THE SUPPLY OF CHILDREN'S TIME TO DISABLED ELDERLY PARENTS

This study develops and tests a model of supply of children's time to disabled elderly parents, using data from the National Long-Term Care Survey. The model, which assumes strategic behavior among relatives, offers predictions about effects of changes in the price of paid personal care, parent's wealth, kid's wage rates, public in-kind subsidies of personal care, and parent's relative bargaining power on care provided by children. Although several statistically significant relationships are obtained, the evidence does not generally indicate that children's provision of care to parents is guided by a strategic bequest motive.     

The Social as Heaven and Hell: Pierre Bourdieu's Philosophical Anthropology

Many authors have argued that all studies of socially specific modalities of human action and experience depend on some form of “philosophical anthropology”, i.e. on a set of general assumptions about what human beings are like, assumptions without which the very diagnoses of the cultural and historical variability of concrete agents' practices would become impossible. Bourdieu was sensitive to that argument and, especially in the later phase of his career, attempted to make explicit how his historical‐sociological investigations presupposed and, at the same time, contributed to the elaboration of an “idea of the human being”. The article reconstructs Bourdieu's philosophical anthropology, starting with his genetic sociology of symbolic power, conceived as a form of critical theory (latu sensu), and concluding with an account of the conditio humana in which recognition (“symbolic capital”) appears as both the fundamental existential goal through which human agents strive to confer meaning on their lives and the source of the endless symbolic competition that keeps society moving. The agonistic vision of the social universe that grounds his sociological studies returns in his philosophical anthropology under the guise of a singular synthesis between Durkheim's thesis that “Society is God” and Sartre's idea that “hell is other people”.     

Co-production of substitutable products

Co-production occurs when a production run produces, simultaneously, more than one type of product. In this paper, we consider co-production planning problems with stochastic yields, multiple processes, limited capacity and non-transitive product demand substitution. We show that these problems can be transformed to a structure where the demand substitutions are transitive. We address the decisions of how to select processes, to determine production quantities for each process and to allocate inventory to product demands. Finally, we provide simple heuristics and report on computational experiments done on randomly generated test cases.     

Theories of Embodied Knowledge: New Directions for Cultural and Cognitive Sociology?

Sociological propositions about the workings of cognition are rarely specified or tested, but are of central relevance to studies of culture, social judgment, and social movements. This paper draws out lessons of recent work from sociological theory, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience on the embodied nature of knowledge and thought, and develops implications of these lessons for cultural and cognitive sociology. Knowledge ought to be conceived of as fundamentally embodied, because sensory information is a fundamental component of experience as it is stored in long‐term memory, and because bodily responses and intuitions often precede reflexive or strategic thought. I argue that the challenge of embodied knowledge for cultural sociology is threefold: to develop cultural theories of motivation; to specify the ways in which the body structures discourses endogenously; and to specify how embodied motivations and embodied discourses interact.     

Semi‐Parametric Models for the Multivariate Tail Dependence Function – the Asymptotically Dependent Case

Abstract. In general, the risk of joint extreme outcomes in financial markets can be expressed as a function of the tail dependence function of a high‐dimensional vector after standardizing marginals. Hence, it is of importance to model and estimate tail dependence functions. Even for moderate dimension, non‐parametrically estimating a tail dependence function is very inefficient and fitting a parametric model to tail dependence functions is not robust. In this paper, we propose a semi‐parametric model for (asymptotically dependent) tail dependence functions via an elliptical copula. Under this model assumption, we propose a novel estimator for the tail dependence function, which proves favourable compared to the empirical tail dependence function estimator, both theoretically and empirically.     

WITHIN U.S. TRADE AND THE LONG SHADOW OF THE AMERICAN SECESSION

Using data from U.S. commodity flow survey, we show that the historical Union–Confederacy border lowers contemporaneous trade between U.S. states by about 13%. The finding is robust over econometric models, survey waves, or aggregation levels. Including contemporaneous controls, such as network or institutional variables, lowers the estimate only slightly. Historical variables, such as slavery, do not explain the effect. Adding U.S. states unaffected by the Civil War, we argue that the friction is not merely reflecting unmeasured North–South differences. Finally, the border effect is larger for differentiated than for homogeneous goods, stressing the potential role for cultural factors and trust. (JEL F15, N72, N92, Z10)     

THE INFLUENTIALS: BACK TO THE CONCEPT OF OPINION LEADERS?

The concept of opinion leadership has been related to a lingeringtheoretical and methodological debate. The present study examinesa new measure to identify opinion leaders (the Strength of PersonalityScale) developed by the Allensbach Survey Center in Germany.The results of applying this measure in Germany and Israel allowedthe testing of its validity and efficiency. The findings, however,do not suggest that the influentials identified by this scaleare opinion leaders according to the original conceptualization,but fit better the more sophisticated characterization of opinionleadership that stemmed from modifications of the original conceptof opinion leaders.     

THE OBSESSION TO FORECAST: PRE-ELECTION POLLS IN THE ISRAELI PRESS

The generous coverage of pre-election polls in the media hasstimulated a debate on the effects of publicized polls on voters.Data for this study come from a content analysis of all pressreports on polls during six pre-election campaigns in Israel(1969–88). The findings highlight the impressive increaseof poll reports both by space and by prominence in the press.Analysis of the reports' content reveals that the style of reportingpolls has become dominated by "horse-race" journalism, wherepredictions and popularity ratings are the leading themes. Inaddition, although the reports have become more detailed andinformative, they still do not adequately define or interpretmethodological deficiencies. Finally, the analysis examinesthe intercorrelations between attributes of coverage and predictionserrors. The fact that the independent variable, media coverageof polls, has changed significantly calls for the inclusionof this factor in any study of polls' effects.