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Empirical Justification (empirical + justification)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	50%

Selected Abstracts

Neo-Classical Neo-Populism 25 Years On: Déjà Vu and Déjà Passé.

JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 1-2 2004
Towards a Critique
The Griffin, Khan and Ickowitz argument in favour of redistributive land reform, as a means of eradicating rural poverty, is an updated version of a case made by Griffin 30 years ago, and is here seen as a variant of neo-classical neo-populism. The essential logic presented by GKI is considered and it is argued that the approach is defective in its lack of historical perspective and its deployment of a static approach in a dynamic context: these defects manifested in its ignoring of the processes associated with capitalist transformation. It is further argued that its logical foundation is the neo-classical construct of perfect competition, which is without historical basis; its empirical justification is a postulated inverse relationship between land productivity and size of holding, supposedly true of all places and all times, but which is swept away by the development of capitalism in agriculture; and its social specification, in failing to capture the existence of differentiated peasantries, ignores the actual class structure of the countryside. [source]

Practitioner Review: The effectiveness of systemic family therapy for children and adolescents

THE JOURNAL OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY AND ALLIED DISCIPLINES, Issue 5 2002
David Cottrell
Background: Systemic family therapy has become a widely used intervention in child and adolescent mental health services over the last twenty years. Methods: This paper reviews the development of systemic family therapy, briefly describes the theory and techniques associated with the most prominent contemporary strands of systemic practice, and examines the empirical justification for using systemic family therapies with children and adolescents. Results: There is a paucity of well-designed randomised controlled trials of systemic therapies with children and adolescents and those trials that do exist evaluate older structural and strategic therapies. Methodological limitations of existing research include the use of unrepresentative participants, small sample sizes and wide age ranges. There is a lack of credible no-treatment or alternative treatment controls, tests of clinical as opposed to statistical significance, and conceptually relevant outcome measures that examine underlying interactional mechanisms. The term `family therapy' encompasses a wide range of interventions and it is not always clear what treatment intervention has been delivered. Nevertheless, there is good evidence for the effectiveness of systemic family therapies in the treatment of conduct disorders, substance misuse and eating disorders, and some support for their use as second-line treatments in depression and chronic illness. Conclusions: Systemic family therapy is an effective intervention for children and adolescents but further well-designed outcome studies are needed using clearly specified, manualised forms of treatment and conceptually relevant outcome measures. [source]

Interfirm Innovation under Uncertainty: Empirical Evidence for Strategic Knowledge Partitioning,

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 5 2008
Jaegul Lee
This paper analyzes how uncertainty and life-cycle effects condition the knowledge boundary between assemblers and suppliers in interfirm product development. Patents associated with automotive emission control technologies for both assemblers and suppliers are categorized as architectural or component innovations, and technology-forcing regulations imposed by the government on the auto industry from 1970 to 1998 are used to define periods of high and low uncertainty. Results confirm that suppliers dominate component innovation whereas assemblers lead on architectural innovation. More importantly, when facing uncertainty firms adjust their knowledge boundary by increasing the knowledge overlap with their supply-chain collaborators. Suppliers clearly expand their knowledge base relatively more into architectural knowledge during such periods. But assemblers' greater emphasis on component innovation in periods of greater uncertainty is only true as a relative deviation from an overall trend toward increasing component innovation over time. This trend results from an observed life-cycle effect, whereby architectural innovation dominates before the emergence of a dominant design, with component innovation taking the lead afterward. Thus, for assemblers life-cycle effects may dominate over task uncertainty in determining relative effort in component versus architectural innovation. This work extends research on strategic interfirm knowledge partitioning as well as on the information-processing view of product development. First, it provides a large-scale empirical justification for the claim that firms' knowledge boundaries need to extend beyond their task boundaries. Further, it implies that overlaps in knowledge domains between an assembler and suppliers are particularly important for projects involving new technologies. Second, it offers a dynamic view of knowledge partitioning, showing how architectural knowledge prevails in the early phase of the product life cycle whereas component knowledge dominates the later stages. Yet the importance of life-cycle effects versus task uncertainty in conditioning knowledge boundaries is different for assemblers and suppliers, with the former dominating for assemblers and the latter more influential for suppliers. Finally, it supports the idea that architectural and component knowledge are critical elements in the alignment of cognitive frameworks between assemblers and suppliers and thus are key for information-exchange effectiveness and resolution of task uncertainties in interfirm innovation. [source]

EFFECTS OF A CHILD'S DISABILITY ON AFFECTED FEMALE'S LABOUR SUPPLY IN AUSTRALIA

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC PAPERS, Issue 3 2010
ZENG-HUA LU
Australia has experienced a growing rate of child disability, with the rate of 3.7 per cent in 1998 increasing to 4.3 per cent in 2003 for children aged under four years and from 9.5 per cent to 10 per cent for children aged five to 14 years in the same period. However, surprisingly no study has examined the economic effects of child disability in the Australian context. This paper attempts to quantify the link between a child's disability and the work behaviour of the female in the affected family. Our findings provide empirical justifications for the current policy linking the severity level of child disability to the assessment of eligibility for Carer Payment (Child). We also found that child disability has different impacts on the labour market activities of married women and non-married women. It appears that child disability imposes a greater hardship on non-married women than on married women in terms of work choice decision. Once non-married women manage to enter the labour force, they may have to stay on to work as usual even if they have a disabled child, because they may not have other family members to turn to for help as married women do. [source]