Manual and Automated Procedures for Compiling a Very Large Sample of Centenarian Pedigrees

A large portion of the baby boomer population will live beyond the age of 90 years, and entitlement programs and various insurance products have thus become interested in longevity risk. Beyond cohort life table predictions, actuaries have little to go on in determining which individuals or portions of populations are at increased risk of living to 90 or 100 or even older. We and others have noted strong familial risk for living beyond the oldest one percentile of survival, and we developed an algorithm that uses information about relatives’ longevity to compute the chance of an individual surviving to extreme old age. An important step of this work is to compile large samples of pedigrees with and without long-lived family members. Here we describe our process of hand curation of centenarian pedigrees and software that we have developed for the automated construction of such pedigrees using internet-based resources that can support the manual process.     

Leading public service organizations: how to obtain high employee self-efficacy and organizational performance

Concerns are sometimes raised that transactional leadership harms public organizations’ performance because demands thwart employees’ self-efficacy. However, the opposite may be argued – conditional rewards strengthen feelings of competence because they provide positive feedback on performance. We study ninety-two high school principals’ reported use of contingent rewards and sanctions and self-efficacy among their 1,932 teachers. The results indicate that contingent rewards strengthen self-efficacy, and that sanctions are not negatively related with self-efficacy or performance. Furthermore, the teachers’ self-efficacy can be linked positively to organizational performance. This suggests that rewards can be an important tool for managers in the public sector.     

Picture this: Managed change and resistance in business network settings

This paper discusses change management in networks. The literature on business networks tends to downplay the role of managerial initiative in network change. The change management literature addresses such initiative, but with its single-firm perspective it overlooks the interdependence of network actors. In exploring the void between these two streams of literature, we deploy the concept of network pictures to discuss managed change in network settings. We analyze a change project from the furniture industry and address the consequences of attempting to manage change activities in a network context characterized by limited managerial authority over these activities. Our analysis suggests that change efforts unfold as a negotiated process during which the change project is re-negotiated to fit the multiple actor constituencies. The degree of overlap in the co-existing network pictures of the involved actors is found to be decisive for the possibility of successfully implementing network change.     

Globalization,Tax Distortions,and Public‐Sector Retrenchment*

It is widely perceived that globalization inevitably leads to a retrenchment of tax‐financed public‐sector activities. The argument is that tax distortions increase when production is more easily relocated across countries (the elasticity argument). We question this perception in a model that captures standard mechanisms from trade and open‐economy models. Importantly, the retrenchment argument overlooks the fact that the basic effect of integration (i.e., gains from trade) tends to lower the marginal costs of public funds. Moreover, the elasticity argument is not unambiguously supported, and there is no race to the bottom as a result of the perceived terms‐of‐trade effects of non‐cooperative fiscal policies.     

Learning to Love Biomimetic Killing: How Jurassic World Embraces Life Forms as Weapons

This article examines how the latest film in a series of movies about a dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, became entangled in the politics of military representations in popular culture. Beginning with the ways in which the Pentagon has influenced the film industry in the 9/11 media environment, we go on to detail how Jurassic World enacts the current high‐tech military research into biowarfare—weaponizing animals and defining nature as the ultimate killing machine. In the film, the dino‐stars are harnessed into battle to protect the humans, led by a former Navy soldier who takes a pack of Velociraptors, and filmgoers, on a thrilling hunt to destroy a bioengineered, genetically modified dino‐monster. Though the film offers a commercial critique of designing animals purely for profit, it fails to challenge the profit‐making ties between the military industries, weapons technology, and corporate entertainment media. Character depictions, narrative, and visual and filmic storytelling devices are explored in order to identify the tropes directing the film's message. Ultimately, Jurassic World presents the military's new frontier of biowarfare with enthusiasm, not skepticism, and Hollywood welcomes a “brave new world” in which the biological world has been harnessed for military purposes.     

Welfare Policies, Labour Taxation and International Integration

How will international integration affect welfare policies? This paper considers the possibilities of financing public sector activities (public consumption and social security expenses) by general (wage) taxation in an economy which becomes more integrated in international product markets. Even if labour is internationally immobile, the increased mobility of products and hence jobs implies a change in the distortions arising from taxes and social security contributions levied on labour income. Since financing of social security via general taxation involves a common resource problem the effects of international integration depend critically on the institutional structure of the labour market. This paper shows that increased international integration inducing more product market competition implies that it becomes more costly to maintain welfare systems financed by general taxation.     

Strategic interaction in undeveloped credit markets

This paper studies the strategic interaction between informal and formal lenders in undeveloped credit markets. In a model with adverse selection, loan seniority, market power, and differences in the cost of lending, it is shown that under general conditions a co-funding equilibrium will be a Nash outcome of the game. We demonstrate that a collateral requirement in connection with formal loans always generates a new co-funding equilibrium in which both lenders earn higher profits. A government subsidy to the formal lender may have the opposite effect. We relate our results to existing empirical evidence and the emerging discussion of how to best ensure financial viability and outreach of microfinance institutions.     

Variance components models for survival data

Extensions of the Cox proportional hazards model for survival data are studied where allowance is made for unobserved heterogeneity and for correlation between the life times of several individuals. The extended models are frailty models inspired by Y ashin et al. (1995). Estimation is carried out using the EM algorithm. Inference is discussed and potential applications are outlined, in particular to statistical research in human genetics using twin data or adoption data, aimed at separating the effects of genetic and environmental factors on mortality.