The structure and infrastructure of Mexico's science and technology

The structure and infrastructure of the Mexican technical literature was determined. A representative database of technical articles was extracted from the Science Citation Index for the year 2002, with each article containing at least one author with a Mexican address. Many different manual and statistical clustering methods were used to identify the structure of the technical literature (especially the science and technology core competencies). One of the pervasive technical topics identified from the clustering, thin films research, was analyzed further using bibliometrics, in order to identify the infrastructure of this technology.     

Unemployment, credit rationing, and capital accumulation: a tale of two frictions

Summary. This paper develops a model in which two information frictions are embedded into an otherwise conventional neoclassical growth model; an adverse selection problem in the labor market and a costly state verification problem in the credit market. The former allows equilibrium unemployment to arise endogenously while the latter is responsible for equilibrium credit rationing. This structure is used to investigate a theoretical link between the level of unemployment and the extent of credit rationing (and capital formation). The presence of the labor market friction is enough to generate scope for multiple steady state equilibria. The model also generates a large class of endogenous cyclical and chaotic dynamical equilibria. Development trap phenomena may also appear. Received: April 10, 1998; revised version: May 20, 1998     

Targeting Consumers Who Care about Future Generations

Generativity, as an adult's preoccupation with the well‐being of future generations, is a well‐studied concept in the social psychology literature. However, to this day, little is known about this concept within a consumer context. This article presents two studies that aimed to better understand the attitudes and behaviors of generative consumers. A first study was conducted to develop a more appropriate measure of generativity for consumer situations. It produced a two‐factor consumer generativity scale of six items, one factor of which measures the motivation for symbolic immortality (agentic generativity) whereas the other factor measures the motivation to be useful (communal generativity). The second study showed the predictive validity of the new scale. Highly generative consumers have more favorable attitudes toward ads and products that are generatively positioned. Generative consumers intend to buy products positioned as generative. In addition, the second study presents some sociodemographic characteristics of generative consumers. This research presents a valid and parsimonious scale of consumer generativity, and demonstrates the relevance of using a generative positioning strategy when targeting highly generative consumers.     

A research framework for group support systems

Over the last decade, many methodologies and techniques have been devised to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of cooperative working. The efficacy of many of these approaches has not been rigorously assessed, causing doubt about their applicability and helping restrict their use. Additionally, research effort has been dissipated. The need is for a generally agreed framework within which research can be conducted and results determined. This article proposes such a framework, involving the identification of the context, process, and outcome variables which, a priori, are deemed important to understanding, and subsequently predicting, the appropriate forms of intervention in the workings of groups. Six major components have been identified: the organizational environment, the group context, the process context, the group process, the substantive outcomes, and process performance indicators. Within these six components, 16 macrovariables have been identified. Within these macrovariables, 90 variables have been selected that characterize an issue-handling situation and its outcomes. The framework is applicable to a very wide range of group support systems used in many contexts.     

University choice: which attributes matter when you are paying the full price?

This article presents the results from a longitudinal study of students' choice of university in England. Students were surveyed initially when applying for university (Wave One) and then again when they were about to embark on their chosen course (Wave Two). The results from Wave Two demonstrated a high degree of consistency with the Wave One findings: course and university reputation are far more important and fees are relatively unimportant. However, a key result across both waves was that patterns of utility for students with no parental experience of university were significantly different from students whose parents had attended university. The utility associated with different levels of entry qualifications, of fees and of university and course reputation, differed between social groups. The study suggests that the benefits of going to a highly rated university may be undervalued in families that have no direct experience of higher education. In addition, whilst females are more significantly put off by universities with low entry requirements, the qualitative attitudinal statements included in the follow‐up study seem to indicate that so‐called ‘softer’ factors may also influence their choice.     

Moral hazard among the sick and unemployed: evidence from a Swedish social insurance reform

This paper studies a specific type of moral hazard that arises in the interplay between two large public social insurance systems in Sweden, namely the sickness insurance (SI) and the unemployment insurance (UI). Moral hazard can arise from the structure of the benefit levels as for some unemployed persons benefits from the SI are higher than benefits from the UI. We use a reform of the SI system that came into force on 1 July 2003 to identify the effect of economic incentives arising from the different benefit levels. The purpose of the reform was to eliminate the difference in benefits between the two social insurance systems. Our results from a duration analysis show clearly that the higher the sickness benefits, the higher the probability of reporting sick.     

Marginalizing pattern-mixture models for categorical data subject to monotone missingness

Many models to analyze incomplete data that allow the missingness to be non-random have been developed. Since such models necessarily rely on unverifiable assumptions, considerable research nowadays is devoted to assess the sensitivity of resulting inferences. A popular sensitivity route, next to local influence (Cook in J Roy Stat Soc Ser B 2:133–169, 1986; Jansen et al. in Biometrics 59:410–419, 2003) and so-called intervals of ignorance (Molenberghs et al. in Appl Stat 50:15–29, 2001), is based on contrasting more conventional selection models with members from the pattern-mixture model family. In the first family, the outcome of interest is modeled directly, while in the second family the natural parameter describes the measurement process, conditional on the missingness pattern. This implies that a direct comparison ought not to be done in terms of parameter estimates, but rather should pass by marginalizing the pattern-mixture model over the patterns. While this is relatively straightforward for linear models, the picture is less clear for the nevertheless important setting of categorical outcomes, since models ordinarily exhibit a certain amount of non-linearity. Following ideas laid out in Jansen and Molenberghs (Pattern-mixture models for categorical outcomes with non-monotone missingness. Submitted for publication, 2007), we offer ways to marginalize pattern-mixture-model-based parameter estimates, and supplement these with asymptotic variance formulas. The modeling context is provided by the multivariate Dale model. The performance of the method and its usefulness for sensitivity analysis is scrutinized using simulations.