scholarly journals Bribing Behaviour and Sample Selection: Evidence from Post-Socialist Countries and Western Europe

2015 ◽  
Vol 235 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Artjoms Ivlevs ◽  
Timothy Hinks

Summary We study the individual-level determinants of bribing public officials. Particular attention is paid to the issue of respondents’ non-random selection into contact with public officials, which may result in biased estimates. Data come from the 2010 Life in Transition Survey, covering 30 post-socialist and five Western European countries. The results suggest that the elderly tend to be less likely to bribe public officials, while people with higher income and, especially, low trust in public institutions are more likely to bribe. Several determinants of bribery - ethnic minority status, the degree of urbanisation, social trust - are context specific, i.e. they change signs or are statistically significant according to the geographical region or the type of public official. The results show that not accounting for sample selection effects may produce a bias in estimated coefficients.

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Klasa ◽  
Stephanie Galaitsi ◽  
Andrew Wister ◽  
Igor Linkov

AbstractThe care needs for aging adults are increasing burdens on health systems around the world. Efforts minimizing risk to improve quality of life and aging have proven moderately successful, but acute shocks and chronic stressors to an individual’s systemic physical and cognitive functions may accelerate their inevitable degradations. A framework for resilience to the challenges associated with aging is required to complement on-going risk reduction policies, programs and interventions. Studies measuring resilience among the elderly at the individual level have not produced a standard methodology. Moreover, resilience measurements need to incorporate external structural and system-level factors that determine the resources that adults can access while recovering from aging-related adversities. We use the National Academies of Science conceptualization of resilience for natural disasters to frame resilience for aging adults. This enables development of a generalized theory of resilience for different individual and structural contexts and populations, including a specific application to the COVID-19 pandemic.


Author(s):  
Yan Wang ◽  
Feng Hao ◽  
Yunxia Liu

Population change and environmental degradation have become two of the most pressing issues for sustainable development in the contemporary world, while the effect of population aging on pro-environmental behavior remains controversial. In this paper, we examine the effects of individual and population aging on pro-environmental behavior through multilevel analyses of cross-national data from 31 countries. Hierarchical linear models with random intercepts are employed to analyze the data. The findings reveal a positive relationship between aging and pro-environmental behavior. At the individual level, older people are more likely to participate in environmental behavior (b = 0.052, p < 0.001), and at the national level, living in a country with a greater share of older persons encourages individuals to behave sustainably (b = 0.023, p < 0.01). We also found that the elderly are more environmentally active in an aging society. The findings imply that the longevity of human beings may offer opportunities for the improvement of the natural environment.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamad Fahmi ◽  
Nur Afni Panjaitan ◽  
Ibnu Habibie ◽  
Adiatma Y. M. Siregar ◽  
Gilang Amarullah ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Prevalence of depression in Indonesia is estimated at about 3.7% of the total population, although the actual may be higher. Studies worldwide have linked the environment where people live to their mental health status. However, little research is found in Indonesia regarding this link. We examined the association between individuals’ perception towards their neighborhood and their depression symptoms. Methods Social trust was measured at the individual (level 1) and community (level 2) levels based on the Indonesian Family Life Survey 5 (IFLS5) in 2014. Depression was measured using the 10-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale Revised (CESD-R-10) and the scores were transformed into logit form using the Rasch model. Multilevel regression was used to determine correlations. Results Of the total sample of 14,227 respondents in this study, about 19.4% had experienced severe depression symptoms in the past week. Social trust was found to be significantly associated with severe depression symptoms. The weaker the individuals’ social trust towards their neighbourhood, the higher the probability of experiencing severe depression symptoms would be. Conclusions This study shows that social trust is associated with the severity of depression symptoms: the higher the social trust, the lower the probability of having severe depression symptoms is. Depression symptoms may also be attributed to significant differences between communities.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 617-633
Author(s):  
Florian Justwan ◽  
Sarah Fisher

Abstract This article explores the sources of public opinion about territorial disputes. Specifically, it investigates the impact of one particular character trait—social trust—on the policy preferences of Indian citizens in the context of the Sino-Indian dispute over Arunachal Pradesh/South Tibet. We argue that social trust shapes how a citizen thinks about a given territorial dispute and influences which policy options this individual favors in response to another country's claim. Our empirical analysis is based on original survey data collected in the National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT) in January/February 2017. In line with our theoretical expectations, we find that high-trust individuals are: (1) more likely to regard China's claim to Arunachal Pradesh/South Tibet as legitimate; (2) more willing to favor the onset of conflict management; and (3) more supportive of concessions. This article therefore adds to a growing literature examining the individual-level determinants of public opinion in territorial disputes.


2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (11) ◽  
pp. 1508-1534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasin Rofcanin ◽  
Mireia Las Heras ◽  
P Matthijs Bal ◽  
Beatrice IJM Van der Heijden ◽  
Didem Taser Erdogan

In today’s competitive landscape, employees increasingly negotiate idiosyncratic deals (i-deals), referring to personalized work arrangements that address recipients’ unique work needs and preferences. While i-deals unfold in a dyadic context between subordinates and their managers, the consequences of i-deals concern everyone including co-workers and the organization. Focusing on task and development i-deals, we propose a trickle-down model to explore whether and how organizations benefit from i-deals. First, we argue that managers’ task and development i-deals cascade down to their subordinates, leading them to have similar i-deals with downstream consequences for co-workers and the organization. Furthermore, we propose that effective implementation of task and development i-deals are context-specific: we integrate the role of managers’ servant leadership as a boundary condition to explore the association between managers’ and subordinates’ task and development i-deals. We also integrate subordinates’ prosocial motives to explore the association between subordinates’ task and development i-deals and their work outcomes. We draw on work adjustment, social learning and social information processing theories to study our proposed associations. The results of a matched employee–manager dataset collected in the Philippines support our hypothesized model. This study contributes to i-deals research by: (1) testing whether and how task and development i-deals can be mutually beneficial for all the involved parties; and (2) revealing how the context, at the individual level, explains how and when task and development i-deals can best be implemented in workplaces. This study highlights that individualization of HR practices need not be a zero-sum game.


Author(s):  
Nicola Luigi Bragazzi ◽  
Ottavia Guglielmi ◽  
and Sergio Garbarino

Sleep disorders have reached epidemic proportions worldwide, affecting the youth as well as the elderly, crossing the entire lifespan in both developed and developing countries. “Real-life” behavioral (sensor-based), molecular, digital, and epidemiological big data represent a source of an impressive wealth of information that can be exploited in order to advance the field of sleep research. It can be anticipated that big data will have a profound impact, potentially enabling the dissection of differences and oscillations in sleep dynamics and architecture at the individual level (“sleepOMICS”), thus paving the way for a targeted, “one-size-does-not-fit-all” management of sleep disorders (“precision sleep medicine”).


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimiter Toshkov

Attitudes towards vaccination have proven to be a major factor determining the pace of national COVID-19 vaccination campaigns throughout 2021. In Europe, large differences in levels of vaccine hesitancy and refusal have emerged, which are highly correlated with actual vaccination levels. This article explores attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination in 27 European countries based on data from Eurobarometer (May 2021). The statistical analyses show that demographic variables have complex effects on vaccine hesitancy and refusal. Trust in different sources of health-related information has significant effects as well, with people who trust the Internet, social networks and ‘people around’ in particular being much more likely to express vaccine skepticism. As expected, beliefs in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines have large predictive power, but – more interestingly – net of these two beliefs, the effects of trust in Internet, online social networks and people as sources of health information are significantly reduced. This study shows that the effects of demographic, belief-related and other individual-level factors on vaccine hesitancy and refusal are context-specific. Yet, explanations of the differences in vaccine hesitancy across Europe need to consider primarily different levels of trust and vaccine-relevant beliefs, and to a lesser extent their differential effects.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcello Romani-Dias ◽  
Jorge Carneiro ◽  
Aline dos Santos Barbosa

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to deal with the topic internationalization of higher education institutions (IHEI), in terms of the research they engage in. The main motivation for the study is to understand the role of researchers in the internationalization of the institutions in which they work through the academic activities they perform. Based on the assumption that each of the researcher’s internationalization activities leads, to some extent, to a greater internationalization of HEI in which it operates, the following question was proposed: Do researchers’ personal characteristics and academic activities affect the internationalization of their (higher education) institutions? Design/methodology/approach This qualitative study adopted as main methods a review of the literature on internationalization of higher education and in-depth interviews based on a semi-structured script with an intentional sample. A sample of 16 researchers was selected for interview using the snowball technique of sample selection. Findings The paper provides theoretical and empirical insights into the characteristics of researchers that influence the internationalization of HEIs. These include the researchers’ international academic experience; insertion in international collaboration networks; international co-authorship; and experience in international publications. These are the four main factors that emerge at the individual level (researcher) that positively impact IHEI. Originality/value The paper responds to a gap found in the literature on the underestimated role of researchers in the internationalization process of HEIs in which they work.


2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolaus Jackob

AbstractTrust in the media has become an increasingly important issue in communication research. Traditional credibility research and modern media skepticism studies have bred a multiplicity of empirical findings illustrating the attitudes of the recipients toward the mass media, possible reasons for trust or skepticism, and possible consequences of media trust for the individual and society. However, the psychological causes of trust in the media have not attracted much attention in communication research. This is especially true for personality traits such as individual level of interpersonal trust, which, as a global attitude, might be considered as one possible reason for the development of further trust relationships. In this paper it is assumed that the individual level of generalized social trust is one possible reason for the development of trust in the media. It is assumed that people tending to generally trust their fellow humans also express high levels of trust in the media and in other institutions. Based on a representative telephonic survey of the German population, it was found that there are positive correlations between interpersonal trust, trust in the media, and trust in other institutions.


Author(s):  
François Béland

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the question of whether the costs of ambulatory medical care (AMCC) in a universal health care system, such as that in Quebec, are related to household income. Questionnaires completed by 32,000 respondents for the Enquête Santé-Québec, 1987 (ESQ87) were matched with records in the Quebec Medicare system (La Régie d'Assurance-maladie du Québec, RAMQ). Approximately 90 per cent of the individuals were matched. Respondents living in remote regions were excluded from the study since a major portion of medical care in these regions is not reimbursed through fee for service; visits to physicians not on fee for service are not recorded in RAMQ files. At the individual level, the costs of ambulatory medical care over a two-year period decreased slightly with income, but at the household level, costs increased for those with higher incomes since the number of individuals in the households increased with income. These associations disappeared when the age of the respondents was taken into account. State of health is directly related to costs of care. Among health risks, availability of social support decreases costs of AMCC for both children and adults, while unemployment increases costs for adults only. Education of parents is linked with higher levels of costs for children, but AMCC decreases with increased education of adults. Finally, costs are lower for children in larger families compared with those in smaller families. To conclude, income does not affect costs of AMCC in Quebec, although variables associated with income, such as education, unemployment and family size, do have definite effects on costs. The absence of a link between psychological distress and costs for the elderly is a matter of concern since it confirms the difficulty the elderly experience in accessing psychiatric care.


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