Social Functioning of Children and Their Parents: Are They Related?

This study examined whether parents' social support was related to their children's peer acceptance and likability. The moderating role of the parent's and the child's gender was also examined. Father (N = 146-150) and mother (N = 201) reports of social support and peer reports of peer acceptance were obtained from 107 boys and 96 girls (7.92-16.76 years, M = 11.77). Aspects of fathers' and mothers' social support were observed to be differentially correlated with their children's friendships and likability. While fathers' social support was moderately correlated with their children's friendships, mothers' social support was not. The implications of these findings for the role of fathers in children's social functioning are discussed

Productivity Growth in European Railways: Technological Progress,Efficiency Change and Scale Effects

This paper analyzes the performance of the European railway sector in the period of deregulation (1990-2005). Using a stochastic frontier panel data model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity a multiple-output multiple input distance function model is estimated in order to evaluate the sources of productivity growth: technological progress, technical efficiency change and scale effects. The results indicate that technology improvements were by far the most important driver of productivity growth, followed by gains in technical efficiency, and to a lesser extent by exploitation of scale economies. Overall, we find an average productivity growth of 39 per cent within the sample period.European railways, Deregulation, Stochastic frontier analysis,Total factor productivity

European Railway Deregulation: The Influence of Regulatory and Environmental Conditions on Efficiency

The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of regulatory and environmental conditions on technical effciency of European railways. Using a panel data set of 31 railway firms from 22 European countries from 1994 to 2005, a multioutput distance function model, including regulatory and environmental factors, is estimated using stochastic frontier analysis. The results obtained indicate positive and negative effciency effects of different regulatory reforms. Furthermore, estimating models with and without regulatory and environmental factors clearly indicates that the omission of environmental factors, such as network density, substantially changes parameter estimates and, hence, leads to biased estimation results.European railways, technical effciency, stochastic frontier analysis

A tubular protozoan predator: a burrow selectively filled with tubular agglutinated protozoans (Xenophyophorea, Foraminifera) in the abyssal South China Sea

We report the occurrence of an unusual agglutinated protozoan-filled burrow recovered in a box core collected in 1998 from a depth of 2496 m in the South China Sea. The onion-shaped burrow occurring some 8 cm beneath the sediment surface was packed full with specimens of xenophyophoreans and foraminifera dominated by a single genus (Aschemonella) that had been living on the surface of the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo ash layer. This selective scavenging of epibenthic tubular agglutinated protozoans contributes to the patchiness of the benthic fauna on the sea floor. Because the tubular protozoans selectively agglutinate mafic mineral grains from the volcanic ash, two levels of biological scavenging are involved with the redistribution of these volcanic grains