Work hours,social value of leisure and globalisation

We examine how openness interacts with the coordination of consumption–leisure decisions in determining the equilibrium working hours and wage rate when there are leisure externalities (e.g., due to social interactions). The latter are modelled by allowing a worker's marginal utility of leisure to be increasing in the leisure time taken by other workers. Coordination takes the form of internalising the leisure externality and other relevant constraints (e.g., labour demand). The extent of openness is measured by the degree of capital mobility. We find that: coordination lowers equilibrium work hours and raises the wage rate; there is a U-shaped (inverse-U-shaped) relationship between work hours (wages) and the degree of coordination; coordination is welfare improving; and, the gap between the coordinated and uncoordinated work hours (and the corresponding wage rates) is affected by the extent and nature of openness.     

An Assessment of Three Procedures to Teach Echoic Responding

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - The research literature has revealed mixed outcomes on various procedures for increasing vocalizations and echoic responding in persons with disabilities (Miguel,...     

Bayes and maximum likelihood for $$L^1$$-Wasserstein deconvolution of Laplace mixtures

We consider the problem of recovering a distribution function on the real line from observations additively contaminated with errors following the standard Laplace distribution. Assuming that the latent distribution is completely unknown leads to a nonparametric deconvolution problem. We begin by studying the rates of convergence relative to the \(L^2\)-norm and the Hellinger metric for the direct problem of estimating the sampling density, which is a mixture of Laplace densities with a possibly unbounded set of locations: the rate of convergence for the Bayes’ density estimator corresponding to a Dirichlet process prior over the space of all mixing distributions on the real line matches, up to a logarithmic factor, with the \(n^{-3/8}\log ^{1/8}n\) rate for the maximum likelihood estimator. Then, appealing to an inversion inequality translating the \(L^2\)-norm and the Hellinger distance between general kernel mixtures, with a kernel density having polynomially decaying Fourier transform, into any \(L^p\)-Wasserstein distance, \(p\ge 1\), between the corresponding mixing distributions, provided their Laplace transforms are finite in some neighborhood of zero, we derive the rates of convergence in the \(L^1\)-Wasserstein metric for the Bayes’ and maximum likelihood estimators of the mixing distribution. Merging in the \(L^1\)-Wasserstein distance between Bayes and maximum likelihood follows as a by-product, along with an assessment on the stochastic order of the discrepancy between the two estimation procedures.     

The KIND Program for Adolescent Family and Dating Violence

Adolescent relational violence has significant and pervasive impacts for young people's current and future relationships. It is known that there is a cross-over between adolescent family violence and other offending behaviour, meaning there is a need for youth justice systems to recognise and respond to these forms of violence. This paper outlines a pilot intervention, the KIND Program, run in Youth Justice South Australia, and aimed at intervening with adolescent family and dating violence. KIND aims to provide tailored systemic intervention to young people and their support network, reducing violence while increasing connection and strength within relationships. The pilot of KIND ran for seven months in 2017, and had eight families participating in the program. Participation in, feedback from, and impact of the program suggest that participation was worthwhile and useful for young people and their families. The KIND Program would benefit from a more extensive pilot period to explore the outcomes of this form of intervention.     

A note on Bayesian nonparametric regression function estimation

In this note the problem of nonparametric regression function estimation in a random design regression model with Gaussian errors is considered from the Bayesian perspective. It is assumed that the regression function belongs to a class of functions with a known degree of smoothness. A prior distribution on the given class can be induced by a prior on the coefficients in a series expansion of the regression function through an orthonormal system. The rate of convergence of the resulting posterior distribution is employed to provide a measure of the accuracy of the Bayesian estimation procedure defined by the posterior expected regression function. We show that the Bayes’ estimator achieves the optimal minimax rate of convergence under mean integrated squared error over the involved class of regression functions, thus being comparable to other popular frequentist regression estimators.     

Doing Feminist Peace

The history of the oldest international women's peace organization, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), presents a practical lesson for individuals and organizations interested in bringing about social change, as well as a theoretical lesson for those concerned with conceptualizing social change. WILPF's positions on decolonization between 1945 and 1975 show how historical circumstances and ideological environment intersected with the organization's ideas about peace to determine different policy choices. An unprecedented resolution in the early 1970s on the inevitability of violent revolutions resulted from a shift in ideological beliefs. While the international environment of the 1960s and 1970s favored this shift, WILPF arrived at its new policies thanks to its reliance on a theoretically-informed feminist critical methodology. This allowed WILPF to increasingly critique entrenched assumptions and reach a better informed understanding of peace, thereby contributing to the redefinition of the context that had created and shaped the organization. An activist-inspired, theoretically-driven feminist critical methodology thus makes social change possible.     

Assessing the Effects of Observational Conditioning and Response-Contingent Pairing on the Vocalizations of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often display impairments in communication, such as limited echoic behavior, few vocal-verbal responses, and a lack of functional communication. One potential way to foster the acquisition of vocal responses in individuals with disabilities is by conditioning vocalizations as reinforcers. Conditioning procedures include stimulus–stimulus pairing, response-contingent pairing (RCP), operant discrimination training, and observational conditioning (OC). However, previous research has not evaluated whether OC can be used to condition vocalizations as reinforcers. The current study assessed whether two conditioning procedures, RCP and OC, were effective in conditioning vocalizations as a reinforcer and also evaluated their effect on the rate of vocalizations. Participants included three children with ASD, ages 5–10 years old. During the conditioning phase, rates of vocalizations during the RCP and OC conditions and a control condition were compared within an adapted alternating-treatments design. Reinforcer assessments were completed in a multielement design, pre- and postconditioning, to assess whether the target vocalizations acquired reinforcing properties. A conditioning effect and an increase in the rate of vocalizations were observed for two of the three participants; however, the conditioning effect was minor for one participant. Overall, the results of this study indicate both the RCP and OC procedures may be beneficial in increasing vocalizations for some children and could be incorporated into clinical programs and further explored in future research.