How Welfare Policies Affect Adolescents' School Outcomes: A Synthesis of Evidence From Experimental Studies

Using data from 8 random assignment studies and employing meta‐analytic techniques, this article provides systematic evidence that welfare and work policies targeted at low‐income parents have small adverse effects on some school outcomes among adolescents ages 12 to 18 years at follow‐up. These adverse effects were observed mostly for school performance outcomes and occurred in programs that required mothers to work or participate in employment‐related activities and those that encouraged mothers to work voluntarily. The most pronounced negative effects on school outcomes occurred for the group of adolescents who had a younger sibling, possibly because of the increased home and sibling care responsibilities they assumed as their mothers increased their employment.     

First Housing Moves in Spain: An Analysis of Leaving Home and First Housing Acquisition

This paper examines young people's firsthousing acquisition in Spain. The majority ofyoung Spanish people leave home to buy aproperty and to live with a partner and/orchild. We examine the extent to which thistransition dominates first housing moves duringthe 1980s and consider the ways in which widerfamily networks facilitate leaving home to buya property. We then examine characteristicsassociated with deviation from this normativeroute. We find alternative transitions,particularly moving into rented accommodation,are more common among young people from moreadvantaged backgrounds, and those living innorthern Spain.     

Information and communication technology adoption in micro and small firms: Can internet access improve labour productivity?

The rapid spread of information and communication technologies (ICT) may increase firms’ productivity with important consequences for job creation and for economic growth. This article contributes to this discussion by analysing the impact of internet adoption on labour productivity and the mechanisms shaping this relationship in Peruvian micro and small manufacturing firms over the period 2011–2013. The article estimates a reduced form where labour productivity is a function of internet adoption and other explanatory factors. Internet adoption is instrumented using a measure of the availability of financial opportunities for micro and small firms in Peru. Findings indicate that internet adoption: (a) increases firms’ labour productivity; (b) reallocates employment away from temporary administrative workers and non‐remunerated workers and expands employment of permanent production workers; (c) leads to the formalization of labour relationships, to the implementation of new organizational practices and to the improvement of training measures. While changes in employment and formalization of workers are linked to labour productivity gains, increases in training measures and organizational changes do not generate any additional productivity increase. Policies oriented to promote the adoption of ICT in micro and small firms can be beneficial to close the productivity gap with larger firms in Peru. Moreover, policies directed to the formalization of the workforce can provide an extra benefit, i.e. additional labour productivity gains in firms adopting the internet. Finally, policies oriented to the development of digital skills are also important to ease the re‐employment of those workers losing their jobs and the achievement of additional productivity gains that new organizational practices can provide.     

Job quality,industrial relations and the crisis in Europe

This paper reports results from recent Eurofound research on the impact of the crisis on industrial relations and working conditions in Europe, based on the output of Eurofound's European Working Conditions Observatory and European Industrial Relations Observatory and data from the European Working Conditions Survey. Overall, the crisis – even if it is sometimes difficult to separate the effect of the crisis from megatrends in working conditions and industrial relations – seems to have had an impact on both domains. With reference to industrial relations, the impact of the crisis has influenced actors, processes, and outcomes. Regarding working conditions, the results appear to be in line with the literature on the topic, which relates the crisis to an increase in job insecurity, a decrease in work intensity, in working hours, and in anti-social working time arrangements, and a general improvement in terms of health risks and related outcomes.     

L'inspection du travail,un outil efficace quand les règles et sanctions varient selon les effectifs de l'entreprise? Analyse à partir du cas péruvien

L'auteure analyse l'effet de la rigueur du dispositif de mise en application de la législation sur le respect effectif des droits au travail lorsque les règles et sanctions dépendent des effectifs de l'entreprise. À partir de données de l'enquête auprès des ménages du Pérou (2008–2013), elle examine l'influence en la matière de facteurs déjà connus (effet dissuasif de l'inspection, glissement vers le secteur informel) mais aussi celui du «redimensionnement», stratégie utilisée par les employeurs pour se prévaloir de régimes plus favorables. Elle montre que l'intensité du dispositif de contrôle n'influe que modérément sur le degré de conformité. L'effet «redimensionnement» est lui aussi limité.     

Young Infants Match Facial and Vocal Emotional Expressions of Other Infants

Research has demonstrated that infants recognize emotional expressions of adults in the first half year of life. We extended this research to a new domain, infant perception of the expressions of other infants. In an intermodal matching procedure, 3.5‐ and 5‐month‐old infants heard a series of infant vocal expressions (positive and negative affect) along with side‐by‐side dynamic videos in which one infant conveyed positive facial affect and another infant conveyed negative facial affect. Results demonstrated that 5‐month‐olds matched the vocal expressions with the affectively congruent facial expressions, whereas 3.5‐month‐olds showed no evidence of matching. These findings indicate that by 5 months of age, infants detect, discriminate, and match the facial and vocal affective displays of other infants. Further, because the facial and vocal expressions were portrayed by different infants and shared no face–voice synchrony, temporal, or intensity patterning, matching was likely based on detection of a more general affective valence common to the face and voice.     

Acculturation and Enculturation Trajectories Among Mexican‐American Adolescent Offenders

This study examines changes over time in ethnic affirmation/belonging and ethnic identity achievement, Spanish language use, English language use, Mexican/Mexican‐American affiliation/identification and Anglo affiliation/identification in a sample of Mexican‐American adolescents participating in a longitudinal study of juvenile offenders. The Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure and the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans‐II were completed by the Mexican‐American adolescents 7 times over a 3‐year period. The findings from longitudinal growth modeling analyses and growth mixture modeling analyses indicate that there is heterogeneity in the initial scores and changes over time on these variables that are related to markers for the cultural qualities of the home environment (i.e., generational status and mother's most frequent language use). In contrast to expectations, marginalized or assimilated acculturation trajectories/types were not overrepresented in this sample of adolescent offenders. Implications for our understanding of the nature of acculturation and enculturation processes and the way these processes are studied are discussed.     

Learning and Becoming Writers: Meaning,Identity, and Epistemology in a Newsroom Community of Practice

This article analyzes a yearlong ethnography of the Southside Free Press, a non-school-affiliated community-based organization that served diverse adolescent staff writers who prepared articles for a monthly newspaper publication. The study employed a perspective of learning as legitimate peripheral participation with/in a newsroom community of practice. Specifically, using Rogoff’s three planes of analysis—apprenticeship, guided participation, and participatory appropriation—demonstrates that the process of becoming staff writers affected their learning and development. Thus, their ongoing participation provided opportunities to come to enact and embody the available meanings, identities, and epistemologies around becoming a staff writer and citizenship.     

Mixture inverse Gaussian for unobserved heterogeneity in the autoregressive conditional duration model

In this paper, we assume that the duration of a process has two different intrinsic components or phases which are independent. The first is the time it takes for a trade to be initiated in the market (for example, the time during which agents obtain knowledge about the market in which they are operating and accumulate information, which is coherent with Brownian motion) and the second is the subsequent time required for the trade to develop into a complete duration. Of course, if the first time is zero then the trade is initiated immediately and no initial knowledge is required. If we assume a specific compound Bernoulli distribution for the first time and an inverse Gaussian distribution for the second, the resulting convolution model has a mixture of an inverse Gaussian distribution with its reciprocal, which allows us to specify and test the unobserved heterogeneity in the autoregressive conditional duration (ACD) model.

Our proposals make it possible not only to capture various density shapes of the durations but also easily to accommodate the behaviour of the tail of the distribution and the non monotonic hazard function. The proposed model is easy to fit and characterizes the behaviour of the conditional durations reasonably well in terms of statistical criteria based on point and density forecasts.     

Monitoring the parameter vector of regression models with time-to-event response in phase II processes

In most of the existing specialized literature, monitoring regression models are a special case of profile monitoring. However, not every regression model always represents appropriately a profile data structure. This is clearly the case of the Weibull regression model (WRM) with common shape parameter γ. Even though it might be thought that existing methodologies (especially likelihood-ratio (LRT)-based methods) for monitoring generalized linear profiles can also be successfully applied to monitoring regression models with time-to-event response, it will be shown in this paper that those methodologies work fairly acceptable just for data structures with 1000 observations at least approximately. It was found out that some corrections, often referred to as Bartlett's adjustments, are needed to be implemented in order to improve the accuracy of using the asymptotic distributional properties of the LRT statistic for carrying out the monitoring of WRM with relatively small and moderate dimensions of the available datasets. Simulation studies suggest that the use of the aforementioned corrections make the resulting charts work quite acceptable when available data structures contain 30 observations at least. Detection abilities of the proposed schemes improve as dataset dimension increases.