Technical and vocational teaching and training in Gabon: how future teachers build their vocational identity?

The professionalism of teachers is based on three levels of expertise: mastering academic knowledge, mastering the teaching of this knowledge and mastering the role played by teachers in schools. For each of these levels, each student during the teacher training courses has his own understanding. This understanding influences their perception of the job of teacher and thus their attitude towards their training. Efficiency of this training could be evaluated through the evolution of this understanding. The experimental part of this study will involve looking at this evolution with students from the ENSET in Libreville at the beginning of the training course, the end of the first cycle and the end of the second cycle. Data collected shows that training does not really produce the desired results for a university vocational teacher training course for technology education.     

Food safety and product liability

This paper focuses on the U.S. product liability system for food poisoning cases and makes six key points. First, current legal incentives to produce safer food are weak, though slightly stronger in outbreak situations and in markets where foodborne illness can be more easily traced to individual firms. Far less than 0.01% of cases are litigated and even fewer are paid compensation. Second, even if potential plaintiffs can overcome the high information and transaction costs necessary to file lawsuits, monetary compensation provides only weak incentives to pursue litigation. Firms paid compensation in 56% of the 294 cases examined in this study and the median compensation was only $2,000 before legal fees. Third, indirect incentives for firms may be important and deserve more research. For example, firms may be influenced by costly settlements and decisions against other firms in the same industry. Fourth, confidential settlements, health insurance, and product liability insurance distort legal incentives to produce safer food. Fifth, the ambiguity about whether microbial contamination is “natural” or an “adulterant” hinders the legal system from effectively dealing with food safety issues. Sixth, a brief comparison of the incentives from U.S. and English legal systems suggests that more research is needed to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and relative impact of each country's legal system on the incentives to produce safer food.     

Urbanization effects on survey nonresponse: a test within and across cities

This paper addresses differences in survey response across city size by applying an explanation from House and Wolf to areas within cities. The data are from Toronto, Hamilton and Kitchener, in Canada. Consistent with other literature, response falls sharply from largest to smallest place, but variation in response rates within the cities is negligible. The intra-city analysis is accomplished by factor analyzing variables such as population density, crime rate and ethnic structure, mostly computed for census tracts, into a variable labelled social disorganization. What House and Wolf termed compositional variation in response is handled by record linking with municipal assessment information. The analysis is based on micro data taking the people listed for the sample as unit of observation.     

New Evidence on the Performance Advantages of Multihospital Systems

This study analyzes the performance effects of proprietary, multihospital systems. It is shown that the organizational structure of these systems may affect the operating costs of member hospitals. Estimating a cost function for Florida hospitals and controlling for other factors, the average costs of HUMANA hospitals are empirically about 17 percent lower, while the costs of other leading chains are about 12 percent lower than not-for-profit institutions. These results contrast with earlier studies that found no such differences. Furthermore, the cost differential that exists between system and non-system hospitals can be largely attributed to technical efficiencies arising from chain ownership.     

Commitment and Lapse Behavior in Long‐Term Insurance: A Case Study

This article presents a case study of a portfolio of individual long‐term insurance contracts sold by a Spanish mutual company. We describe the risk levels, the rating structure, and the implied cross‐subsidies on a portfolio of policies providing health, life, and long‐term care insurance. We show evidence of reclassification risk through the history of disability spells. We also analyze the lapse behavior and seek to provide a rationale for the portfolio’s dynamics. We discuss the lack of commitment from the policyholders (lapses) and from the mutual company (which took a run‐off decision). Finally, we draw conclusions regarding the design of such contracts.     

Productivity and international competitiveness of agriculture in the European Union and the United States

This study looks at international competitiveness of agriculture in the European Union and the United States. The most intuitive concept is that of price competitiveness. We calculate relative prices for 11 member states of the European Union and the United States for the period 1973–2002. We assume that markets are perfectly competitive and in long‐run equilibrium, so that the observed price always equals average total cost, as measured by the cost dual to the production function. This assumption is used in our calculation of relative competitiveness and productivity gaps between the European Union and the United States and in our decomposition of relative price movements between changes in relative input prices and changes in relative productivity levels.     

Contractual Practice and Land Conflicts: The ‘Plant & Share’ Arrangement in Côte d'Ivoire

This paper tackles the broad issue of agrarian contracts, property rights and conflicts in the context of rural Côte d'Ivoire. Since the beginning of the 2000s, a new type of contractual arrangement has been developing rapidly: the ‘Plant & Share’ contract. Through such a contract, a landowner provides the land to a farmer who develops a perennial tree crop plantation; when production starts, the plantation, the plantation and the land, or the product is shared. The aim of the paper is to discuss the conflictive features of the arrangement. I argue that this contract, in spite of its potential for tensions and conflicts, constitutes an alternative to the much more conflictive land sales that currently dominate extra‐familial land transfers in the country.     

The politics of redistributive social insurance

This paper analyses the political support for a social insurance that includes elements of redistribution when there exists an imperfect private insurance alternative. Individuals differ both in their income and risk. The social insurance is compulsory and charges an income-related contribution with pooling of risks. The private insurance is voluntary and charges a contribution based on individual risks. However due to the adverse selection problem, private insurance companies provide only partial insurance. Adopting a non-expected utility model, we show that there is a general majority support for social insurance and that this support is increasing with risk aversion. We also show that a mixed insurance is politically impossible, regardless of the degree of redistribution of social insurance and the joint distribution of risk and income in the population. Lastly, we analyse how the political support for social insurance is affected by any change in its redistributive component and the possibility of using genetic tests.     

Self-control in peer groups

Social influences on self-control underlie both self-help groups and many peer interactions among youths. To understand these phenomena, we analyze how observing each other's behavior affects individuals’ ability to deal with their own impulses. These endogenous informational spillovers lead to either a unique “good news” equilibrium that ameliorates behavior, a unique “bad news equilibrium” that worsens it, or to the coexistence of both. A welfare analysis shows that people will find social interactions valuable only when they have enough confidence in their own and others’ ability to resist temptation. The ideal partner, however, is someone with a slightly worse self-control problem than one's own: this makes his successes more encouraging, and his failures less discouraging.