Seat allocation distributions and seat biases of stationary apportionment methods for proportional representation

In a proportional representation system, apportionment methods are used to round the vote proportion of a party to an integer number of seats in parliament. Assuming uniformly distributed vote proportions, we derive the seat allocation distributions for stationary divisor methods. An important characteristic of apportionment methods are seat biases, that is, expected differences between actual seat numbers and ideal shares of seats, when the parties are ordered from largest to smallest. We obtain seat bias formulas for the stationary divisor methods and for the quota method of greatest remainders.Acknowledgement. We thank Friedrich Pukelsheim for many fruitful discussions.Received March 2004     

汽车座椅舒适性开发的初步研究

文章通过深入分析消费者对汽车座椅舒适性要求的诉求模型,系统地阐述了座椅舒适性的定义及基于此定义的舒适性目标的建立,并结合多年项目经验提出了汽车座椅舒适性设计开发的一般原则和要点,以及舒适性分析验证及完善的主要手段,同时围绕整车开发流程概述了座椅舒适性设计开发流程和主要关键节点,最后对座椅舒适性设计开发在汽车上的实际应用效果进行了辨证分析和总结,对其未来的发展趋势进行了展望。     

汽车座椅舒适性开发的初步研究

文章通过深入分析消费者对汽车座椅舒适性要求的诉求模型，系统地阐述了座椅舒适性的定义及基于此定义的舒适性目标的建立，并结合多年项目经验提出了汽车座椅舒适性设计开发的一般原则和要点，以及舒适性分析验证及完善的主要手段，同时围绕整车开发流程概述了座椅舒适性设计开发流程和主要关键节点，最后对座椅舒适性设计开发在汽车上的实际应用效果进行了辨证分析和总结，对其未来的发展趋势进行了展望。     

CAE分析在某车型座椅满足行李位移乘客防护强度改进中的应用

通过使用Hypermesh软件构建座椅骨架的有限元分析模型，根据GB15083--2006中行李位移乘客防护的要求，对某车型后排座椅进行行李位移乘客防护试验仿真分析。仿真分析结果展示了座椅结构的应力集中位置，以及座椅结构中容易导致试验失效的薄弱环节。通过优化设计，改进了产品的结构，降低了零件开发成本及采购成本，并使改进后的座椅结构成功应用在新车型上。     

Replicating the Levitt and Porter estimates of drunk driving

Estimates of the prevalence and risk of drinking-and-driving are a high-priority need for researchers and policymakers. Levitt and Porter (Journal of Political Economy, 2001, 109(6), 1198–1237) demonstrate how these can be recovered using publicly available information in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Although robust to systematic misreporting and sample selection and far cheaper to implement than surveys, their methodological innovations are largely ignored. We believe this arises partly from difficulty in replicating their results. This article identifies the underlying causes of replication failure and offers practical guidance for future implementation that takes advantage of the current structure of the FARS data.     

Balancing family and work: The effect of cash benefits for working mothers

The aim of this paper is to measure the potential effect of a family policy introduced in Spain in 2003 that provides working mothers with a monthly cash benefit of 100 euros per child aged under 3 years. We explore the effect of the policy on eligible women's labour market participation. In the tradition of the policy evaluation literature we use a difference-in-differences-in-differences (DDD) estimation approach. Our results support a small but significant positive effect of the policy. We find that since the implementation of the policy the labour market participation rate for mothers of children aged under 3 has risen by 3 percentage points compared to the rate for non-policy-eligible females. This represents 5% of their average labour market participation in 2002, the year before the policy was implemented. This overall policy effect is dominated by the effect of the policy among high school educated females.     

Reanalyzing Zero Returns to Education in Germany

Pischke and von Wachter (Review of Economics and Statistics 2008; 90 (3): 592–598) find zero earnings returns to compulsory schooling in the basic school track in Germany. We reanalyze their study using a different dataset. In an extension, we use additional instruments which allow estimation of heterogeneous effects for different groups of compliers. We can confirm the previous result and also find zero returns for other compliers in higher track schools. Moreover, we do not find a causal effect of schooling on cognitive skills. This is in line with a potential reason Pischke & von Wachter (2008) give for their result, namely that basic skills are learned earlier in Germany and additional years of schooling are no longer effective. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Proxy contest,board reelection,and managerial turnover—yes,the proxy contest outcome matters

In a previous study based on a matched sample analysis, it is found that in Taiwan top management turnover rate for the listed firms in the presence of a proxy contest is much higher than the ones without a proxy contest. In other words, the hypothesis of job security has gained empirical support. Taking account of the proxy contest outcomes, the present study extends the sample years, i.e. 1994–1999, to further examine the impact of proxy contest on managerial turnover. In conformity with expectations, the major empirical findings can be summarized as follows: the highest turnover rate of top management is observed in the firms of which the dissidents win majority seats; the second highest turnover rate is observed in the firms of which the dissidents win some seats; whereas the lowest turnover rate is observed in the firms of which the dissidents win no seats. Empirical findings of this kind provide further support to the view that proxy contest has played an effective monitoring role in disciplining incumbent management. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Asymptotic seat bias formulas

Apportionment methods are used to round the vote proportions of parties in a proportional representation system to integer numbers of seats in the parliament. Seat biases quantify by how much on average a particular apportionment method favors larger (or smaller) parties. In this paper, we prove a previous conjecture on asymptotic seat biases of stationary divisor methods and the quota method of greatest remainders, as the size of the parliament tends to infinity.     

UNIVERSAL PRESCHOOL PROGRAMS AND LONG-TERM CHILD OUTCOMES: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

What are the long-term effects of universal preschool programs on child outcomes? We review 26 studies using natural experiments to estimate the effects of universal preschool programs for children aged 0–6 years on child outcomes measured from third grade to adulthood. Studies comparing universal preschool with a mix of parental, family, and private modes of care show mixed effects on test scores and on measures related to health, well-being, and behavior. All estimates for outcomes related to adequate primary and secondary school progression, years of schooling, highest degree completed, employment, and earnings indicate beneficial average effects of universal preschool programs. Three of the included studies calculate benefits-to-costs ratios and find ratios clearly above one. Universal preschool tends to be more beneficial for children with low socioeconomic status and there are not consistently different effects for boys or girls. Only three studies compare two alternative types of universal preschool programs in terms of long-term outcomes.     

County capital cities,county public finance and county economic geography

We are interested in the county governments role for the county seat economy. Our suggestion is this: Rather than discuss changes in county seat location at a given budget (representing a rare natural experiment), we should look at changes in county budget holding fixed county seat location (yielding a steady flow of observations). In the papers model changes in the county budget translate into changes in county seat employment. In the papers empirical test against a sample of German county seats we find it difficult to reject this.Received: February 2003, Accepted: Accepted May 2004JEL Classification: R53, H72, R23Kristof Dascher: I have benefitted from comments by three anonymous referees. I am also grateful for financial support from the CEPR research network on Foreign Direct Investment and the Multinational Organization, funded by the European Commission under contract number ERBFMRXCT980215.     

Estimating intergenerational schooling mobility on censored samples: consequences and remedies

In this paper we estimate the impact of parental schooling on child schooling, focus on the problem that children who are still in school constitute censored observations, and evaluate three solutions to it: replacement of observed with expected years of schooling, maximum likelihood approach, and elimination of all school‐aged children. Using intergenerational data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study we test how the three correction methods deal with censored observations. The one that treats parental expectations as if they were realizations seems to fix the censoring problem quite well. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Impact of CO2 Emission Variation on Firm Performance

The quantifying and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions is one of the most important tools for monitoring and auditing proposed to mitigate climate change, and it also directly affects business. It is thus vital that at this time we learn in detail whether firms actually report on greenhouse gas emissions and make the account entries that must be included within it. This research is twofold: first to analyse the reports on greenhouse gas emissions of international firms in the 2007 and 2008 period and to see what kind of variation occurs in CO₂ emissions between 2006–2007 and 2007–2008, and second to determine the impact that this variation (2006–2007) can have on firm performance in four time periods (t, t + 1, t + 2 and t + 3) that correspond to 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010, taking two variables as a measure of firm performance, ROE and ROA, and considering a time period affected by a financial crisis. The results obtained show that there was a reduction in CO₂ emissions in the 2006–2007 period, and also in the 2007–2008 period. As regards the impact that the variation in CO₂ emissions has on ROE and ROA, CO₂ emission variation is a significant but negative variable only for ROA_2007 and for the rest of the years it is not statistically significant either for ROE or ROA. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Healthy lifestyle and safety: An expected net benefit approach to seat belt use

This paper examines the relationship between motorist safety belt use and three lifestyle behaviors affecting health. A healthy lifestyle affects benefits of seat belt use because it indicates a greater value on safety. If individuals are rational in their behavior, we expect consistency across health and safety choices. Using a nationwide survey sample and logit analysis we find lifestyle has expected effects on belt use holding constant individual and vehicle characteristics. Illustrations for two different lifestyles are considered: (1) smoking 1 pack per day, 2 years between dental visits, and no regular exercise and (2) no smoking, 1 year between dental visits and regular exercise. Healtiher lifestyle increases the probability of seat belt use by more than 50% for typical individuals     

The political economy of financial reform: How robust are huang's findings?

Using new data on financial liberalization taken from Abiad et al. (2008, IMF Working Papers, No. 08/266) for 62 countries over the period 1975–2005, we show that some of the main findings of Huang's (2009, Journal of Applied Econometrics 24 : 1207–1213) replication study on the drivers of financial liberalization are not robust. Major changes concern the effect of democracy on financial reform and the supposed relationship between the desired level of financial liberalization and a country's per capita income. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Public school availability for two-year olds and mothers' labour supply

French children start public school either the year they turn two or the year they turn three. We evaluate the impact of this unique schooling policy on maternal labour supply. Using a Regression–Discontinuity design, we show that early school availability has a significant employment effect on lone mothers, but no effect on two-parent families. Also we show that the effect grows larger as the child grows older and as the family loses eligibility for child benefits. Finally, we provide some new evidence that school enrolment at the age of two has no adverse effect on children's subsequent educational outcomes.     

Income and Democracy: A Smooth Varying Coefficient Redux

Acemoglu et al. (American Economic Review 2008; 98 : 808–842) find no effect of income on democracy when controlling for fixed effects in a dynamic panel model. Work by Moral‐Benito and Bartolucci (Economics Letters 2012; 117 : 844–847) and Cervellati et al. (American Economic Review 2014; 104 : 707–719) suggests that the original model might have been misspecified and proposes alternative specifications instead. We formally test these parametric specifications by implementing Lee's (Journal of Econometrics 2014; 178 : 146–166) dynamic panel test of linear parametric specifications against a general class of nonlinear alternatives robustly and reject all these specifications. However, using a more flexible model proposed by Cai and Li (Econometric Theory 2008; 24 : 1321–1342) we find that the relationship between income and democracy appears to be mediated by education, but results are not statistically significant. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mother–child interaction: a qualitative investigation of imprisoned mothers

In many countries, babies born to women in prison stay in prison with their mother and very young children may accompany their mothers in prison. Among these countries, Iran is one of those we do not have enough information about its prisoners especially mothers who have child(ren). This study aims to investigate imprisoned mother–child interaction by a qualitative method, Grounded Theory, in Iran. Two main questions of this research are: how is the interaction of mother–child in prison? What are the consequences of this interaction? Participants of this study comprised of 14 imprisoned mothers who were on leave, Iran. Being a mother and living with a child was the criterion of selecting the participants. All of the participants were in a separated unit. Data analysis yielded six categories and a core category. The categories are: “child as an emotional support of the mother; child as centre, prison as periphery; hope and will to favored future; mother unit as a family; rehabilitation; the other side of the coin: perceived risk for children.” Core category of the study is “imprisoned mother–child interactions: learning to live by hope and fear.”     

Trading Partners and Trading Volumes: Implementing the Helpman–Melitz–Rubinstein Model Empirically

Helpman, Melitz and Rubinstein [Quarterly Journal of Economics (2008) Vol. 123, pp. 441–487] (HMR) present a rich theoretical model to study the determinants of bilateral trade flows across countries. The model is then empirically implemented through a two‐stage estimation procedure. We argue that this estimation procedure is only valid under the strong distributional assumptions maintained in the article. Statistical tests using the HMR sample, however, clearly reject such assumptions. Moreover, we perform numerical experiments which show that the HMR two‐stage estimator is very sensitive to departures from the assumption of homoskedasticity. These findings cast doubts on any inference drawn from the empirical implementation of the HMR model.     

Targeting fertility and female participation through the income tax

We evaluate the effect of a 2003 reform in the Spanish income tax on fertility and the employment of mothers with small children. The reform introduced a tax credit for working mothers with children under the age of three, while also increasing child deductions for all households with children. Theoretically, given the interplay of these two components, the expected effect of the reform is ambiguous on both outcomes. We find that the combined reforms significantly increased both fertility (by almost 5%) and the employment rate of mothers with children under three (by 2%). These effects were more pronounced among less-educated women. In addition, to disentangle the impact of the two reform components, we use an earlier reform that increased child deductions in 1999. We find that the child deductions affect mothers' employment negatively, which implies that the 2003 tax credit would have increased employment even more (up to 5%) in the absence of the change in child deductions.