CHILD MENTAL HEALTH AND EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT: MULTIPLE OBSERVERS AND THE MEASUREMENT ERROR PROBLEM

We examine the effect of survey measurement error on the empirical relationship between child mental health and personal and family characteristics, and between child mental health and educational progress. Our contribution is to use unique UK survey data that contain (potentially biased) assessments of each child's mental state from three observers (parent, teacher and child), together with expert (quasi‐)diagnoses, using an assumption of optimal diagnostic behaviour to adjust for reporting bias. We use three alternative restrictions to identify the effect of mental disorders on educational progress. Maternal education and mental health, family income and major adverse life events are all significant in explaining child mental health, and child mental health is found to have a large influence on educational progress. Our preferred estimate is that a one‐standard‐deviation reduction in ‘true’ latent child mental health leads to a 2‐ to 5‐month loss in educational progress. We also find a strong tendency for observers to understate the problems of older children and adolescents compared to expert diagnosis. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Applied Econometrics published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sketching: Friend or Foe to the Novice Designer?

Previous research by one of the authors showed that novice designers do not use sketching as a way to generate, develop and communicate design proposals, but move immediately to three-dimensional modelling. Neither do they generate multiple solutions.     

The Economic Demography Transition: Is China's ‘Not Rich,First Old’ Circumstance a Barrier to Growth?

Around 1980 China adopted a reformist economic agenda and a restrictive population policy. China's consequential ‘getting old before rich’ discourse is herein advanced into the ‘economic demography transition’ and economic demography matrix (EDM). EDM transition analysis of 182 economies from 1996 to 2016 identifies: i) China to be one of many ‘poor‐old’ economies; and ii) a majority of countries recently entering the high‐income group were first old. These results question China's 1980 s‐based fears that early demographic transition would stall development and also call for enhanced nuance in understanding economic and demographic change links.     

Evaluating the newer salesperson

This article reports the results of an experiment examining the effect pattern of performance and information format have on sales managers performance appraisal.