Bootstrapping Malmquist Indices for Danish Seiners in the North Sea and Skagerrak

In connection with assessing how an ongoing development in fisheries management may change fishing activity, evaluation of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) change over a period, including efficiency, scale and technology changes, is an important tool. The Malmquist index, based on distance functions evaluated with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), is often employed to estimate TFP changes. DEA is generally gaining attention for evaluating efficiency and capacity in fisheries. One main criticism of DEA is that it does not have any statistical foundation, i.e. that it is not possible to make inference about DEA scores or related parameters. The bootstrap method for estimating confidence intervals of deterministic parameters can however be applied to estimate confidence intervals for DEA scores. This method is applied in the present paper for assessing TFP changes between 1987 and 1999 for the fleet of Danish seiners operating in the North Sea and the Skagerrak.     

How physician-employees experience their work lives in a changing HMO

The present study advances our understanding of both physician adaptation and the physician-organization relationship in a managed care environment defined by structural diversity and constant change. It does so through a longitudinal examination of a single group of physician-employees experiencing their work lives within a nonprofit health maintenance organization (HMO) in the midst of major strategic developments. Using interview, observation, and archival data collected over a five-year period, the analysis reveals that the form and substance of individual physician adaptation to organizational life is dependent upon social exchanges over time with the HMO, making it an emergent, evolutionary process rather than a pre-determined, static phenomenon. However, the results also demonstrate that physician adaptive response to rapid, unpredictable organizational change is slow and delayed, in particular when this change makes physicians more dependent on their employing organization. This confers an advantage onto the organization vis-à-vis professionals in interpreting and responding to environmental change. These insights should encourage sociologists to employ research designs and contingency models of physician attitudes and behavior that capture the dynamic and particularistic nature of everyday physician work life in contemporary health care.     

Same Profession,Different People: Stratification,Structure, and Physicians' Employment Choices

Professions such as medicine are in the midst of profound change. This paper explores how recent stratifying forces within the medical profession relate to the trend toward salaried employment for physicians. Specifically, growing segments of female, black and Hispanic, and lower and middle class doctors are focused upon in the analysis. Several important structural forces related to managed care and the nature of medical work are discussed and examined as well. The results suggests that it is useful to consider factors internal to professions in explaining large-scale professional change. This does not mean forgetting about the role played by structure in this change. Instead, it supports incorporating stratification perspectives into studies of professionals and of considering micro levels of analysis which acknowledge and investigate the effects of intraprofessional diversity.     

Landmark estimation of transition probabilities in non-Markov multi-state models with covariates

Lifetime Data Analysis - In non-Markov multi-state models, the traditional Aalen–Johansen (AJ) estimator for state transition probabilities is generally not valid. An alternative, suggested...     

American women and the lingering implications of coverture

Because coverture restrictions prevented most married American women from the colonial period through a good part of the 19th century from acting as their own agents at law or to have independent property rights, attempts were made to modify this legal disability. Married Women Property Acts partially remedied some of these legal disabilities, but others lingered well into the 20th century because, unlike most contracts, the marriage contract in the United States still remains unwritten and so, its terms are not defined. Even with the advent of contractual marriages in the 1970s and 1980s, coverture overtones continue to exist. While some state courts have accepted these contractual arrangements, others have not and their enforcement remains problematic “because the law still prescribes sex-differentiated marital roles and male domination.”     

生活在安第斯山区的土著是否明显地存在因缺氧而造成的生育力下降的问题——对戈尔斯坦、查隆和比尔的回应

在最近的文章中(见1983出版的<美国人类学家>期刊,总第85期,第28-49页),戈尔斯坦、查隆和比尔对埃伯尔森、贝克、达特和我引申出来的一个假说--缺氧引起安第斯山区土著的生育力下降--提出了批评.     

Justification of functional form assumptions in structural models: applications and testing of qualitative measurement axioms

In both theoretical and applied modeling in behavioral sciences, it is common to choose a mathematical specification of functional form and distribution of unobservables on grounds of analytic convenience without support from explicit theoretical postulates. This article discusses the issue of deriving particular qualitative hypotheses about functional form restrictions in structural models from intuitive theoretical axioms. In particular, we focus on a family of postulates known as dimensional invariance. Subsequently, we discuss how specific qualitative postulates can be reformulated so as to allow for conventional statistical hypothesis testing, and we also derive details of a particular likelihood ratio test procedure. An empirical application of the testing procedure is carried out, based on data from a Stated Preference survey.     

The Disadvantaged Among the Dutch: A Survey Approach to the Multidimensional Measurement of Social Exclusion

While combating social exclusion has been a key target of the European Union’s social policy in recent years, the concept remains contested and various ways of measuring its prevalence have been proposed. In the Netherlands a survey-based method has been in use since 2004, which refers to four theoretical elements of social exclusion: material deprivation, limited social participation, inadequate access to basic social rights and a lack of normative integration. In this article we propose an improved and more concise version of the instrument. Using focus groups and cognitive tests, the study first examined whether it adequately covers the different elements of social exclusion. Based on the results, the existing items were reformulated and supplemented. A revised questionnaire was then submitted to a new stratified sample of 650 respondents, randomly drawn from an online panel and a database of people without access to the Internet. The weighted outcomes may be regarded as representative for the entire adult Dutch population, although some caveats apply. Using nonlinear canonical correlation analysis, we identified a single underlying dimension in our new data set. This contains 15 items, with three to four indicators for each of the theoretical elements of social exclusion. According to our general index, just under 5 % of the Dutch population aged 18 years or older are faced with a serious degree of social exclusion. On the four subscales the figure ranges from 7 % (social rights) to 22 % (material deprivation).