics and individual patient features on demand for malaria care in Ghana. The individual patient characteristics form a set of social indicators which can be used to discriminate or put into groups patients with respect to their choice of provider.The study confirms the popular use of self-medication as a first choice of action in treating malaria. The choice of malaria care providers is found to be influenced by facility price, travel time, waiting time for treatment, education, age, sex and quality of care measured in terms of drugs availability. We further find that as income increases, the odds are in favour of self-medication when people get malaria.     

基于偏好异质性的家庭农场扶持政策研究——黄淮海平原570个粮食类农场的实证分析

依据黄淮海平原5省570个粮食类家庭农场的调研数据,运用选择实验法,在对家庭农场忽略的属性进行信息处理的基础上,借助混合Logit模型和潜在类别模型,分析家庭农场对不同扶持政策的偏好程度,以及不同偏好类型的家庭农场特征差异。结果发现：采用推断性属性非参与方法进行信息处理后的模型拟合效果最好;家庭农场更偏好农业补贴、信贷支持和技术支持,但其对政策传播渠道的偏好也不能忽视;面临相同的政策属性组合时,受教育水平高、经营规模合理和对扶持政策认知程度高的家庭农场利润率提升的可能性更大;家庭农场可划分为资金偏好型、知识与技术偏好型、土地流转偏好型和政策信息偏好型四种类型。应该基于偏好异质性制定家庭农场扶持政策,将扶持政策向家庭农场相对更为偏好的农业补贴、信贷支持和技术支持适当倾斜,并对农场主受教育水平高、经营规模合理和对扶持政策认知度高的家庭农场进行重点扶持。     

河南省流动人口体育健身现状及影响因素实证分析

本文通过对河南省635名流动人口的问卷调查的统计分析发现,只有18.2%的流动人口有体育健身的习惯,通过构建二值选择模型进行实证后得出：河南省流动人口的体育健身行为受教育程度、收入水平、幸福感、长期居留意愿、居住类型、孩子数、日工作时数和参保状况的影响显著,而性别、年龄、户口性质等因素没有通过显著性检验。根据实证分析结果,提出了加强和改善流动人口体育健身状况的建议和对策。     

Multivariate tests comparing binomial probabilities, with application to safety studies for drugs

Summary.  In magazine advertisements for new drugs, it is common to see summary tables that compare the relative frequency of several side-effects for the drug and for a placebo, based on results from placebo-controlled clinical trials. The paper summarizes ways to conduct a global test of equality of the population proportions for the drug and the vector of population proportions for the placebo. For multivariate normal responses, the Hotelling T ²-test is a well-known method for testing equality of a vector of means for two independent samples. The tests in the paper are analogues of this test for vectors of binary responses. The likelihood ratio tests can be computationally intensive or have poor asymptotic performance. Simple quadratic forms comparing the two vectors provide alternative tests. Much better performance results from using a score-type version with a null-estimated covariance matrix than from the sample covariance matrix that applies with an ordinary Wald test. For either type of statistic, asymptotic inference is often inadequate, so we also present alternative, exact permutation tests. Follow-up inferences are also discussed, and our methods are applied to safety data from a phase II clinical trial.     

试析人工神经网络运用于社会统计分析中的可能性

社会统计分析是社会研究方法中十分重要的一部分,因为定量研究所得的原始资料在经过审核、整理与汇总之后,需要进行科学系统的统计分析,才能揭示出研究资料所包含的众多信息,从而得出研究的结论。在多元统计分析方法中,研究者用得比较多的是多元线性回归分析、方差分析、log线性模型、probit模型及logistic回归分析,这些分析方法能够帮助我们对数据进行简化、对变量之间的相互依赖关系进行分析,以及根据模型进行预测。但上述方法也存在着一定的使用局限性,比如,方差分析法要假定进行均值比较的总体具有相同的方差和服从正态分布,如果不符合…     

我国居民医疗资源利用状况的不平等

医疗资源利用状况的不平等,是指不同收入组的居民在利用医疗资源方面存在显著的差异。根据2004年的中国营养与健康调查(CHNS)数据,用多元logit模型估计出我国居民医疗支出的价格弹性和收入弹性,结果表明:低收入的居民偏向于到基础医院就诊,高收入的居民偏向于到高级医院就诊;与高收入的居民相比,低收入居民受到的收入约束更大,特别是在患重病的时候,低收入居民的医疗费用更高,经济负担更重。     

上市公司财务困境预测方法的比较研究

如何采用适当的方法对公司财务困境进行正确的预测,一直是学术界关注的热点问题之一。基于国内外已有的财务困境各种预测方法及其结果的差异,我们在分析各种研究方法应用前提的基础上,采用中国制造业上市公司1999—2002年的数据分别运用多元判别分析、逻辑线性回归和人工神经网络对财务状况处于困境的公司进行预测比较分析。结果表明:尽管各模型的使用有其特定的前提条件,三个主流模型均能在公司发生财务困境前1年和前2—3年较好地进行预测。其中,多元判别分析要逊色于逻辑线性回归,人工神经网络的预测准确率最高。     

Life Satisfaction and Happiness in Turkey

This research aims to investigate life satisfaction and happiness in Turkey. It extends the previous researches on subjective well-being (SWB) for Turkey by considering both happiness and life satisfaction. The previous researches for Turkey are local studies, and their findings cannot be generalized to the population of Turkish society. Given these facts, the factors that shape individual happiness and life satisfaction amongst Turkish people are determined using a representative survey of sociocultural and political change, World Values Survey (WVS). Some results obtained in this study are similar to typical findings such as a negative age effect, positive influences of income and health status, and a negative effect of unemployment. Contrary to the expectations, middle education has a negative direct effect on life satisfaction among females, and the upper education level is insignificant in the life satisfaction model. By comparing the correlates of happiness and life satisfaction across different years, this research aims to provide insights for policy makers and professionals to improve the perceived lives of Turkish people.

Analyzing event stream dynamics in two-mode networks: An exploratory analysis of private communication in a question and answer community

Information about social networks can often be collected as event stream data. However, most methods in social network analysis are defined for static network snapshots or for panel data. We propose an actor oriented Markov process framework to analyze the structural dynamics in event streams. Estimated parameters are similar to what is known from exponential random graph models or stochastic actor oriented models as implemented in SIENA. We apply the methodology on a question and answer web community and show how the relevance of different kinds of one- and two-mode network structures can be tested using a new software.     

When to Carry Eccentric Products? Optimal Retail Assortment under Consumer Returns

To understand whether retailers should consider consumer returns when merchandising, we study how the optimal assortment of a retailer is influenced by its return policy. The retailer selects its assortment from an exogenous set of horizontally differentiated products. Consumers make purchase and keep/return decisions in nested multinomial logit fashion. Our main finding is that the optimal assortment has a distinct structure for relatively strict return policies: it is optimal to offer a mix of the most popular and most eccentric products when the refund amount is sufficiently low, which can be viewed as a form of risk sharing between the retailer and consumers. In contrast, if the refund is sufficiently high or when returns are disallowed, the optimal assortment is composed of only the most popular products (a common finding in the literature). We provide preliminary empirical evidence for one of the key drivers of our results: more eccentric products have higher probability of return—conditional on purchase. In light of our analytical findings and managerial insights, we conclude that retailers should take returns into account when merchandising.