Vying for time. Work and family

Time--there is never enough of it. There are never enough hours in the day to do everything at work and at home. Today's employees, forced to choose between work obligations and family responsibilities, often feel frazzled and guilty. Some employers recognize these conflicts and are finding ways to lighten the work/family load. They are offering a sophisticated combination of dependent-care options, flexible work hours and family-related benefits tailored to meet the needs of the employees within their specific industries. HRMagazine looks at leaders in six major industries--manufacturing, health, communications/technology, financial management, government and retail. No one can give employees that 25-hour day that everyone feels they need to juggle all their work and family obligations. But these industry leaders have provided a nurturing environment where employees can successfully balance those obligations.     

THE SOCIAL ACCOUNTS FROM A CONSUMER'S POINT OF VIEW

After a short introduction, the first part of this paper (section 3 through 9) provides an outline of the revisions proposed to the System of National Accounts (SNA) of the United Nations which are now under discussion. These proposals were considered by an expert group at the end of 1964 and were accepted by the Statistical Commission of the United Nations in 1965 as the basis for further work on the extension and revision of the SNA. The aim of the revision is to provide a fully integrated system of accounts and balance sheets in which input-output, flows-of-funds and sector balance sheets are incorporated in a generalised accounting framework. Whereas the real side of the economy has been studied analytically in many countries (input-output analysis, demand analysis and so on) much less experience is available on modelling the financial side of the economy, apart from econometric work on saving behaviour, which is fairly widespread. Accordingly, the second part of the paper (sections 10 through 14) contains a discussion of financial model-building in which a number of possibilities are explored. The final topic discussed (section 15) is demographic accounting, by which is meant a framework for recording and analysing human, as opposed to economic, flows and stocks. The development of such a system arose out of the emphasis placed by the expert group on the integration of demographic and economic information.     

Fit performance of several programs used for non-linear least squares problems

Seven computerprograms for non-linear regression or curve fitting problems are compared. The comparison of the programs, running in different computing centra, is restricted to the fit performance. Six model functions are fitted according to the least squares criterion to data series, arising from practical work. The special least squares minimization programs turned out to be better suited for these problems than general optimizing programs.     

A Stochastic Frontier Production Function with Flexible Risk Properties

This paper considers a stochastic frontier production function which has additive, heteroscedastic error structure. The model allows for negative or positive marginal production risks of inputs, as originally proposed by Just and Pope (1978). The technical efficiencies of individual firms in the sample are a function of the levels of the input variables in the stochastic frontier, in addition to the technical inefficiency effects. These are two features of the model which are not exhibited by the commonly used stochastic frontiers with multiplicative error structures.An empirical application is presented using cross-sectional data on Ethiopian peasant farmers. The null hypothesis of no technical inefficiencies of production among these farmers is accepted. Further, the flexible risk models do not fit the data on peasant farmers as well as the traditional stochastic frontier model with multiplicative error structure.     

OCCUPATIONAL EARNINGS BEHAVIOR AND THE INEQUALITY OF EARNINGS BY SEX AND RACE IN THE UNITED STATES*

This paper examines differences in earnings by occupations, and within occupations by sex and by race, on the basis of the 1/100 Public Use Samples of the 1960 and 1970 U.S. Population Censuses. It employs interval analysis to establish 32 categories of occupations with similar characteristics. Little relation was found between mean earnings of occupational groups and the degree of earnings inequality within them. When the figures are examined by sex, it was found that men, on average, earned over twice as much as women in both years, but women's earnings were more unequally distributed (as measured by the Gini coefficient). Women are concentrated in the traditional “female” occupations, which tend to be those at the bottom of the earnings scale, and men have a monopoly of the higher paid occupations. But mean earnings for men exceeded those for women in all occupational groups except one, even in the primarily female occupations. Standardizing first for occupational distribution and then for earnings by occupation, it was found that earnings differences between males and females within occupation had a greater impact on the overall male-female earnings ratio than did differences in occupational distribution by sex. In contrast, when the figures are examined by race, the change in occupational distribution (primarily the movement of blacks out of farming and of blacks and Spanish speakers out of personal services) was the major factor. There was also a considerable degree of earnings inequality within demographic groups. The degree of inequality was in the main reduced when the demographic groups were subdivided into occupations, but it was still substantial. Additional factors like time worked, schooling, and experience must be taken into consideration in understanding this phenomenon.     

Una nuova caratterizzatione dell'ammissibilità nella teoria delle decisioni

In questo lavoro viene fornita una nuova caratterizzazione dell'ammissibilità attraverso un adeguato uso della nozione di ammissibilità parziale. Questa caratterizzazione consente di affrontare le questioni riguardanti la completezza della classe delle decisioni ammissibiliti sotto condizioni «maneggevoli». Fornisce inoltre un approccio unificante al problema della completezza che consente di derivare, come casi particolari, alcuni risultati già noti nella letteratura sull'argomento.

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In this paper a new characterization of admissibility is given for general decision problems. It is based on an adequate use of the notion of partial admissibility.A general decision problem is usually synthetized by a triplet (, , ) where is the states (or parameters) space, the set of available decisions and is a family of real valued functions defined on and expressing numerically the consequences of choosing when the state is . The set is regarded as a subset of the space of all real valued functions on endowed with the topology of pointwise convergence.As for as admissibility is concerned all the pertinent information about decisions are contained in the corresponding functionsW .This allows to introduce a notion of partial admissibility through the neigh-bourhoods of this topology. Admissibile decisions are then shown to be limits of monotone non increasing sequences of partially admissible decisions.Moreover this topological characterization allows to prove the completeness of classes of admissible decisions under acceptable systems of conditions which contain as special cases, known results in literature.

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Lavoro svolto nell'ambito del Gruppo Nazionale per l'Analisi Funzionale e le sue Applicazioni del C.N.R.