Job Mobility and Early Career Wage Growth of White,African‐American,and Hispanic Women*

Objective. This article examines whether and how young women's job mobility influences racial and ethnic wage‐growth differentials during the first eight years after leaving school. Methods. We use the NLSY‐79 Work History File to simulate the influence of job mobility on the wages of skilled and unskilled workers. Results. African‐American and Hispanic women average less job mobility than white women, especially if they did not attend college. Unskilled women who experience frequent job changes during the first four postschool years reap positive wage returns, but turnover beyond the shopping period incurs wage penalties. Job mobility does not appear to boost wage growth for college‐educated women. Conclusions. Among unskilled women, race and ethnic wage disparities partly derive from group differences in the frequency of job changes, but unequal returns to job mobility drive the wage gaps for skilled women. We discuss several explanations for these disparities.     

Asymptotic behaviour of binned kernel density estimators for locally non-stationary random fields

We investigate the asymptotic behaviour of binned kernel density estimators for dependent and locally non-stationary random fields converging to stationary random fields. We focus on the study of the bias and the asymptotic normality of the estimators. A simulation experiment conducted shows that both the kernel density estimator and the binned kernel density estimator have the same behavior and both estimate accurately the true density when the number of fields increases. We apply our results to the 2002 incidence rates of tuberculosis in the departments of France.     

Pollutant Ground Concentrations of Nonneutrally Buoyant Particles

A methodology is suggested for the estimation of the mass density and the cumulative ground deposition of a nonvolatile, nonneutrally buoyant, air pollutant (liquid or solid) released from a polluted column (following an explosion caused during routine operation in, e.g., the chemical industry or due to any kind of hostile act) and deposited on the ground via gravitational settling. In many cases, the deposited mass due to gravitational settling constitutes a significant fraction of the original inventory released from the source. Implementation of the methodology in preliminary risk assessments can serve as an efficient tool for emergency planning for both immediate and long‐term measures such as evacuation and decontamination. The methodology considers, inter alia, an estimation of the critical particle diameter, particle size, and mass distributions along the polluted column. This methodology was developed to apply in rural regions since proper application of relevant meteorological input data can be accomplished mainly for such areas.     

Role of Comparative Risk Assessment in Addressing Environmental Security in the Middle East

During the 21st century, environmental challenges are likely to intensify across the world and possibly lead to violent conflicts. Strategies for conflict avoidance will be incomplete unless they recognize, discuss, and mitigate regional environmental stress factors. Comparative risk assessment (CRA) is one of the most critical tools emerging to influence modern environmental policies and is increasingly used to create a common language to help reconcile competing interests in development and environmental disputes around the world. This article considers the environmental challenges facing the Middle East in light of their "transboundary" nature and proposes CRA as a framework for setting environmental priorities and reducing tensions in the region.     

The Local Life of Nationhood

What characterises many studies that invoke the local can be described as a logic of transcendence. This logic of transcendence does not reject nor disregard the local. Rather, it affirms the centrality of the local. At the same time, the focus is on how the local is historically transcended into higher levels of generality and abstraction; the argument is that only through attention to these higher levels that the meanings of the local become clear. In contrast, the other local which we refer to in this essay is a set of practices which emerges in intimate relationship to nationalism, which in some ways even sustains nationalism, even though the places it produces cannot be understood within the same logic of transcendence. At times, this other local refers to the political and conceptual practices that emerged at the limits of the abstract time and space that constituted nationalism. At other times, this local refers to the marginal in order to represent nationhood anew. Nationhood does not exhaust, sublate or transcend this local; rather, this local continues to live, in the era of nationhood, not so much outside the national, but beyond and alongside it. This other local is explored in this essay by discussing the cases of Germany and India.     

The marked empirical process to test nonlinear time series against a large class of alternatives when the random vectors are nonstationary and absolutely regular

In this paper, we propose a method for testing absolutely regular and possibly nonstationary nonlinear time-series, with application to general AR-ARCH models. Our test statistic is based on a marked empirical process of residuals which is shown to converge to a Gaussian process with respect to the Skohorod topology. This testing procedure was first introduced by Stute [Nonparametric model checks for regression, Ann. Statist. 25 (1997), pp. 613–641] and then widely developed by Ngatchou-Wandji [Weak convergence of some marked empirical processes: Application to testing heteroscedasticity, J. Nonparametr. Stat. 14 (2002), pp. 325–339; Checking nonlinear heteroscedastic time series models, J. Statist. Plann. Inference 133 (2005), pp. 33–68; Local power of a Cramer-von Mises type test for parametric autoregressive models of order one, Compt. Math. Appl. 56(4) (2008), pp. 918–929] under more general conditions. Applications to general AR-ARCH models are given.     

Side-by-Side on Stage - Music and Drama Form a Bridge between Acting Students and People with Dementia in an Intergenerational Group Work

ABSTRACT

This article presents an intergenerational music and drama therapy groups comprised of twelve people with dementia residing in a nursing home and twelve acting students from the community.

The qualitative research aimed to explore the students’ attitudes towards elderly people, and to understand the role of creative arts therapies in facilitating intergenerational relationships. Qualitative content analysis of students’ weekly reports and questionnaires revealed the gradual process of connection between the students and people with dementia. Engaging in a creative act helped the students to discover the strengths and abilities of people with dementia and to see beyond the disease.     

Predicting Maternal Resolution of Preterm Birth at One Month Corrected Age

Early maternal resolution with preterm birth was assessed at one month corrected age (CA), and potential maternal and infant characteristics that may be associated with early resolution were examined. Fifty‐five mothers of preterm infants (≤34 weeks) participated. Data regarding pregnancy, prenatal risk, delivery, infant's medical risk, maternal well‐being status, and infant's early developmental status were collected. Resolution was examined using the Reaction to Diagnosis Interview (RDI). A total of 38.2% of the mothers were classified as resolved. Only completion of antenatal corticosteroids (ACS) treatment and high prenatal risk significantly predicted maternal resolution. Early maternal resolution of preterm birth is associated with early knowledge regarding the preterm birth.     

Combined survival analysis of cardiac patients by a Cox PH model and a Markov chain

The control and treatment of dyslipidemia is a major public health challenge, particularly for patients with coronary heart diseases. In this paper we propose a framework for survival analysis of patients who had a major cardiac event, focusing on assessment of the effect of changing LDL-cholesterol level and statins consumption on survival. This framework includes a Cox PH model and a Markov chain, and combines their results into reinforced conclusions regarding the factors that affect survival time. We prospectively studied 2,277 cardiac patients, and the results show high congruence between the Markov model and the PH model; both evidence that diabetes, history of stroke, peripheral vascular disease and smoking significantly increase hazard rate and reduce survival time. On the other hand, statin consumption is correlated with a lower hazard rate and longer survival time in both models. The role of such a framework in understanding the therapeutic behavior of patients and implementing effective secondary and primary prevention of heart diseases is discussed here.     

The inverse Banzhaf problem

Let ${\mathcal{F}}Let F{\mathcal{F}} be a family of subsets of the ground set [n] = {1, 2, . . . , n}. For each i ? [n]{i \in [n]} we let p(F,i){p(\mathcal{F},i)} be the number of pairs of subsets that differ in the element i and exactly one of them is in F{\mathcal{F}}. We interpret p(F,i){p(\mathcal{F},i)} as the influence of that element. The normalized Banzhaf vector of F{\mathcal{F}}, denoted B(F){B(\mathcal{F})}, is the vector (B(F,1),...,B(F,n)){(B(\mathcal{F},1),\dots,B(\mathcal{F},n))}, where B(F,i)=\fracp(F,i)p(F){B(\mathcal{F},i)=\frac{p(\mathcal{F},i)}{p(\mathcal{F})}} and p(F){p(\mathcal{F})} is the sum of all p(F,i){p(\mathcal{F},i)}. The Banzhaf vector has been studied in the context of measuring voting power in voting games as well as in Boolean circuit theory. In this paper we investigate which non-negative vectors of sum 1 can be closely approximated by Banzhaf vectors of simple voting games. In particular, we show that if a vector has most of its weight concentrated in k < n coordinates, then it must be essentially the Banzhaf vector of some simple voting game with n − k dummy voters.