Post-Divorce Transfers and the Welfare of Mothers and Children in the United States

ABSTRACT In this paper we analyze the relationship between post-divorce private transfers (child support and alimony), mothers' economic independence and children's welfare using US data. Our empirical results show that mothers who receive child support and alimony from absent fathers are more likely to work and to spend a higher proportion of the income on child-related goods. We argue that the pattern of empirical results is consistent with there being significant externalities between parents even after divorce.     

The role of grandparenting in early childcare and child outcomes

This paper examines the short and medium term impact of early childcare provision by grandparents and formal care settings on child cognitive outcomes, using data from the Millennium Cohort Study (UK). Compared with children placed in formal childcare, children cared for by their grandparents are better at naming objects, but perform worse on tests of basic concept development and non-verbal reasoning. These results mask strong heterogeneities. On the one hand, the positive association between grandparental care and child outcomes is stronger for children from more advantaged households; on the other, the negative association is only significant for those from more disadvantaged households. The results of OLS estimations used for our analysis are confirmed using panel methods and an instrumental variable approach.     

Emotions into Disorder: Anxiety Disorders and the Social Meaning of Fear

This article explores what we refer to as norm-stimuli-state discrepancies, which are disparities between people's physical-emotional responses to emotional cues and the normative meanings of those cues. Drawing on forty qualitative interviews and participant observation research at support groups, we show that people with anxiety disorders describe two forms of norm-stimuli-state discrepancies. The first form involves discrepancies of type, in which people label fearful emotional states as deviant for being caused by the “wrong” stimuli. The second involves discrepancies of intensity, in which people label fearful states as deviant for involving feelings or displays of “too much” anxiety in response to an “appropriate” stimuli. The article further addresses the role of stimuli in prompting treatment seeking. Unexpected and intense emotional distress in combination with the falling away of external cues—which we refer to as “stimuli-less fear”—serve as a critical juncture on the path to an anxiety disorder diagnosis.     

Sequential Monte Carlo for rare event estimation

This paper discusses a novel strategy for simulating rare events and an associated Monte Carlo estimation of tail probabilities. Our method uses a system of interacting particles and exploits a Feynman-Kac representation of that system to analyze their fluctuations. Our precise analysis of the variance of a standard multilevel splitting algorithm reveals an opportunity for improvement. This leads to a novel method that relies on adaptive levels and produces, in the limit of an idealized version of the algorithm, estimates with optimal variance. The motivation for this theoretical work comes from problems occurring in watermarking and fingerprinting of digital contents, which represents a new field of applications of rare event simulation techniques. Some numerical results show performance close to the idealized version of our technique for these practical applications.     

The policies of unemployment protection in Europe

The abundant literature on welfare state policies, regimes or ‘worlds’ has been only limitedly interested in unemployment protection, and even less in youth unemployment protection. What is clearly lacking in the literature is an updated analysis of the most recent policies developed in European countries targeting youth. This mini‐symposium aims to fill in this gap by presenting findings from an EU‐funded research project entitled ‘Youth, Unemployment and Exclusion in Europe: A Multidimensional Approach to Understanding the Conditions and Prospects for Social and Political Integration of Young Unemployed’ (YOUNEX). The main aim of the research endeavour was to develop theory and contribute to empirical knowledge concerning the social and political exclusion of unemployed youth in Europe.     

Mixing patterns between age groups in social networks

We present a method for estimating transmission matrices that describe the mixing and the probability of infection between age groups. Transmission matrices can be used to estimate age-dependent forces of infection in age-structured, compartmental models for the study of infectious diseases. We analyze the social network generated by the synthetic population of Portland and extract mixing patterns. Our results show that the mixing within the population consists of two groups, children and adults. Children interact most frequently with other children close to their own age, while adults interact with a wider range of age groups and the durations of typical adult contacts are shorter than typical contacts between children. Furthermore, the transmission matrix shows that children are more likely to acquire infection than adults.