This thesis examines stabilizing mechanisms in social security retirement systems (“SSRS”), especially those purporting to be automatic balancing mechanisms (“ABM”). It develops a consistent approach to identifying whether an ABM is robust, partial or transitory and establishes a...

This article defines standards, discusses the components of standards development, and provides an overview of the use of standards in the credentialing processes of health promotion and education specialists. Credentialing or registering agencies related to health promotion and education in the...

Statistical disclosure control refers to the methodology used in the design of the statistical outputs from a survey for protecting the confidentiality of respondents’ answers. The threat to confidentiality is assumed to come from a hypothetical intruder who has access to these outputs and...

The design effect measures the inflation of the sampling variance of an estimator as a result of the use of a complex sampling scheme. It is usually measured relative to the variance of the estimator under simple random sampling. Many social survey designs employ multi-stage sampling, leading to...

A test of reciprocity is often performed by analysts of social network data. This test corresponds to testing whether a parameter in an exponential family model for the adjacency matrix is zero. The uniformly most powerful unbiased test compares the observed number of mutual relations in the...

This article explores the reasons why GMM estimators of production function parametersare generally found to produce unsatisfactory results. I attribute this finding to the inaccurateconstruction of the variables used in production function analysis. In particular, I suggest that theproblem lies...

Survey sampling textbooks often refer to the Sen-Yates-Grundy variance estimator for use with without-replacement unequal probability designs. This estimator is rarely implemented because of the complexity of determining joint inclusion probabilities. In practice, the variance is usually...

Variance estimation of changes requires estimates of variances and covariances that would be relatively straightforward to make if the sample remained the same from one wave to the next, but this is rarely the case in practice as successive waves are usually different overlapping samples. The...

This paper investigates the effect of previous cohabitation on marital stability among the 1958 British birth cohort. Prospective data from the National Child Development Study are used to investigate the way in which family background factors and early lifecourse experiences, including...

Several studies have shown that at the individual level there exists a negative relationship between age at first birth and completed fertility. Using twin data in order to control for unobserved heterogeneity as possible source of bias, Kohler et al. (2001) showed the significant presence of...