Why Distinguish Between Statistics and Mathematical Statistics–The Case of Swedish Academia

A separation between the academic subjects statistics and mathematical statistics has existed in Sweden almost as long as there have been statistics professors. The same distinction has not been maintained in other countries. Why has it been kept for so long in Sweden, and what consequences may it have had? In May 2015, it was 100 years since Mathematical Statistics was formally established as an academic discipline at a Swedish university where Statistics had existed since the turn of the century. We give an account of the debate in Lund and elsewhere about this division during the first decades after 1900 and present two of its leading personalities. The Lund University astronomer (and mathematical statistician) C. V. L. Charlier was a leading proponent for a position in mathematical statistics at the university. Charlier's adversary in the debate was Pontus Fahlbeck, professor in political science and statistics, who reserved the word statistics for ‘statistics as a social science’. Charlier not only secured the first academic position in Sweden in mathematical statistics for his former PhD student Sven Wicksell but also demonstrated that a mathematical statistician can be influential in matters of state, finance as well as in different natural sciences. Fahlbeck saw mathematical statistics as a set of tools that sometimes could be useful in his brand of statistics. After a summary of the organisational, educational and scientific growth of the statistical sciences in Sweden that has taken place during the last 50 years, we discuss what effects the Charlier–Fahlbeck divergence might have had on this development.     

Do health system reforms stand a chance?

While most major reforms of health systems fail, those that succeed are motivated by politicians' quest for reducing the health burden on their budget in response to a shift in voters' preferences away from public health. An Edgeworth box is used to depict their preferences, in addition to those of (potential) patients and health‐care providers. Politicians are found to severely constrain the area of mutual advantage, suggesting that only minor reforms are possible unless they promise to lower health‐care expenditure. An efficiency‐enhancing change that would enlarge the box and hence the area of mutual advantage would be to suppress the requirement imposed on health insurers to purchase domestically, rather than being free to directly import health‐care services and drugs.     

The Context of Entrepreneurial Judgment: Organizations,Markets, and Institutions

The economics and management literatures pay increasing attention to the technological, competitive, and institutional environment for entrepreneurship. However, less is known about how context influences the judgment of entrepreneurs. Focusing on the emerging judgment‐based approach to entrepreneurship, we argue that economics can say much about how the organizational, market, and institutional context shapes entrepreneurial judgment. We describe entrepreneurs as individuals who deploy scarce, heterogeneous resources to service customer preferences at a profit. Because of uncertainty, this process is essentially experimental, and context influences the experimental process. Thus, entrepreneurs will seek to design the internal organization of the firm so that it facilitates internal experimentation. Moreover, the market or task environment determines the need for experimentation (e.g., how fast do consumer preferences change, how does technology evolve, which assets are available at which terms, etc.). Finally, the institutional environment influences, for example, the transaction costs of acquiring and divesting assets as firms adjust their boundaries through ongoing commercial experimentation.     

Creating compassion: How volunteering websites encourage prosocial behaviour

Organisations increasingly use websites to promote prosocial behaviour such as volunteering, philanthropy, and activism. However, these websites often fail to encourage prosocial behaviours effectively. To address the lack of relevant research, we develop, then refine, a design model that identifies the user experience factors that create intention to engage in prosocial behaviour on websites. We test an initial model developed from the literature, by interviewing forty participants, each of whom visited and compared six volunteering websites. Our analysis of the participants' user experience reveals eighteen elements that interplay to create intention to engage in prosocial behaviour. Our refined design model comprises ten website features (interaction, factual, anecdata, external recognition, organisational expression, value suggestion, explanatory content, visual media, written media and, website design), seven perceptions (ease of use, aesthetics, information quality, trust, negative affect, positive affect, and argument strength), and one motivation (egoism). These findings provide novel insights into how to design Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to encourage prosocial behaviour.     

Socio-economic impacts of migrant clustering on Dutch neighbourhoods: In search of optimal migrant diversity

The recent empirical literature on the impact of migrant clustering on socio-economic welfare indicators shows inconclusive and often even contradictory results. In this paper we argue that there is not an unambiguous empirical outcome of migrant or ethnic diversity, but that it depends on the level of migrant or ethnic composition itself. A low degree of socio-economic and cultural diversity may be beneficial for neighbourhoods, whereas an excessive degree of diversity may be harmful. We test this hypothesis by (i) constructing a migrant clustering index for all neighbourhoods in the Netherlands based on a gamma index; and, subsequently, (ii) incorporating it in a regression framework to assess three relevant socio-economic outcomes: neighbourhood income, number of students, and average housing value. We show that there is apparently an optimal level of migrant clustering, and that it is remarkably robust. For the Netherlands as a whole and for the ten largest Dutch cities as well, it is striking that largely similar effects were found. Our results suggest that population composition in neighbourhoods may vary up to about 40 per cent from the national average before migrant clustering generates negative effects.     

A Multi-state model of state dependence in labor supply: Intertemporal labor supply effects of a shift from joint to individual taxation

In this paper I develop an intertemporal discrete choice model of female labor supply to analyze the effects of true state dependence and its effect on labor supply behavior over time. The estimation results show that state dependence is significantly positive at the extensive margin and lower but in general still significant at the intensive margin. I apply this model to study the short and long run labor supply effects of a fundamental reform of the German income tax system, i.e. the shift from joint to individual taxation of married couples and show that labor supply responses are significantly higher in the long run than in the short run.     

Learning trajectory in offshore OEM cooperation: Transaction value for local suppliers in the emerging economies

We focus on the unique role of offshore OEM cooperation as a learning opportunity for local suppliers in the emerging economies. In particular, we conceptually argue and empirically confirm the links between learning intent, capability enhancement, governance mode, and overall innovativeness from the perspective of local suppliers in offshore OEM cooperation in China as well as the influence of local business culture within these links. We address two issues: (1) offshore OEM cooperation can be a unique opportunity for local suppliers with strong intent to learn from foreign buyers for capability enhancement and (2) the moderating effects of trust and contact as two distinctive governance modes. Addressing the two issues, we make two specific contributions to the research on inter-firm cooperation, both of which derive from the often-neglected theoretical lens of transaction value. Our general contribution lies in the extension of the transaction value perspective by specifying its dual tenets of inter-firm co-specialization and shared-trust as the central theme of inter-firm cooperation to complement the transaction cost economics and also contextualize the research on inter-firm cooperation in terms of different partners’ perspectives as well as different governance modes.     

Bootstrapping I(1) data

A functional law is given for an I(1) sample data version of the continuous-path block bootstrap of Paparoditis and Politis (2001a). The results provide an alternative demonstration that continuous-path block bootstrap unit root tests are consistent under the null.     

Testing the impact of predefined and self-defined end anchors on the linearity of the category rating scale

In this research the impact of two types of end anchors on the linearity of the category rating scale is studied. Two functional measurement experiments were carried out, each requiring a different kind of judgement, i.e., job satisfaction ratings and attractiveness ratings. One group of participants rated the stimuli using a category rating scale with fixed anchors, while another group was presented with a self-anchoring category rating scale. The results indicate that researchers can be confident in the ability of both category rating scales to provide linear data. This implies that the different end anchors do not impact on the linearity of the category rating scale.