Brief work with parents of infants

Book Synopsis. This volume is the result of over twenty years of therapeutic interventions with families within the Tavistock Clinic's Under Fives Service. It describes in detail the process of understanding young children's communications and behaviour and the dynamics of family relationships within the consulting room in a lively, accessible style. It covers common themes in work with young children such as disruptive, angry behaviour, separation and sleep difficulties, and problems in the parent/couple relationship. This book is essential reading for all early years professionals hoping to gain a greater understanding of the technique, observational skills and theory which underlie a psychodynamic approach to work with the under fives

Estimating expenditure impacts without expenditure data using asset proxies

When asset indices are used in regressions the coefficients obtained are typically difficult to interpret. We show how lower bounds on expenditure effects can be extracted, if the relationship between the assets and expenditure can be calibrated on an auxiliary data set.asset index, proxy variables, attenuation, obesity

Dissecting post-apartheid labour market developments: Decomposing a discrete choice model while dealing with unobservables

The abolition of apartheid should have improved the employment prospects of black South Africans. The reality seems to have been different, with rising unemployment rates. Disentangling the real trends from changes in measurement and sampling design has proved to be difficult. We tackle this issue by means of an new methodology for decomposing changes in a proportion. Our approach is based on a methodology presented by Lemieux for continuous variables. In particular we show how we can construct counterfactual data at the individual level controlling for unobservable effects. We show that this methodology has many attractive features when compared to other approaches available. In particular it lends itself to graphical analyses. We use this methodology to explore changes in the proportion of African men being employed, unemployed and not economically active in South Africa in the post-apartheid period. Our results suggest that changes in the characteristics of these men have made them more employable over time, but that the propensity to be employed has declined. One might say that the human and social capital of these men has improved, but that the returns on that capital have declined. The net effect has been to leave measured employment more or less static. Changes in their characteristics and in their propensity to be economically active have both worked towards increasing the participation rate. As a consequence unemployment has risen over time. The analysis confirms that there are important measurement changes between different national surveys.decomposition, discrete choice models, South Africa, employment, unemployment, participation

Lazy Rotten Sons? Relatedness, gender and the intra-household allocation of work and leisure in South Africa

We investigate the balance between work (including home production), leisure and personal care (chiefly sleep) within South African households. We use the South African time use survey which enables us to obtain a better measure of the division of total labour (paid and unpaid) within South African households than previous studies have been able to. Furthermore we construct a measure of "genetic" relatedness between the respondent and other members of the household. We find that women that are more closely related to other household members do more work and enjoy less leisure than more peripheral individuals. Single men, by contrast, seem to do less work and enjoy more leisure if they are more closely related to other household members. Our findings are not compatible with the unitary model of the household. They suggest that men extract extra leisure because of the anticipated altruism shown by women.altruism, genetic relatedness, Hamilton’s rule, intra-household allocation, rotten kid theorem, time use

Nonparametric estimation when income is reported in bands and at points

We show how to estimate kernel density functions of distributions in which some of the responses are provided in brackets, by inverse probability weighting. We consider two cases, one where the data are CAR and where the data are not CAR. We show how the selection probabilities can be estimated by means of the EM algorithm without specifying a parametric distribution function for the variable. A Monte Carlo experiment shows that this procedure estimates the selection parameters fairly precisely. We apply these techniques to earnings data from South Africa’s first post-apartheid nationally representative survey, the 1994 October Household Survey.coarsening, bracket responses, EM algorithm, inverse probability weighting

On the cycle class map for zero-cycles over local fields

We study the Chow group of zero-cycles of smooth projective varieties over local and strictly local fields. We prove in particular the injectivity of the cycle class map to integral l-adic cohomology for a large class of surfaces with positive geometric genus, over local fields of residue characteristic different from l. The same statement holds for semistable K3 surfaces defined over C((t)), but does not hold in general for surfaces over strictly local fields.Comment: 37 pages (with an appendix by Spencer Bloch); bibliography updated, final versio

On the integral Hodge conjecture for real varieties, I

We formulate the "real integral Hodge conjecture", a version of the integral Hodge conjecture for real varieties, and raise the question of its validity for cycles of dimension 1 on uniruled and Calabi-Yau threefolds and on rationally connected varieties. We relate it to the problem of determining the image of the Borel-Haefliger cycle class map for 1-cycles, with the problem of deciding whether a real variety with no real point contains a curve of even geometric genus and with the problem of computing the torsion of the Chow group of 1-cycles of real threefolds. New results about these problems are obtained along the way.Comment: 67 pages; v2: minor modifications; v3: Section 1.1.3 slightly expanded, final versio

On the fibration method for zero-cycles and rational points

Conjectures on the existence of zero-cycles on arbitrary smooth projective varieties over number fields were proposed by Colliot-Th\'el\`ene, Sansuc, Kato and Saito in the 1980's. We prove that these conjectures are compatible with fibrations, for fibrations into rationally connected varieties over a curve. In particular, they hold for the total space of families of homogeneous spaces of linear groups with connected geometric stabilisers. We prove the analogous result for rational points, conditionally on a conjecture on locally split values of polynomials which a recent work of Matthiesen establishes in the case of linear polynomials over the rationals.Comment: 54 pages; v3: minor updates, added Remark 9.12(ii), v4: improved exposition, final versio