The Effect of Child Care Costs on the Employment and Welfare Recipiency of Single Mothers

This paper considers the effect of child care costs on two labor market outcomes for single mothers—whether to work for pay and whether to receive welfare. Hourly child care expenditures are estimated using data drawn from the 1992 and 1993 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). These expenditures are then used to predict the probability of welfare recipiency and employment. While the direction and significance of key variables are robust to changes in specification, the quantitative results are found to be sensitive to identification restrictions. All results show a substantial positive effect of child care costs on welfare recipiency, with the child care price elasticity of welfare recipiency varying from 1.0 to 1.9. Similarly, we find a significant negative effect of child care price on employment with elasticity estimates from -.3 to -1.1, showing that controlling for the welfare choice does not reduce the price elasticity of employment found in other studies.     

Consumer use of the internet for health information: a survey of primary care patients

An increasing number of patients use the internet to obtain information about health. Although some information is available about how health professionals use the internet, little is known about how patients utilize this information. Some patients may actively seek information to assume more responsibility for their health. However, others may feel obliged to do so because of failing confidence in health care provision. Health professionals have the potential to assist patients to make sense of health information from the internet; however, they may not necessarily welcome this role. This study aims to evaluate patients’ use of such information in a primary care setting. The sample consisted of adult patients (n = 851) from two general practice populations at different levels of the socio‐economic spectrum in South Wales (UK). Patients were surveyed by questionnaire about the health information they use, including the internet. The majority of patients preferred to use their general practitioner as the main source of health information. The internet was jointly the second preferred source for information about an illness (6%). Just over half (51%) of patients in this study had access to the internet, of which about half use it to access health information. Just under a quarter (24%, n = 55) of health internet users had discussed information accessed from the internet during a subsequent consultation with a health professional. Of these, three‐quarters felt more prepared and able to participate in decision‐making about treatments. This study provides a greater understanding of how patients are making use of health‐related information from the internet. These findings can be used to help prepare health care professionals for dealing appropriately with internet‐informed patients.     

Pledger modelling: Help the Aged case study

• The recruitment of pledgers (as a proxy for potential legators) to charitable organisations plays a vital role in their continued success, and as a percentage of all fundraising income generated it can represent substantial proportions. However, of all the ‘donation asks’ made of supporters, asking for a legacy is the most difficult. Therefore, it is important that the target audience should be as well researched and highly targeted as possible.
• Help the Aged had reached the stage where decisions need to be made about its future marketing in order to protect longer-term income. The findings of this legacy targeting project were to feed into communication programmes, direct marketing, and the overall legacy marketing strategy.
• The key objective was to identify the best prospects to mail a legacy ask to, across the supporter database, with the likelihood that they are going to pledge as a result.
• It was found that whilst tailored data analysis comes at a price, the average value of a legacy justifies the cost of using sophisticated targeting tools. However, because of the pledge-to-legacy time lapse, there will always be issues with measuring any long-term return on investment (ROI). Nonetheless, pledgers have to be taken on their word for the purpose of testing (and subsequent rollouts). Pledge data should be tested and the outcomes should inform legacy marketing. However, as mentioned above, pledgers necessarily need to be taken on their word and therefore, formulating models based on the type and/or value of pledges is not recommended.

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bias against overweight job applicants: Further explorations of when and why

We investigated the impact of job candidate weight (average or overweight) on several job‐related ratings following a videotaped mock interview. In ad‐dition to weight, we manipulated the race of the applicant, level of job qual‐ifications, and type of job (e.g., public or private contact). We also measured the effect of rater race and negative affect on multiple work‐relevant ratings. Weight, applicant race, job qualifications, and job type each had a modest but significant impact on ratings of hireability, performance capacity, adapt‐ability, and interpersonal skills, in varying combinations. The implications of these results for practice and future research are provided. © 2007 Wiley Pe‐riodicals, Inc.     

Consumption Externality and Equilibrium Underinsurance

Relative consumption has been found to be crucial in many areas, such as asset pricing, the design of taxation, and economic growth. This article extends this line of research to the individual's insurance decision. We first define “keeping up with the Joneses” in the purchase of insurance and find that jealousy does not necessarily give rise to “keeping up with the Joneses.” We also identify several sufficient conditions that cause the optimal coverage in the private market to be less than the social optimum (equilibrium underinsurance). Jealousy is found to be neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for equilibrium underinsurance. We further show that a social welfare maximizing government could adopt a tax system to correct for the consumption externality and make individuals better off.     

The impact of employee satisfaction on quality and profitability in high-contact service industries

The extant operations management literature has extensively investigated the associations among quality, customer satisfaction, and firm profitability. However, the influence of employee attributes on these performance dimensions has rarely been examined. In this study we investigate the impact of employee satisfaction on operational performance in high-contact service industries. Based on an empirical study of 206 service shops in Hong Kong, we examined the hypothesized relationships among employee satisfaction, service quality, customer satisfaction, and firm profitability. Using structural equations modeling, we found that employee satisfaction is significantly related to service quality and to customer satisfaction, while the latter in turn influences firm profitability. We also found that firm profitability has a moderate non-recursive effect on employee satisfaction, leading to a “satisfaction–quality–profit cycle”. Our empirical investigation suggests that employee satisfaction is an important consideration for operations managers to boost service quality and customer satisfaction. We provide empirical evidence that employee satisfaction plays a significant role in enhancing the operational performance of organizations in the high-contact service sector.     

A semi-parametric Bayesian approach to the instrumental variable problem

We develop a Bayesian semi-parametric approach to the instrumental variable problem. We assume linear structural and reduced form equations, but model the error distributions non-parametrically. A Dirichlet process prior is used for the joint distribution of structural and instrumental variable equations errors. Our implementation of the Dirichlet process prior uses a normal distribution as a base model. It can therefore be interpreted as modeling the unknown joint distribution with a mixture of normal distributions with a variable number of mixture components. We demonstrate that this procedure is both feasible and sensible using actual and simulated data. Sampling experiments compare inferences from the non-parametric Bayesian procedure with those based on procedures from the recent literature on weak instrument asymptotics. When errors are non-normal, our procedure is more efficient than standard Bayesian or classical methods.     

The Global MRIO Lab – charting the world economy

ABSTRACT

We describe the creation of the Global Multi-Region Input–Output (MRIO) Lab, which is a cloud-computing platform offering a collaborative research environment through which participants can use each other’s resources to assemble their own individual MRIO versions. The Global MRIO Lab’s main purpose is to harness and focus previously disparate resources aimed at compiling large-scale MRIO databases that provide comprehensive representations of interregional trade, economic structure, industrial interdependence, as well as environmental and social impact. Based on the operational Australian Industrial Ecology Lab, a particularly important feature of this cloud environment is a highly detailed regional and sectoral taxonomy called the ‘root classification’. The purpose of this root is to serve as a feedstock from which researchers can choose any combination of regions and economic sectors to form a model of the economy that is suitable to address their particular research questions. Thus, the Global MRIO Lab concept enables enhanced flexibility in MRIO database construction whilst at the same time saving resources and avoiding duplication, by sharing time- and labour-intensive tasks amongst multiple research teams. We explain the concept, architecture, development and preliminary results of the Global MRIO Lab, and discuss its ability to continuously deliver some of the most prominent world MRIO databases.