Retirement and housing adjustment in later life: evidence from the British Household Panel Survey

Using data from the first five waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we examine the extent and determinants of residential mobility for persons aged 55 or older, plus the subsequent housing adjustments made by those who move. The dimensions of adjustment examined are house value and rental costs, the number of `excess' rooms, and housing tenure. Relatively few individuals move house in later life in Britain. Choices do respond to one's own retirement, but other household changes such as loss of spouse and spouse leaving employment are also important. When a residential move is made, there is a tendency for housing consumption to change in a direction consistent with the correction of a disequilibrium position.     

Diagnosing Response Style Behavior by Means of a Latent-Class Factor Approach. Socio-Demographic Correlates of Gender Role Attitudes and Perceptions of Ethnic Discrimination Reexamined

It is generally accepted that response style behavior in survey research may seriously distort the measurement of attitudes and subsequent causal models that include attitudinal dimensions. However, there in no single accepted methodological approach in dealing with this issue. This article aims at illustrating the flexibility of a latent class factor approach in diagnosing response style behavior and in adjusting findings from causal models with latent variables. We present a substantive example from the Belgian MHSM research project on integration-related attitudes among ethnic minorities. We argue that an extreme response style can be detected in analyzing two independent sets of Likert-type questions referring to `gender roles' and `feelings of ethnic discrimination'. If the response style is taken into account the effect of covariates on attitudinal dimensions is more adequately estimated.     

Wages and Ageing: Is There Evidence for the ‘Inverse‐U’ Profile?*

How individual wages change with time is one of the crucial determinants of labour market decisions including the timing of retirement. The focus of this paper is the relationship between age and wages with special attention given to individuals nearing retirement. The analysis is presented in a comparative context for Britain and Germany looking at two longitudinal data sets (BHPS and SOEP, respectively) for the years 1995–2004. We show the importance of cohort effects and selection out of employment which determine the downward‐sloping part of the ‘inverse‐U’ profile observed in cross‐sections. There is little evidence that wages fall with age.     

Dual careers,time‐use and satisfaction levels: evidence from the British Household Panel Survey

This article empirically examines time‐use and its impact on satisfaction levels among dual career households in a post‐industrial economy, the UK. Analysis explores the 1993–2009 British Household Panel Survey using panel probit regression. The evidence reveals distinctions in time‐use relative to gender, occupations and employment sector. Long hours persist among managers and professionals. The uneven division of household labour, further, continues to burden women with extensive amounts of housework and care. Satisfaction with working hours and amount/use of leisure time are lower among women, especially the public sector professionals. Provision of care, occupation and partner employment characteristics represent important satisfaction determinants present among women, while income (including partner's income) only has relevance among men. Housework does not itself generate dissatisfaction. It is the overload of household tasks, due to inequality in the household division of labour, which constrains many highly skilled working women reducing satisfaction with time‐use and life overall.     

The Importance of Experimental Control in Testing the Impact of Interviewer Continuity on Panel Survey Nonresponse

The conventional wisdom in survey research suggests that it is advisable to have the same interviewers return to the same respondents in order to maintain good response rates in longitudinal surveys. There has been, however, very little documented experimental research to support this. Work conducted by Campanelli and O'Muircheartaigh (1999) using a subsample of the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) at Wave 2 with experimental control of the allocation of respondents to interviewers showed no evidence of a positive continuity effect on nonresponse; more extensive analysis by Laurie et al. (1999) of the full BHPS sample using Waves 2 through 4 presents contradictory results. This paper extends the earlier analysis and shows that these differences in findings are due to the lack of experimental control for the inferences from the full BHPS sample in the Laurie et al. (1999) report rather than the shorter time frame considered in Campanelli and O'Muircheartaigh (1999). This paper also considers variation in interviewer continuity effects across areas through the use of multilevel statistical models.     

What really matters in a job? Hedonic measurement using quit data

This paper uses labour market spell data from the first seven waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to model separations and quits. Three main results emerge. First, job satisfaction data are powerful predictors of both separations and quits, even controlling for wages, hours and standard demographic and job variables. Second, the comparison of the power of seven domain job satisfaction measures in a quit equation yields a ranking of job characteristics: job security and pay are the most important, followed by use of initiative, the work itself, and hours of work. This ranking differs markedly across different labour market groups. Last, union job dissatisfaction seems to be real: dissatisfied union members are just as likely to quit as are dissatisfied union non-members. However, union “free-riders” (non-union members at establishments with union recognition) do seem to behave differently from workers at establishments where unions are not recognised.     

文化休闲景区游客满意度测评

本文通过对国际上认可度较高的顾客满意度指数模型进行改进,在此基础上构建了文化休闲景区顾客满意度指数的模型。通过对大雁塔文化休闲景区进行大量的调查,通用统计分析软件对调查数据进行处理分析,再分析探究模型中观测变量是否对文化休闲景区具有显著影响,模型的变量之间系数与假设是否一致,从而验证模型拟合的良好性,验证模型的合理性和普遍适用性,以期望对文化休闲景区游客满意度研究提供建议和对策。     

Early Career Outcomes of Graduate Employees: the Effect of Mentoring and Ingratiation*

Underpinned by the growing recognition of influence processes or a careerist orientation in the determination of career success, this study examined the effect of career-oriented mentoring, ingratiation and their interaction term on the career success measures of salary, number of promotions received and career satisfaction. Data were obtained through structured questionnaires from graduate employees (N= 432) working full-time in Hong Kong. Results of the ordinary least-squares regression analyses revealed a non-significant effect of career-oriented mentoring, ingratiation and their interaction term on salary. Career-oriented mentoring was, however, significantly positively related to number of promotions received and career satisfaction. Although the results reinforced the dominance of the traditional determinants of career success, the significant effect of career-oriented mentoring on two of the career success measures may help to paint a more realistic picture of the process of career success in organizations. Limitations of the study, directions for future research and implications of the findings are discussed.     

Job characteristics,employee voice and well‐being in Britain

Job characteristics are often omitted when analysing job satisfaction, but these are crucial to work psychology models, such as the Karasek model. There has also been a neglect of non‐union voice. This study uses data from the 2004 Workplace Employee Relations Survey to investigate the associations between job characteristics and employee voice and well‐being. Improvements in the survey from that of 1998 mean that we can examine two dimensions of well‐being: job satisfaction and the less studied anxiety–contentment. Support is found for the basic Karasek model that both measures of well‐being are negatively related to job demands and positively related to job control; moreover, high job controls reduce the negative association between job demands and both measures. Supportive management is also related to both measures but does not play the buffering role between demands and well‐being that job control does. Union membership is found to be unrelated to job satisfaction and anxiety–contentment, but a perception of consultative management is.     

PSEUDO-R2 MEASURES FOR SOME COMMON LIMITED DEPENDENT VARIABLE MODELS

Abstract. A large number of different Pseudo- R ² measures for some common limited dependent variable models are surveyed. Measures include those based solely on the maximized likelihoods with and without the restriction that slope coefficients are zero, those which require further calculations based on parameter estimates of the coefficients and variances and those that are based solely on whether the qualitative predictions of the model are correct or not. The theme of the survey is that while there is no obvious criterion for choosing which Pseudo- R ² to use, if the estimation is in the context of an underlying latent dependent variable model, a case can be made for basing the choice on the strength of the numerical relationship to the OLS- R ² in the latent dependent variable. As such an OLS- R ² can be known in a Monte Carlo simulation, we summarize Monte Carlo results for some important latent dependent variable models (binary probit, ordinal probit and Tobit) and find that a Pseudo- R ² measure due to McKelvey and Zavoina scores consistently well under our criterion. We also very briefly discuss Pseudo- R ² measures for count data, for duration models and for prediction-realization tables.     

Using Non-linear Models for a Complexity Approach to Psychological Well-being

Psychological well-being in adolescence is an increasing field of study. The literature identifies a large number of dimensions of psychological well-being. However, even when considering all these dimensions, the explanatory power of most models is rather low. Complexity theories can be a productive alternative, at the theoretical but especially the methodological level, to the limitations more traditional approaches to psychological well-being have. In this paper, we suggest a structural equation modelling approach to complexity that focuses on the non-linearity property. Given the large number of dimensions, the model is estimated in two steps as described by Jöreskog [(2000) Latent Variable Scores and Their Uses. Lincolnwood IL: Scientific Software International] First, a confirmatory factor analysis is fitted and Anderson and Rubin’s factor scores are saved. Then all possible products and squared terms of the factor scores are computed and are used as predictors of the dependent variable using an ordered logit model. The results from a sample of 968 Catalan adolescents show that a non-linear model including interaction effects among the eight dimensions, age and gender, has a higher explanatory power to predict satisfaction with life as a whole, compared to a linear model. Important consequences for the study of psychological well-being in adolescence emerge from the methodological procedure we have followed, which can be used to study any type of complex psychological and psychosocial phenomenon.     

Classification of longitudinal career paths

The aim of the present article is to classify, in terms of contractual stability, the careers of the workers in a specified territorial context (Province of Milan-Italy), utilizing large administrative archives. The final goal is a synthetic clustering that identifies individuals in homogeneous groups regarding the longitudinal sequences of contractual typologies occurring in the evolution of vocational experiences during their career, identifying, on the one hand, the worker profiles that remain stable in each contractual typology and on the other hand, the profiles that improve or worsen contractual stability over time. Methodologically, our approach uses a combination of scaling methods to estimate stability scores of each contractual typology and Latent mixture models to cluster similar trajectories. Specifically, the scores of contractual stability were performed by Multidimensional Scaling with individual preferences, taking into account the ordinal nature of distances among contractual typologies and the heterogeneity factors of the subjects. Further, Latent Growth Mixture models, capitalizing the longitudinal property of data sequences, were proposed to identify distinctive, prototypical developmental trajectories of contractual stability within the analyzed population.     

Model building and estimation strategies for implementing the Balanced Scorecard in Health sector

Over last two decades, the concept of the Balanced Scorecard has had broad application by the health sector internationally, including Hospitals systems and national healthcare systems or organizations. However, the lack of literature on causal-effect relationships between different types of dimensions and indicators poses difficulty in conceptualising and implementing a quality evaluation system based on Balanced Scorecard. Methodologically, the most natural context for Balanced Scorecard conceptualization and estimation deals with Structural Equation Models with latent variables. Partial Least Squares Path Modelling has found increased applications, thanks to its ability to handle complex models. However, the lack of a global optimization criterion makes it difficult to evaluate this procedure. The aim of this article is to propose a methodological conceptualization of the Balanced Scorecard in a new context, as the Health sector, using a suitable statistical approach to estimate causal relationships among specified latent dimensions, together with a model building strategy, a necessary step when expert knowledge is too weak to build a robust and well suited model. Specifically, within the Structural Equation Models framework a two-step model building strategy is presented; the first step build the measurement models based on a clustering (around latent variables) technique and the second step build the structural model based on partial correlations and a procedure that selects the best model in terms of predictive power, measured by the mean of the R ² for the endogenous latent variables. Finally, an application based on administrative archives of Lombardy region (Italy) illustrates the presented methodology.     

The effects of flexible work practices on employee attitudes: evidence from a large-scale panel study in Germany

We explore the effects of flexible work practices (FWPs) on the work attitudes (job satisfaction and turnover intention) and non-work attitudes (leisure satisfaction and perceived health) of employees based on representative large-scale German panel data. Because unobserved individual characteristics can easily act as confounders, we estimate both pooled ordinary least squares models and individual fixed-effects models. Controlling for time-constant individual heterogeneity, we find that the three considered FWPs – flexitime, sabbaticals, and working from home – significantly increase job satisfaction and that sabbaticals and working from home (but not flexitime) significantly decrease turnover intention. In addition, sabbaticals but not flexitime or working from home significantly increase leisure satisfaction. The effects of FWPs on health are mostly weak and statistically insignificant. Models that do not control for such individual heterogeneity either underestimate the positive effects of FWPs or find detrimental effects. Our findings indicate that organizations in Germany can increase job satisfaction and decrease employee turnover intention by offering FWPs.     

Modeling behavior with attribute disparity: implicit relationships between attribute magnitudes and aggregated behavior

This article uses two measures of disparity, relative and absolute distance, to show that operationalizations of attribute disparity are logically linked to attribute magnitudes and monadic behavior. This existing integration of both explanatory devices and cases for analysis that have been incorrectly portrayed as competitors has a number of implications. Discussed consequences include the use of monadic patterns as empirical screening devices for dyadic models and the need for new uses of attributes in the dyad so that the dyadic model has appropriate inherent monadic assumptions.     

Bayesian forecasting and portfolio decisions using dynamic dependent sparse factor models

We extend the recently introduced latent threshold dynamic models to include dependencies among the dynamic latent factors which underlie multivariate volatility. With an ability to induce time-varying sparsity in factor loadings, these models now also allow time-varying correlations among factors, which may be exploited in order to improve volatility forecasts. We couple multi-period, out-of-sample forecasting with portfolio analysis using standard and novel benchmark neutral portfolios. Detailed studies of stock index and FX time series include: multi-period, out-of-sample forecasting, statistical model comparisons, and portfolio performance testing using raw returns, risk-adjusted returns and portfolio volatility. We find uniform improvements on all measures relative to standard dynamic factor models. This is due to the parsimony of latent threshold models and their ability to exploit between-factor correlations so as to improve the characterization and prediction of volatility. These advances will be of interest to financial analysts, investors and practitioners, as well as to modeling researchers.     

A dynamic view on interactions between academic spin-offs and their parent organizations

Literature on academic spin-offs gives evidence of different modes of interaction between spin-offs and their parent and their relative role in different modes of knowledge production. In this article, we examine the development of interactions between academic spin-offs and their parent organizations over a mid- to long-term period (4–15 years), drawing on a series of 25 case studies of spin-off/parent pairs from France and Switzerland. We show that the relational trajectories can be captured by four major dynamic patterns. These patterns range from an early cut-off of interactions in line with a linear model of innovation to sustained interactions supporting joint production of knowledge. Some patterns even include a change in the mode of knowledge production over time. In addition, we identify a number of determinants, internal or external to the pair, affecting the dynamic pattern. We conclude that management of spin-off processes and support policies for academic spin-offs should embrace this dynamic diversity.     

The effects of occupational stress on burnout and life satisfaction: a study in accountants

The aim of this study is to determine the impact of occupational stress on burnout and life satisfaction in accountants. The study deals with burnout from three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, lack of personal accomplishment and depersonalization. Certain hypotheses were developed according to a model. These hypotheses mainly measure the negative impact of occupational stress on life satisfaction and its positive impact on burnout. In order to test these hypotheses, a study was conducted in 217 accountants in the city of Kayseri in Turkey. On the research revealed that occupational stress has a negative impact on life satisfaction, while it has a positive impact on the three dimensions of burnout listed above. Based on these results, the study argues that occupational stress is an important factor in determining the life satisfaction and burnout levels of accountants. Finally in this study, some limitations and recommendations are presented for the researchers of future studies.     

顾客满意度指数基础测评模型可比性的实证研究

目前各个国家和地区的顾客满意度指数（CSI）基础测评模型存在差异,这些模型之间是否可比意义重大,但尚无定论。本文通过针对性的实证研究发现,在其它条件一致的情况下,各个国家和地区的CSI基础模型具有可比性的关键是各CSI基础测评模型对核心变量顾客满意的显变量设定一致,而各CSI基础测评模型纳入何种潜变量以及如何设定潜变量之间关系,对CSI可比性的影响并不显著。     

A simpler quality of e-life indicator: does the Internet have a positive impact on the quality of life in Taiwan

This research aims to restructure a Simpler Quality of e-Life Indicators (SEQOL) and use this simpler structure to understand whether the usage of computer and Internet will make impacts on quality of life in Taiwan. By using telephone interviews, 3,563 valid respondents, aged 15 and above with Taiwan nationality, were interviewed. After performing exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, reliability and validity assessment, a simpler factor structure of the SEQOL was formed. The new structure contains 24 items categorized into seven domains: Socioeconomic status, Selfesteem, Social competence, Life freedom, Community support, Psychological pressure and physical health. This research also found that gender divide on most domains did not exist. Those who are aged between 35 and 54 exhibit the highest satisfaction. Residents with university degree have the highest satisfaction on their quality of life and the residents of northern Taiwan have the lowest satisfaction. People who having computer at home show higher satisfaction on quality of life in dimensions of overall, Socioeconomic Status, Social Competence, Psychological Pressure, and Physical Health. On overall quality of life, there is no significant difference between Internet user and non user. But, People who having access to Internet show higher satisfaction on quality of life in dimensions of Socioeconomic Status, Social Competence, Psychological Pressure, and Physical Health, oppositely, have lower satisfaction on quality of life in dimensions of Life Freedom and Community Support.