A Data Envelopment Analysis-Based Methodology Adopting Assurance Region Approach for Measuring Corporate Social Performance

Many research papers calculate corporate social performance (CSP) with the net score method, i.e., by subtracting the number of concerns from the number of strengths. Although widely adopted, this method implies, perhaps mistakenly, that each indicator is of equal importance and that however serious the social misconduct a firm may have engaged in, it can be completely offset by some positive social action. The method also implies that a given firm that has done both a lot of harm and a lot of good will have CSP similar to that of another firm that has done little harm and little good. In this study, however, we question the appropriateness of the net score method in terms of its ability to truly reflect CSP and truly identify the real effects of CSP on various characteristics. We therefore propose a data envelopment analysis-based methodology that adopts the assurance region approach for evaluating CSP, through which various CSP indicators are converted into a single composite measure of CSP. Our findings show that our proposed methodology consistently performs better than the net score method in evaluating CSP.

     

Reconfigured Reciprocity: How Aging Taiwanese Immigrants Transform Cultural Logics of Elder Care

Drawing on 55 interviews with older Taiwanese immigrants who relocated to the United States at an earlier life stage, the author argues that changing contextual features involved in the processes of international migration encourage and even demand aging immigrants to reconstruct cultural logics of aging and geriatric care. He develops the concept of reconfigured reciprocity to demonstrate how aging migrant populations transform cultural logics of intergenerational responsibility, obligation, and entitlement to reconcile the tension between ethnic tradition and modernity. First, he reveals how many of the respondents' lack of caregiving for their own parents undermines their sense of entitlement to receive care from younger generations. Furthermore, he highlights how the structural squeeze among work, family, and caregiving with which the younger generation struggles further discourages the respondents from relying on their children. Finally, the author underscores how aging immigrants evoke the concept of Americanization to reconstruct expectations of how they should be taken care of in their twilight years.     

Risks Perception of Electromagnetic Fields in Taiwan: The Influence of Psychopathology and the Degree of Sensitivity to Electromagnetic Fields

Little is known about the perceived health risks of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and factors associated with risk perception in non‐Western countries. Psychological conditions and risk perception have been postulated as factors that facilitate the attribution of health complaints to environmental factors. This study investigated people's perceived risks of EMFs and other environmental sources, as well as the relationships between risk perception, psychopathology, and the degree of self‐reported sensitivity to EMFs. A total of 1,251 adults selected from a nationwide telephone interviewing system database responded to a telephone survey about the relationships between environmental sources and human health. The interview included questions assessing participants’ psychiatric conditions and the presence and degree of sensitivity to EMFs. One hundred and seventy participants were self‐identified as having sensitivity to EMFs, and 141 met the criteria for psychiatric conditions without EMF sensitivity. More than half of the survey respondents considered power lines and mobile phone base stations to affect people's health to a big extent. Higher sensitivity to EMFs, psychopathology, being female, being married, more years of education, and having a catastrophic illness had positive associations with perceived risks of EMF‐related environmental sources as well as for all environmental sources combined. We observed no moderating effect of psychopathology on the association between degree of sensitivity to EMF and risk perception. Thus, psychopathology had influence on general people's risk perception without having influence on the relationship between people's degree of sensitivity to EMF and risk perception. The plausible explanations are discussed in the text.     

Well‐being among employed and non‐employed caregiving women in Taiwan

Chou Y‐C, Kröger T, Chiao C, Pu C‐Y. Well‐being among employed and non‐employed caregiving women in Taiwan This study addressed various groups of non‐employed/employed and non‐caring/caring women in Taiwan. Data from the 2006 National Taiwanese Women Survey (at age 16–64, n= 6,017) were analysed to determine whether there are differences in terms of well‐being, as measured by self‐rated health and family life satisfaction, between women who work and/or care and between different carer groups. Other factors associated with well‐being of carers of young children (n= 1,697) were also analysed. The results showed that non‐employed carers of disabled adults stood out as the most disadvantaged group. However, the importance of work has been replaced by support among carers of young children. This study suggests that unpaid carers, particularly carers of disabled adults who are non‐employed, ought to be supported by policies. To improve carers' well‐being, care–work reconciliation among working‐age women needs to be included in the future care scheme in Taiwan.     

Parenting,Uncertainty, and Expert Advice: How Privileged American Families Work with Private Counselors in Their Children's College Race

This article uses privileged families who hire Independent Educational Consultants (IECs) as an instance to examine how privileged parents collaborate with individuals whom they consider educational experts to support their children in the college race. We argue that advantaged parents' anxieties about their children have created a market for IECs who provide expert advice in order to mitigate the uncertainties that these parents experience and to manage various goals that they want to achieve at an important turning point in their children's lives. Drawing primarily on interviews with parents who work with IECs, we introduce the concept of “collaborative cultivation” to analyze the processes whereby advantaged parents rely on the expertise and expert status of private counselors to cope with their and their children's vulnerability in the college race while at the same time preparing their children for the unknown future. The parental method of “concerted cultivation” reveals how elite parents rely on individuals they perceive as experts to establish “bridges” between their own social worlds and the academic worlds that appear to beyond their control. This bridging labor points to the myriad cultural beliefs enacted to justify the child‐rearing goals that privileged parents wish to accomplish by working with IECs.     

Consumption of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) Contaminated Beef and the Risk of Variant Creutzfeldt‐Jakob Disease

To date, the variant Creutzfeldt‐Jakob disease (vCJD) risk assessments that have been performed have primarily focused on predicting future vCJD cases in the United Kingdom, which underwent a bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) epidemic between 1980 and 1996. Surveillance of potential BSE cases was also used to assess vCJD risk, especially in other BSE‐prevalent EU countries. However, little is known about the vCJD risk for uninfected individuals who accidentally consume BSE‐contaminated meat products in or imported from a country with prevalent BSE. In this article, taking into account the biological mechanism of abnormal prion PrP^res aggregation in the brain, the probability of exposure, and the expected amount of ingested infectivity, we establish a stochastic mean exponential growth model of lifetime exposure through dietary intake. Given the findings that BSE agents behave similarly in humans and macaques, we obtained parameter estimates from experimental macaque data. We then estimated the accumulation of abnormal prions to assess lifetime risk of developing clinical signs of vCJD. Based on the observed number of vCJD cases and the estimated number of exposed individuals during the BSE epidemic period from 1980 to 1996 in the United Kingdom, an exposure threshold hypothesis is proposed. Given the age‐specific risk of infection, the hypothesis explains the observations very well from an extreme‐value distribution fitting of the estimated BSE infectivity exposure. The current BSE statistics in the United Kingdom are provided as an example.     

Estimating the Probability of Rare Events Occurring Using a Local Model Averaging

In statistical applications, logistic regression is a popular method for analyzing binary data accompanied by explanatory variables. But when one of the two outcomes is rare, the estimation of model parameters has been shown to be severely biased and hence estimating the probability of rare events occurring based on a logistic regression model would be inaccurate. In this article, we focus on estimating the probability of rare events occurring based on logistic regression models. Instead of selecting a best model, we propose a local model averaging procedure based on a data perturbation technique applied to different information criteria to obtain different probability estimates of rare events occurring. Then an approximately unbiased estimator of Kullback‐Leibler loss is used to choose the best one among them. We design complete simulations to show the effectiveness of our approach. For illustration, a necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) data set is analyzed.     

Status Traps

In this article, we explore nonlinearities in the intergenerational mobility process using threshold regression models. We uncover evidence of threshold effects in children's outcomes based on parental education and cognitive and noncognitive skills as well as their interaction with offspring characteristics. We interpret these thresholds as organizing dynastic earning processes into “status traps.” Status traps, unlike poverty traps, are not absorbing states. Rather, they reduce the impact of favorable shocks for disadvantaged children and so inhibit upward mobility in ways not captured by linear models. Our evidence of status traps is based on three complementary datasets; that is, the PSID, the NLSY, and US administrative data at the commuting zone level, which together suggest that the threshold-like mobility behavior we observe in the data is robust for a range of outcomes and contexts.