Academic economists behaving badly? A survey on three areas of unethical behavior

This article measures the degree to which academic economists have engaged in unethical behavior and the degree to which academic economists believe the profession as a whole engages in unethical behavior. Three main types of unethical behavior are examined: (1) falsification of research; (2) expropriation of graduate student research or including an undeserving co-author on a research paper; and (3) exchange of grades for gifts, money, or sex. Using a unique data set gathered at the 1998 American Economic Association (AEA) meetings, we find that there is a significant amount of misconduct, particularly in the second category.     

EXPLAINING PROTESTANT FERTILITY: BELIEF, COMMITMENT, AND HOMOGAMY

Alternative explanations for higher conservative than liberal fertility among white Protestants in the United States emphasize concurrent compositional differences in either (1) social characteristics or (2) doctrine. Previous tests support the doctrine hypothesis but use denominational proxies for beliefs. Using a personal measure of liberaiism-conservatism, I test these hypotheses with data from the 1963 Glock-Stark Northern California Church Member Study. I find little support for either the characteristics or doctrine explanations, even when the analysis is restricted to subsets of couples highly committed to their faith and denominationally homogamous. Further investigation suggests that the regional nature of the Northern California data, and not the measurement of liberalism-conservatism, accounts for the difference in results between this and prior research.     

Office of the future — New challenges for operational research

A technological barrage has been fired on the office environment in an attempt to attack rising costs and improve productivity. Although very new, a dramatic level of effort is already being applied. The state of the art is changing daily but so far the problems still outnumber the solutions. The opportunities to contribute are significant. This paper briefly describes the scene, characterizes the state-of-the-art and suggests an entry strategy for the OR professional. The probable response of the OR profession is considered.     

A Canonical Correlation Analysis of Occupational Mobility Among Mexican Americans*

Studies of occupational mobility have generally ranked occupations on the basis of their socioeconomic status level or prestige component to measure movement between jobs. Two potential problems may limit the usefulness of that approach for racial and ethnic minority groups: (1) the relationship between occupation and socioeconomic status may not be the same as for the majority group, and (2) minority group members are more likely to be clustered at the low end of both socioeconomic and prestige scales. Canonical correlation analysis requires no prior ranking of occupations, so we use it to investigate intergenerational and career mobility among a sample of Mexican Americans. The findings indicate that mobility among Mexican Americans is about as frequent as among the total population, but that the pattern of movement differs considerably. As a result, the relative status of occupations among Mexican Americans has changed over time and, consequently, socioeconomic status scales developed for the total population do not provide accurate assessments of mobility for Mexican Americans. This discrepancy is less noticeable for career mobility, indicating that among the latest generation of Mexican Americans, mobility patterns are becoming more similar to those in the rest of society.     

A CUSUM SCHEME BASED ON THE EXPONENTIAL DISTRIBUTION FOR SURVEDLLANCE OF RARE CONGENITAL MALFORMATIONS

A method of monitoring the incidence of malformations is described. It is suitable for systems where the number of births between successive malformations is known or can be estimated with reasonable accuracy. The method utilises a cusum technique based on the exponential distribution to detect an increase in the incidence of malformations above a baseline level. Adequate information to enable the implementation of the method is presented. The proposed method compares favourably with others such as the Poisson cusum and the modified sets technique.