Matthew in History: Interpretation, Influence, and Effects

Reviewed Book: Luz, Ulrich. Matthew in History: Interpretation, Influence, and Effects. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994

Public Transfers and Marital Dissolution

In this paper we analyse determinants of marital dissolution. The focus is on the alleged influence from public transfers, including governmental transfers directed towards divorced families, child allowance, and child support awards. We use a Norwegian panel of 2.800 couples who were married in 1989, together with a broad range of socio-economic variables, including (expected) public and private transfers in case of divorce. The sample is observed over a six-year period, with the purpose of registering marital dissolution. Our findings are consistent with matching models where divorce is explained according to assortative mating hypothesis. We find that the level of transfers has a significantly positive effect on the divorce probability, and that the distribution of transfers in favour of the wife increases the same probability. The fact that internal re-distribution between spouses affects the divorce propensity is consistent with non-unitary family models, but at odds with the predictions from unitary and/or common wealth models.divorce; marital dissolution; empirical modelling

Security by Obfuscating Data Across Non-Adjacent Memory Locations

The bytes that make up a data primitive (e.g., float, integer, etc.) are stored in adjacent bytes and in known order, based on a computer\u27s architecture. Storing data in adjacent bytes is required by the hardware in order to operate on them. Compilers, in an effort to improve cache efficiency, pack primitives together. This packing indirectly communicates the relationship between primitives. When reverse engineering code, an attacker can observe the state of data on the stack. Knowing how the data is structured makes this much easier. The most reliable structuring is knowing how primitives will be structured. This disclosure describes techniques that achieve code security by distributing data across distinct, non-adjacent, randomly-selected memory locations, thereby reducing the accessibility of the data to attackers

Understanding competing motivations for urban agriculture: an analysis of U.S. municipal ordinance adoption

Municipalities are increasingly responding to zoning regulations that act as a barrier to the practice of urban agriculture activities. While there has been some case-study research on municipalities engaging in large urban agriculture policy efforts, a framework for analyzing urban agriculture ordinances on a national scale has not yet been established. This research is an exploratory analysis of the motivations for urban agriculture ordinance adoption utilizing a theoretical framework of neoliberalism to understand the potential for urban agriculture to be used either as a tool to reinforce or alter neoliberal structures. Responses from 34 municipalities throughout the United States that participated in a survey on urban agriculture ordinance adoption were utilized to construct a cluster analysis of cities based on levels of ordinance adoption and motivations for adoption. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) analysis was used to determine differences between clusters on selected socioeconomic variables. The cluster analysis resulted in four clusters. Two clusters were low or average on both motivation and adoption variables. Two clusters had higher scores on either motivation or adoption variables, but differed in types of ordinances adopted and major motivations for adoption. Economic motivations were linked with adoption of commercial urban agriculture ordinances. Cultural and health motivations were linked with non-commercial, retail, and animal urban agriculture ordinances. Clusters with low engagement involved mostly government agencies in drafting ordinances, whereas more engaged clusters relied on government agencies and a variety of community groups in initial stages of ordinance adoption. The clusters that were least engaged in urban agriculture primarily had a Council-Manager form of government, compared to the higher engaged clusters with a Mayor-Council form of government

Late careers and career exits in Norway

We used matched employer-employee data for the period 1992-1997 to analyse the transition from work to early retirement in Norway. We focus on the effect of a new early retirement scheme ("AFP") of which some 60 percent of the population is eligible. We thus observe individuals in two different incentive systems and estimate the reallocation effect between employment and different early retirement, notably AFP and disability pension. There is a substantial drop in employment for the group entitled to AFP. However, while AFP has an increasingly negative effect on the labour supply, there seem to be almost no corresponding reduction in the incidence of disability pension during the period of investigation. Our data includes a broad range of individual, workplace and industry characteristics. We report a relatively high degree of heterogeneity in the retirement behaviour, notably between genders, but also between industries and sectors. Push as well as pull factors are identified. The former appears to be more relevant for the disability pathway, while the latter turns out to be significant when retiring to AFP.early retirement; social security

Assessing Changes in Intergenerational Earnings Mobility

Previous research on changes in intergenerational mobility suggests that the mobility is decreasing over time. One explanation for this pattern is increased cross-sectional income inequality. In contrast to most other OECD countries, the income inequality in Norway has been remarkably stable through large parts of the 1980s and the 1990s, not the least due to a compression of the earnings distribution during the same period. Using longitudinal data for Norwegian children born 1950, - 55, -60, and -65, we find a relatively high degree of earnings mobility. Furthermore, there is no tendency to increasing inequality along this dimension. This finding supports the hypothesis that intergenerational mobility is positively correlated with a compressed income distribution. Quartile father-child earnings transition matrices, together with nonparametric regressions, indicate quite high mobility in the middle of the distribution and somewhat more persistence at the top and bottom. This approach also reveals increased mobility over time for sons, but a less clear picture for daughters.Job; Occupational; and Intergenerational Mobility; Models with Panel Data; Longitudinal Data; Spatial Time Series.

Educational Attainment and Family Background

This paper analyses the effect of aspects of family background, such as family income and parental education, on the educational attainment of persons born from 1967 to 1972. Family income is measured at different periods of a child’s life to separate longterm versus short-term effects of family income on educational choices. We find that permanent income matters to a certain degree, and that family income when the child is 0-6 years old is an important explanatory variable for educational attainment later in a child’s life. We find that short-term credit constraints have only a small effect on educational attainment. Long term factors, such as permanent family income and parental education are much more important for educational attainment than are shortterm credit constraints. Public interventions to alleviate the effects of family background should thus also be targeted at a child's early years, the shaping period for the cognitive and non-cognitive skills important later in life.credit constraints; education; Norway; family background

Has Job Stability Decreased in Norway?

A widespread belief in the popular press is that job stability has declined across Western economies over the last 15 years. However, little support for this is found in the empirical literature. We use an extensive employer–employee data set for Norway to analyse changes in job stability in Norway by first presenting descriptive measures of job stability for manufacturing, the public sector and private services. Both descriptive analyses of tenure, hire and separation rates as well as regression-adjusted measures controlling for changes in demographics and the business cycle, indicate a slight decrease in job stability in Norway driven by increased job separation rates. These changes are not equally distributed across sectors or sub-groups of workers. However, we do not find that this tendency towards less stable jobs led to an increase in job-to-unemployment/out of the labour force; rather it was characterized by more job-to-job changes.Job stability; employer-employee data.

Intergenerational Mobility: Trends Across the Earnings Distribution

The analysis, based on register data for Norwegian cohorts born 1950, 1955, and 1960, shows that the intergenerational earnings mobility is high. Using quantile regression, mobility is found to be lower at the lower end of the earnings distribution than at the upper end. The findings also indicate that mobility increases over time and that the increase seems to be somewhat higher for lower earnings. Finally, we find that the increase in earnings mobility over time has been larger for women than for men.Intergenerational mobility; time trends; quantile regression

Measuring Heterogeneity in the Returns to Education in Norway Using Educational Reforms

The decision to take more education is complex, and is influenced by individual ability, financial constraints, family background, preferences, etc. Such factors, normally unobserved by the researcher, introduce endogeneity and heterogeneity problems into estimating the returns to education. In this paper, these problems are addressed by estimating a comparative advantage model for schooling, in which the returns to education vary at different levels of education. The model requires that instruments must be specified at each level of education, and we suggest that different school reforms in Norway can serve as suitable instruments. In particular, we exploit the staged implementation of a major reform in the comprehensive school system in the 1960s. We find that the returns to education are strongly nonlinear. In particular, we find that the returns to upper secondary school and shorter programs at regional colleges, together with master’s programs at universities, have high returns as measured by wages. Also, we find that the average treatment effect is surprisingly high for medium-length educations (up to two years of college education). This means that increasing the general level of education, which was the intention of the comprehensive school reform of the 1960s and of other school reforms, has the potential to generate a high return in wages, although we do not consider the cost to society. We also find that there is a substantial difference between the average treatment effect and the effect of treatment on the treated for bachelor’s and master’s degrees at universities.Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models; Quantile Regressions; Social Interaction Models (Updated); Analysis of Education