Lone Mothers: What is to be done?

This Dialogue presents the views of four authors, from the US, the UK, and Norway, on the best policies to help lone mothers. Lone mothers face an inevitable dilemma in allocating their time between earning income and caring for their children. The low-earning capacity of women in an unequal labor market exacerbates the problem, causing material hardship for many lone mothers and their families. The policy solutions proposed lie along a spectrum, ranging from those that seek to enable all lone mothers to take employment to those that aim to let mothers choose whether to take employment or care for their children themselves. Other policies discussed concern ways to value and support caregiving, improve the low-wage labor market for women, and provide a set of income supports that would both boost income and provide time to care for children.     

Subjective model selection rules versus passive model selection rules

In this paper, the choice of a particular functional form based on the objective of the author is called the subjective model selection rule and the choice of a particular functional form using pre-selected model selection criteria is called the passive model selection rule. The objective of the author is the analysis of equilibrium, an efficient input choice, the study of the returns to scale function, the estimation of the elasticity of substitution, and the evaluation of the technical progress. Depending on the chosen objectives, economic restrictions such as the homogeneity, homotheticity, and regularity condition (positivity, monotonicity, and quasiconcavity) can be imposed. Various well-known functions beginning from the Cobb–Douglas (CD) to a globally well-behaved polynomial series are listed and the performances are compared with respect to the possibility of extracting economic interpretation, usefulness for advanced studies, computational easiness, and the potentiality of extending the given function to a more complex function. The isoquants and three dimensional output surfaces are plotted for a series of production functions using the transportation data of Zellner and Revankar (1969). Barnett and Jonas (1983) imposed the sufficient conditions for quasiconcavity of production functions while Gallant and Golub (1984) imposed the necessary and sufficient conditions. The strength and weakness of the above two methods are discussed. These methods are extended for three input cases using the U.S. electric power industry data of Nerlove (1963) and Greene (2008).     

Insulin-Pens: Können sie mehrfach verwendet werden?

Pen-Papier der DGKH - Der korrekte Umgang mit Insulin-Pens ist offensichtlich nicht ganz einfach. Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Krankenhaushygiene (DGKH) erh?lt immer wieder Anfragen, ob die Hautantiseptik vorab notwendig sei oder ob Pen-Nadeln mehrfach verwendet werden dürfen. Deshalb aktualisierte die DGKH jetzt ihr Konsensuspapier und bündelt darin die Empfehlungen der Experten.     

Messie oder Diogenes?

Typen der Wohnungsdesorganisation - Für den ungeschulten Betrachter ist eine verwahrloste Wohnung eine verwahrloste Wohnung. Doch auch die dort lebenden Menschen unterscheiden sich betr?chtlich in der Art und Weise, wie sie leben.     

The value of extended delegation in dynamic agency

One of the main advantages of delegation is that specific department level information is used. Its main disadvantage is probably that central management looses direct control over certain actions. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted trade-off. We show that delegation might be favorable even if specific knowledge is completely absent. We consider a firm that lives for two periods. Due to its organizational structure part of the tasks and decision rights is inevitably delegated to a subordinate (agent). The agent performs the tasks assigned to him, tantamount to personal effort, in each of the two periods. Besides this effort the decision to implement a particular project has to be made at the beginning of period two. With regard to the project choice, central management can decide to delegate it to the agent (decentralization). Alternatively it can make it personally (centralization). If the project choice is decentralized it remains unobservable for central management. Along with second period effort it must be motivated via an incentive contract written on period output.We analyze two different contracting regimes: long-term commitment and long-term renegotiation-proof contracts. With full commitment we find that centralization is indeed favorable as compared to delegation if no informational advantage exists. This confirms conventional wisdom. However, the result does not necessarily hold with renegotiation-proof contracts. Renegotiation-proofness may force central management to set too low second-period incentives. Delegation counteracts this effect as it allows central management to implicitly commit to a higher second-period incentive rate. This arises as both, personal effort and the project choice, rather than effort alone need to be motivated. A necessary condition for too low second-period incentives, and thus for delegation to be favorable, is a negative intertemporal correlation of output.     

Writing the differences: Poststructural ist pluralism,retextualization, and the construction of reflexive ethnographic narratives in consumption and market research

Representing social realities in a narrative form is central to the interpretive processes by which market‐oriented ethnographies are constructed. In recent years, the process of textualization has shifted from a taken‐for‐granted aspect of the ethnographic enterprise to a central focus of ethnographers’ reflexive considerations. This shift reflects the realization that textualization poses dilemmas of representation that can not be resolved through additional fieldwork or other methodological procedures. This paper addresses these workbench problems by devising an alternative narrative formretextualization‐based on a poststructuralist version of critical pluralistic analysis. We first discuss how non‐realist genres of ethnographic writing have emerged in response to a heightened sensitivity toward ideological positions embedded in research narratives. We then discuss how the use of retextualization can facilitate the development of reflexivity in consumption research by destabilizing the representational authority of the ethnographic text through expressions of divergence, dissensus, and contested interpretations.     

Reasserting Institutionalist Insights on the Good Society: 30 Years After Petr’s Call for a Mixed Economy

In this research note, I revisit the issues raised by Jerry Petr (1987) in “The Nature and Necessity of the Mixed Economy.” The institutionalist mixed economy is still a sound model for the good society. However, Western industrialized countries have been losing ground on the goals of the mixed economy. The struggle to defend pragmatism over ideological attachment to neoliberalism, has evolved into a distributional struggle that cannot be resolved without institutional change.