1. Introduction and Overview. 2. Detecting Influential Observations and Outliers. 3. Detecting and Assessing Collinearity. 4. Applications and Remedies. 5. Research Issues and Directions for Extensions. Bibliography. Author Index. Subject Index.

Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

http://onemvweb.com/sources/sources/network_structure_social_capital.pdf

The Network Structure Of Social Capital

I present argument and evidence for a structural ecology of social capital that describes how the value of social capital to an individual is contingent on the number of people doing the same work. The information and control benefits of bridging the structural holes—or, disconnections between nonredundant contacts in a network—that constitute social capital are especially valuable to managers with few peers. Such managers do not have the guiding frame of reference for behavior provided by numerous competitors, and the work they do does not have the legitimacy provided by numerous people doing the same kind of work. I use network and performance data on a probability sample of senior managers to show how the value of social capital, high on average for the managers, varies as a power function of the number of people doing the same work.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2393923.pdf

The contingent value of social capital.

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

Transaction cost economics (TCE) is one of the leading perspectives in management and organizational studies, yet debate continues regarding its empirical support. In this paper, we take stock of the large body of extant research and provide a systematic assessment of empirical evidence. In all, 308 statistical tests from 63 articles, selected according to a set of clear criteria, were examined across various dimensions. We assess not only the level of empirical support for the theory, but also the degree of paradigm consensus present in the empirical literature. Our analysis shows that results are mixed: while we found support in some areas (e.g., with regard to asset specificity), we also found considerable disagreement on how to operationalize some of TCE's central constructs and propositions, and relatively low levels of empirical support in other core areas (e.g., surrounding uncertainty and performance). We conclude that a more thorough empirical grounding of the theory's foundation is crucial to its future development, and offer several strategies for doing this. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A systematic assessment of the empirical support for transaction cost economics

This article draws on life history data of the cohorts of recent US retirees to examine the temporal patterning of retirement Three major dimensions‐‐historical context, social heterogeneity, and, most important, biographical pacing, measured by cohort, gender, and career pathway, respectively‐‐operate simultaneously, yet unevenly, to affect various aspects of the retirement process Findings suggest that changes over the past few decades have undermined the regularity in retirement timing that was a product of the convergence of diverse institutional features, anchored by a large core of men on traditional career tracks Focusing on retirement, our model underscores the multiplex nature of the temporal structuring of the life course

http://users.soc.umn.edu/~moen/PDFs/Clocking%20Out.pdf

Clocking out : Temporal patterning of retirement

Une dynamique d'imitation entre entreprises produit un niveau eleve d'isomorphisme observable dans la selection des experts (audit). La probabilite d'imitation varie en fonction de la position de l'acteur au sein du groupe de pairs et de la dimension statutaire. Les leaders d'un secteur cherchent a se differencier de leurs principaux concurrents. Les moyennes entreprises imitent les leaders de leur secteur en choisissant parmi le meme ensemble d'experts. Les entreprises du bas de l'echelle semblent etre exclues. Cette interaction entre l'inclusion et l'exclusion chez les acteurs socialement differencies produit une polarisation substantielle de taille dans les entreprises et la concentration extreme de la part du marche qui caracterise le marche des services d'audit

Mimetic Isomorphism and Its Effect on the Audit Services Market

Given the fundamental changes in the institutions of both work and family, the need to focus on the work-family interface is greater than ever. Most studies, however, examine this interface in terms of individuals and at only one point in time. The authors propose a coupled-careers model, based on a life course perspective, directly addressing the multiple interfaces between work and family and between men and women as they unfold over time. This approach challenges implicit assumptions and stereotypes about work, careers, and gender that are increasingly outdated. Analysis of the data collected in the Cornell Retirement and Well-Being Study consistently shows the asymmetry between husbands and wives in their distinctive work-family interfaces over the life course. The evidence from our data leads us to believe that what is required are new, more open, and more flexible institutional arrangements for structuring the work-family interface for both men and women at all life course and career stages.

Shin-Kap Han

Papers

A systematic assessment of the empirical support for transaction cost economics

Clocking out : Temporal patterning of retirement

Mimetic Isomorphism and Its Effect on the Audit Services Market

Work and Family Over Time: A Life Course Approach

Tribal regimes in academia: a comparative analysis of market structure across disciplines ☆