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Why do strangers in collectivist societies act prosocially? Previous work indicates that generalized trust (trust in strangers) is necessary for prosocial behavior; however, generalized trust exists at low levels in collectivist societies. Researchers have also argued that without trust among strangers, social order is threatened. Yet, collectivist societies are not characterized by social disorder; therefore, individuals must be acting prosocially. Without generalized trust, how is this possible? In this work I argue that institutional trust (a belief that institutions induce others to act in a trustworthy manner) is responsible for prosociality in collectivist societies, not generalized trust. Does a similar relationship hold in individualist societies? Although some evidence suggests that prosocial behavior is predicated by generalized trust, other evidence indicates that the stronger predictor is institutional trust. All arguments are tested with data from the World Values Survey (WVS) with data from 14 countries. Results from regression analyses are reported. The chapter concludes with implications and directions for future work.

The multidimensional nature of well-being is now widely recognized. However, multidimensional poverty measurement is still an expanding field of research and a consensus about the “best” composite indicator has not yet emerged. In this chapter, we provide an empirical analysis using three existing methodologies: Bourguignon and Chakravarty (2003), Alkire and Foster (2007), and Lemmi (2005); Chiappero Martinetti (2000). We present an empirical study of the convergence and divergence of poverty profiles for children in Uruguay considering the following dimensions: nutritional status, child educational achievement, housing condition, and household income. Our data gather information of 1,185 children attending public schools in Montevideo and the surrounding metropolitan area, and were specially gathered to carry out a multidimensional analysis of poverty.

Our results indicate that the three families of indexes yield very different cardinalizations of poverty. At the same time, the correlation coefficients among the three groups of measures for the generalized headcount ratio also highlight important differences in the children labeled as “more deprived.” For the generalized severity and intensity indexes the correlation coefficients increase significantly suggesting a high level of concordance among the three measures, particularly among the Bourguignon and Chakravarty methodology and the Alkire and Foster one.

This paper seeks to connect changes in the structure of wages at the occupation level to measures of the task content of jobs. We first present a simple model where skills are used to produce tasks, and changes in task prices are the underlying source of change in occupational wages. Using Current Population Survey (CPS) wage data and task measures from the O*NET, we document large changes in both the within and between dimensions of occupational wages over time, and find that these changes are well explained by changes in task prices likely induced by technological change and offshoring.

Purpose: Using GSOEP-PSID the study analyzes the effects of redistribution policy on intergenerational income inequality, poverty intensity, intergenerational income mobility, and dynastic poverty persistence in Germany and the United States.

Methodology: To evaluate the extent and the intensity of dynastic inequality and poverty the paper employs inequality measures and poverty indices. The contribution of a set of human capital and labor market variables on intergenerational income mobility and the risk of dynastic poverty persistence is analyzed with linear and nonlinear regression approaches and a binomial logit model.

Findings: The empirical results partly corroborate that countries with a forced redistribution scheme succeed in reducing income inequality and poverty intensity, but at the expense of intergenerational income persistence and the relative risk of dynastic poverty persistence. In Germany, redistribution policy reduces income inequality and poverty intensity to a greater extent than in the United States, and the equalizing effect of public transfers increases with age. In the United States intergenerational income persistence and the relative risk of dynastic poverty persistence are more pronounced than in Germany. The contribution of gender, educational attainment, and labor market engagement to the intergenerational income mobility and the relative risk of dynastic poverty persistence is country specific and differ by age group.

Research implications: The results call for further research of the interaction of family-life, labor market settings, and social policy in determining the degree of intergenerational income mobility and dynastic poverty persistence.

For half a century, psychologist Albert Bandura has worked to advance a cognitive interactional model of human functioning that emphasizes the role of cognitive and symbolic representations as central processes in human adaptation and change. In his seminal 1977 publication, Bandura emphasized that these representations – visualized actions and outcomes stemming from reflective thought – form the basis from which individuals assess their personal efficacy. An efficacy belief, he contended, is the “conviction that one can successfully execute the behavior required to produce the outcomes” one desires (p. 193). Efficacy beliefs serve as the primary means by which people are able to exercise a measure of control over their lives. During the next two decades, Bandura (1986, 1997) advanced his social cognitive theory, in which people are viewed as self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting, and self-regulating rather than as solely reactive organisms, products of environmental or concealed inner influences. From this agentic perspective, people are seen as contributors to their life circumstances, not just recipients of them. In this way, people are “partial architects of their own destinies” (Bandura, 1997, p. 8).

The methodological discourse of mixed-methods research offers general procedures to combine quantitative and qualitative methods for investigating complex fields of research such as higher education. However, integrating different methods still poses considerable challenges. To move beyond general recommendations for mixed-methods research, this chapter proposes to discuss methodological issues with respect to a particular research domain. Taking current studies on the transition to higher education as an example, the authors first provide an overview of the potentials and limitations of quantitative and qualitative methods in the research domain. Second, they show the need for a conceptual framework grounded in the theory of the research object to guide the integration of different methods and findings. Finally, an example study that investigates transition with regard to the interplay of the individual student and the institutional context serves to illustrate the guiding role of theory. The framework integrates different theoretical perspectives on transition, informs the selection of the research methods, and defines the nexus of the two strands that constitute the mixed-methods design. As the interplay of individual and context is of concern for teaching and learning in general, the example presented may be fruitful for the wider field of higher education research.

In a recent paper entitled “On Lateral Thinking,” Atkinson (2011) argued that Economics has benefited not only from borrowing ideas from other disciplines such as physics (e.g., Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947) or psychology (e.g., the growing importance of behavioral economics) but also from applying ideas that appeared in one subfield of Economics to another domain of Economics. As examples of such a cross-fertilization, Atkinson cites duality theory where cost functions were applied to consumer theory or Harberger's (1962) model of tax incidence that was borrowed from international trade theory. Atkinson in fact cited a sentence from his famous 1970 (Atkinson, 1970) article: “My interest in the question of measuring inequality was originally stimulated by reading an early version of the paper by Rotschild and Stiglitz (1970, 1971)” The same parallelism between uncertainty and inequality had been drawn previously by Serge Kolm in his well-known presentation at the meeting of the International Economic Association in Biarritz, France (see Kolm, 1969), which was inspired by his previous work on uncertainty (Kolm, 1966). Atkinson, however, stressed also the need for care in drawing parallels.

This paper provides a fuller characterization of the analytical upper bounds for American options than has been available to date. We establish properties required of analytical upper bounds without any direct reliance on the exercise boundary. A class of generalized European claims on the same underlying asset is then proposed as upper bounds. This set contains the existing closed form bounds of Margrabe, (1978) and Chen and Yeh (2002) as special cases and allows randomization of the maturity payoff. Owing to the European nature of the bounds, across-strike arbitrage conditions on option prices seem to carry over to the bounds. Among other things, European option spreads may be viewed as ratio positions on the early exercise option. To tighten the upper bound, we propose a quasi-bound that holds as an upper bound for most situations of interest and seems to offer considerable improvement over the currently available closed form bounds. As an approximation, the discounted value of Chen and Yeh's (2002) bound holds some promise. We also discuss implications for parametric and nonparametric empirical option pricing. Sample option quotes for the European (XEO) and the American (OEX) options on the S&P 100 Index appear well behaved with respect to the upper bound properties but the bid–ask spreads are too wide to permit a synthetic short position in the early exercise option.