Measuring Agreement in Ordered Rating Scales

Ordered rating scales are one of the most frequently used question formats in large-scale surveys. Analysts of the responses to such questions often find themselves in need of describing the degree of agreement (concentration, consensus) of the answers to such questions. For that purpose they commonly use standard deviations of the response distributions, or measures based on these (such as the coefficient of consensus defined by Granberg and Holmberg, 1988), or the coefficient of variability, etc. This paper demonstrates that such measures are inappropriate for this purpose because they misrepresent what they are supposed to measure: the `peakedness' of a distribution. As an alternative a measure of agreement A is proposed. This measure is a weighted average of the degree of agreement that exists in the simple component parts – layers – into which any frequency distribution can be disaggregated, and for which agreement can be expressed in a straightforward and unequivocal way.     

The Impact of Standard Setting on Relevance and Reliability of Accounting Information: Lower of Cost or Market Accounting Reforms in China

During the period from 1998 to 2000, China implemented several new asset write‐down regulations that mandate lower of cost or market accounting (LCM) for most non‐cash assets. This is a study of the relevance and reliability of those regulations for investors in China. The study measures the association of net asset value with market value of equity and the association of accounting income with stock return, on both a historical cost accounting (HCA) basis and on an LCM basis. A fixed‐effects model controlling both year and firm effects is used in a balanced panel sample. The panel regressions show high levels of explanatory power. LCM values can be relevant but may be measured with sufficient error that they do not improve the prediction of firm values. Reliability is measured using non‐nested, overlapping model comparison tests (J and Cox). The paper also considers whether discretionary motivations influence the amount of write‐down. The study supports the relevance of LCM reforms, but finds that reliability is not increased over HCA during the period under study. Reliability appears to be reduced by the voluntary nature of LCM provisions during part of the period and by the effects of opportunism for some firms in the sample.     

A new approach to inter-rater agreement through stochastic orderings: the discrete case

We wish to study inter-rater agreement comparing groups of observers who express their ratings on a discrete or ordinal scale. The starting point is that of defining what we mean by “agreement”. Given d observers, let the scores they assign to a given statistical unit be expressed as a d-vector in the real space. We define a deterministic ordering among these vectors, which expresses the degree of the raters’ agreement. The overall scoring of the raters on the sample space will be a d-dimensional random vector. We then define an associated partial ordering among the random vectors of the ratings, illustrate a number of its properties, and look at order-preserving functions (agreement measures). In this paper we also show how to test the hypothesis of greater agreement against the unrestricted hypothesis, and the hypothesis of equal agreement against the hypothesis that an agreement ordering holds. The test is applied to real data on two medical observers rating clinical guidelines.     

Imputing continuous data under some non-Gaussian distributions

There has been a growing interest regarding generalized classes of distributions in statistical theory and practice because of their flexibility in model formation. Multiple imputation under such distributions that span a broader area in the symmetry–kurtosis plane appears to have the potential of better capturing real incomplete data trends. In this article, we impute continuous univariate data that exhibit varying characteristics under two well-known distributions, assess the extent to which this procedure works properly, make comparisons with normal imputation models in terms of commonly accepted bias and precision measures, and discuss possible generalizations to the multivariate case and to larger families of distributions.     

Measures of similarity between distributions

Eleven criteria are suggested as suitable for measures of similarity between distributions. For seven measures it is discussed whether they satisfy these measures or not. Two measures, the proportional similarity and the Hellinger coefficient satisfy all the eleven criteria.     

Path analysis with partial association measures

This paper discusses the use of partial association measures for carrying out path analyses on categorical data. The measures considered are essentially PRE (proportion of reduction in error of prediction) measures for nominal variables and concordance-discordance indices for ordinal ones. These measures provide a natural way to evaluate the strength of the path linking a non-measurable response variable to one of several categorical explanatory factors. Concerning the decomposition of raw association into direct and indirect effects, it is shown, however, that they do not share the properties of conventional path coefficients for measurable variables. Especially purely nominal association measures need to be interpreted with care. The scope of the partial measures for path analysis is illustrated through a study of the relationships between the educational styles experienced by swiss adolescents and their selfesteem.     

Identity Orientation,Organizational Identification,and Leadership Involvement

The present study relies on theories of authentic and relational leadership, as well as the identity orientation model, to study leadership involvement in volunteer organizations. We propose that self‐expression and social cohesion—the opportunity organizational membership provides people to express who they are and to develop social relationships—are related to organizational identification and leadership involvement. We posit that self‐expression and social cohesion satisfy personal and relational identification motives and increase organizational identification—a form of identification with a collective—which in turn affect leadership involvement. The hypotheses are tested using structural equations modeling using a sample of 210 professional association members, a nonwork sample that reduces the influence of extrinsic rewards on leadership involvement.     

Convertible bond issuance volume,capital structure,and firm value

We investigate whether convertible bond (CB) issuance volume that causes capital structure change would affect firm value. We focus on either the hand-collected data due to multiple CB issues or diverse CB issuance volume (CB-IV) measures, including CB-IV over debt, equity, and assets. We reveal that the firms with higher CB-IV would enhance firm value, somewhat different from previous findings that CB might not be a cheap financing instrument for raising funds. We infer that because increased CB-IV might not be easily permitted by Taiwan authorities, enterprises might endeavor to exploit profits by using the funds raised by CBs. We argue that, to our understanding, our explored issues are essential for enterprises because they link CB-IV and firm value through the capital structure channel. Given that these issues have rarely been a comprehensive focus, this study may contribute to the existing literature.     

Measuring housing affordability: Looking beyond the median

We draw a distinction between the concepts of purchase affordability (whether a household is able to borrow enough funds to purchase a house) and repayment affordability (the burden imposed on a household of repaying the mortgage). We operationalize this distinction in the context of a new methodology for constructing affordability measures that draws on the value-at-risk concept and takes account of the whole distribution of household income and house prices rather than just the median. Empirically we find that the distinction between purchase and repayment affordability can be pronounced. In the Sydney prime mortgage market over the period 1996–2006, repayment affordability deteriorated very significantly while purchase affordability remained quite stable. This difference can be attributed to the loosening of credit constraints in the mortgage market which it seems has carried through primarily into higher house prices rather than an improvement in purchase affordability. We also show how median house-price-to-income ratio measures of affordability can be extended to take account of the whole distribution of income and house prices, and how as a result of differential skewness in the house price and income distributions the housing affordability problem may be significantly worse for lower income households than suggested by standard median measures.     

基于模糊状态的串-并联可修系统的模糊可靠性

研究了具有3台修理设备且在假定关键部件具有优先修理权的可修串-并联系统。利用马尔可夫过程对系统的各状态进行分析,得出系统各状态的概率。然后利用基于模糊状态的可靠性理论,通过定义系统模糊工作以及模糊故障的隶属函数,得到了可修串-并联系统的模糊可靠性指标的计算公式,并比较其结果与传统可靠性理论的不同之处。     

Debt,equity, and information

Most firms issue financial assets such as debt or equity (e.g. bonds or stock) to outside investors. While these financial assets differ greatly in their characteristics, their diversity has received little attention in the literature. Filling this important gap in the literature, this paper views debt and equity as financial contracts, and asks why they are optimal instead of other financial contracts. By endogenizing the bankruptcy process, this paper shows how debt and equity arise as a consequence of an optimal allocation of cash-flow rights and monitoring rights, and how equity leads to dividend signaling.     

The magnitude and reliability of equity capital cost estimates: A statistical approach

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate a simple technique of estimating the cost of equity capital as well as a statistical measure of its reliability. The approach specifies a probability structure that is readily estimated from company dividend data, and front that structure both the estimated cost of capital and its standard error are calculated.     

The effects of high-speed rail on accessibility and equity: Evidence from the Turin-Lyon case-study

According to EU directives, cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is adopted to assess the impacts of high-speed rail (HSR). CBA evaluates the effectiveness of such infrastructure, determining whether and to what extent the present benefits overcome the present opportunity costs. However, it fails to include equity issues, which are the key aspects of transport planning. After a general discussion of equity in HSR and its link with the concept of accessibility, this study describes some complementary methods to calculate the variation in equity. Four of them (i.e. the potential accessibility index, spatial rail equity index, Gini index, and coefficient of variation) were adopted to assess the equity impacts for the Italian municipalities along the Turin-Lyon HSR. The results of the analysis reveal that despite a generalised increase in overall accessibility, equity implications are more contradictory, with main localities gaining further benefits compared to medium- and small-sized municipalities. In particular, the latter register a further increase in peripheralization. However, since they account for 36% of the total surface but represent only approximately 1% of the total population, the overall balance for the population served by the infrastructure may be considered positive. These results are particularly useful in contexts where the acceptance of HSR is weak, as they allow policymakers to identify adequate compensation measures to reduce the gap and increase territorial cohesion.     

Modelling Regime‐Specific Stock Price Volatility*

Single‐state generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models identify only one mechanism governing the response of volatility to market shocks, and the conditional higher moments are constant, unless modelled explicitly. So they neither capture state‐dependent behaviour of volatility nor explain why the equity index skew persists into long‐dated options. Markov switching (MS) GARCH models specify several volatility states with endogenous conditional skewness and kurtosis; of these the simplest to estimate is normal mixture (NM) GARCH, which has constant state probabilities. We introduce a state‐dependent leverage effect to NM‐GARCH and thereby explain the observed characteristics of equity index returns and implied volatility skews, without resorting to time‐varying volatility risk premia. An empirical study on European equity indices identifies two‐state asymmetric NM‐GARCH as the best fit of the 15 models considered. During stable markets volatility behaviour is broadly similar across all indices, but the crash probability and the behaviour of returns and volatility during a crash depends on the index. The volatility mean‐reversion and leverage effects during crash markets are quite different from those in the stable regime.     

Determinants of donation amount in nonprofit membership associations

Nonprofit organizations depend heavily on charitable giving. Using survey data of 2,517 nonprofit professional association members, this study examines the factors influencing the donation amounts given to those organizations. The results of a hierarchical regression analysis suggest that gender, length of membership, and individuals' intrinsic motivation are predictors of their decisions about how much to donate. However, level of satisfaction and extrinsic motivation do not predict members' extent of generosity. This study offers empirical evidence of the positive effects of nonprofit organizations' building mutual relationships with their members regarding donation amounts. The findings contribute to further understanding of the factors that drive donation amount.     

Bayesian Priors from Loss Matching

This paper is concerned with the construction of prior probability measures for parametric families of densities where the framework is such that only beliefs or knowledge about a single observable data point is required. We pay particular attention to the parameter which minimizes a measure of divergence to the distribution providing the data. The prior distribution reflects this attention and we discuss the application of the Bayes rule from this perspective. Our framework is fundamentally non‐parametric and we are able to interpret prior distributions on the parameter space using ideas of matching loss functions, one of which is coming from the data model and the other from the prior.     

Measurement of power,probabilities, and alternative models of man

Starting from Max Weber’s definitions of power we discuss the meaning of his concept Chance and its relationships to the probabilistic notions that play a central role in definitions of indices of measuring voting power. Using Martin Hollis’s distinction between two models of man—plastic and autonomous—we argue that the common measures of voting power when interpreted in terms of probabilities seem to be in better conformity with the model of plastic man than with the model of autonomous man. The paper elaborates on the probability interpretation with applications to the modelling of power measures with a priori unions and to the concept of “real voting power” based on relative frequencies of historical events. Power as potential—which in our view is what Weber very likely meant—remains an elusive concept, but one that should be amenable to game-theoretic analysis.     

Inconsistencies Across Three Contextual Meanings of Reliability

The purpose of this article is to assess the nature of reliability and its inconsistent definitions across three contextual (conceptual, measurement and statistical) levels under the traditional true score theory. Due to such inconsistencies, two existing quantitative approaches (using r and covariance) are not uniformly understood in Psychology and other disciplines; consequently, their applications to measurements and testings are limited to ambiguous interpretations at the conceptual and measurement levels. To examine the extent of this problem, a questionnaire including various contextual definitions and interpretations of reliability in the literature was distributed in a nationwide survey. Results from six groups of experts representing editors, professors and advanced graduate students in both quantitative and clinical areas indicate that all subject groups generally agreed that a reliable instrument possesses the characteristics of the repeatability of responses of all test-takers at the conceptual level, and the reproducibility of the instrument with little or no variations from the underlying true scores at the measurement level. However, between the editors and noneditors, the endorsements of the common definition at the measurement level show obvious discrepancies. Further, at the statistical level, significant differences were found not only between but also within subject-groups in their interpretations of product-moment correlations and Alpha coefficients for the assessment of reliability at the conceptual and measurement levels. The causes of such inconsistencies were discussed in terms of the inherent limitations of the two statistical approaches used and their insufficiencies for indexing the conceptual and measurement meanings of reliability. Finally, this paper called for developing new statistical indices that are coherent with conceptual and measurement definitions. Before such development, the capacities of existing reliability indices shall be redefined and their application qualifications shall be proportionally re-established for educational, research and clinical purposes.     

Housing equity,residential mobility and commuting

Highly productive economies require a flexible labor force with workers that move in accordance with the changing demand for goods and services. In times with falling housing prices, the mobility of home owning workers may be hampered by a lock-in effect of low or even negative housing equity. This paper explores the effect of housing equity on both the residential mobility and the commuting pattern of homeowners. We merge administrative registers for the Danish population and properties and get highly reliable micro data for our analysis. We find that low and negative housing equity substantially reduces residential mobility among homeowners. The negative effect of locked-in low equity families on labor market mobility may be mitigated by commuting. However, our results show that family heads in low or negative equity homes are not found to commute more than households with higher housing equity, but also that a considerable fraction of home owning family heads commute. The analysis of the joint decision of homeowners to commute or move shows that the option of moving, as an alternative to not moving and not commuting, is chosen by five to six percent of homeowners with low housing equity, while the option of not moving but commuting is chosen by 60%.