Testing and Applying a Theory of Utility; an attempt to decompose income in compensatory and scarcity rents

Data on income after tax, schooling completed, job held, age, and ‘level of satisfaction’ of 2663 members of the Dutch Consumer Union have been used to estimate regression equations of two types. Type I may be called a specification of a utility function, Type II an ‘earnings function’ (where income after tax was used as earnings). For both types a number of alternatives were estimated both with regard to mathematical shape and with regard to variables included. Defining equitable or justified income differences as differences which do not change the level of satisfaction, a formula for equitable incomes for given combinations of job, schooling and age can be derived from Type I equations. All regression coefficients are found to be lower than the corresponding earnings function coefficients. The latter can then be decomposed into a ‘compensatory’ component and a ‘scarcity rent’ component

On the Origins of Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Sibling Correlations

Promoting entrepreneurship has become an increasingly important part of the policy agenda in many countries. The success of such policies, however, rests in part on the assumption that entrepreneurship outcomes are not fully determined at a young age by factors that are unrelated to current policy. We test this assumption and assess the importance of family background and neighborhood effects as determinants of entrepreneurship, by estimating sibling correlations in entrepreneurship. We find that between 20 and 50 percent of the variance in different entrepreneurial outcomes is explained by factors that siblings share (i.e., family background and neighborhood effects). The average is 28 percent. Hence, entrepreneurship is far less than fully determined at a young age. Our estimates increase only a little when allowing for differential treatment within families by gender and birth order. We then investigate a comprehensive set of mechanisms that explain sibling similarities. Parental entrepreneurship plays a large role in explaining sibling similarities, as do shared genes. We show that neighborhood effects matter, but are rather small, particularly when compared with the overall importance of family factors. Sibling peer effects, and parental income and education matter even less

Monitoring ethnic minorities in the Netherlands

Item does not contain fulltextThe article first summarises the history of ethnic minority policy in the Netherlands and the development of the ‘ethnic minority’ and ‘allochthonous’ categories, which are peculiar in comparative perspective in emphasising socio-economic disadvantage as a constitutive dimension of minority status and in setting the minority question within the broader Dutch political principle of ‘pillarisation’. The article then examines the use of statistics in public policy, in a context where the national census has been discontinued since 1971, focusing more specifically on the case of education, where major statistical efforts have been devoted to identifying patterns of disadvantage and integration. Finally, the article briefly examines current debates on the situation of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands in the context of growing questioning of established Dutch models of minority policy.13 p

Aggregated dynamic demand equations for specialistic-outpatient medical care:(Estimated from a time-series of cross-sections)

In this paper a dynamic model is presented which describes the development of the demand for specialistic medical care in The Netherlands, during the period 1960-1972. The "regionally correlated, time-wise auto-regressive" model is consistently estimated from a time-series of cross-sections, using a modified Aitken estimator. The dependent variables are the number of publicly insured patients referred from general care to specialistic care, and the amount of care consumed per patient referred. As independent variables we took demographic factors, the supply of different levels of medical care and the insurance system. The estimation results show a.o. important substitution possibilities between general and specialistic care, and a significant influence of supply and supply-related variables on the demand for specialistic care.</p

A controlled study of temporal lobe structure volumes and P300 responses in schizophrenic patients with persistent auditory hallucinations

Recent studies of cerebral pathology in patients with schizophrenia have focused on symptomatological and electrophysiological correlates of reduced temporal lobe structure volumes. Volume deficits of the left superior temporal gyrus have been correlated with auditory hallucinations as well as to left-sided P300 amplitude reduction. However, caution is needed to interpret correlational data as evidence of a specific relationship. Therefore, a controlled study was undertaken on schizophrenic patients with and without auditory hallucinations. MRI-defined volumes of the left superior temporal gyrus and other temporal lobe structures were quantified from 3-mm coronal slices in 15 schizophrenic patients with chronic auditory hallucinations (hallucinators), 15 schizophrenic patients without auditory hallucinations (nonhallucinators) and 17 healthy controls. In all subjects a simple oddball paradigm was used to elicit P300 responses at temporal and centro-parietal electrode sites. No evidence was found for volume reductions of temporal lobe structures in the combined patient group compared with controls, or in the hallucinators compared with the nonhallucinators. The patients did show left P300 amplitude reduction compared with controls, particularly in the hallucinator group. Correlations between volumes of left temporal lobe structures and left P300 amplitudes were low and not significant. The results of the present study do not indicate that auditory hallucinations and associated abnormal electrophysiological activity are the consequence of atrophy of localized temporal lobe structures. However, replication in a larger sample of subjects is needed before firm conclusions can be drawn

Human hippocampal neurogenesis drops sharply in children to undetectable levels in adults.

New neurons continue to be generated in the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus of the adult mammalian hippocampus. This process has been linked to learning and memory, stress and exercise, and is thought to be altered in neurological disease. In humans, some studies have suggested that hundreds of new neurons are added to the adult dentate gyrus every day, whereas other studies find many fewer putative new neurons. Despite these discrepancies, it is generally believed that the adult human hippocampus continues to generate new neurons. Here we show that a defined population of progenitor cells does not coalesce in the subgranular zone during human fetal or postnatal development. We also find that the number of proliferating progenitors and young neurons in the dentate gyrus declines sharply during the first year of life and only a few isolated young neurons are observed by 7 and 13 years of age. In adult patients with epilepsy and healthy adults (18-77 years; n = 17 post-mortem samples from controls; n = 12 surgical resection samples from patients with epilepsy), young neurons were not detected in the dentate gyrus. In the monkey (Macaca mulatta) hippocampus, proliferation of neurons in the subgranular zone was found in early postnatal life, but this diminished during juvenile development as neurogenesis decreased. We conclude that recruitment of young neurons to the primate hippocampus decreases rapidly during the first years of life, and that neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus does not continue, or is extremely rare, in adult humans. The early decline in hippocampal neurogenesis raises questions about how the function of the dentate gyrus differs between humans and other species in which adult hippocampal neurogenesis is preserved