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We survey New Zealand firms and document novel facts about their macroeconomic beliefs. There is widespread dispersion in beliefs about past and future macroeconomic conditions, especially inflation. This dispersion in beliefs is consistent with firms' incentives to collect and process information. Using experimental methods, we find that firms update their beliefs in a Bayesian manner when presented with new information about the economy and that changes in their beliefs affect their decisions. Inflation is not generally perceived as being important to business decisions so firms devote few resources to collecting and processing information about inflation. (JEL D22, D83, D84, E31, E52)

Defined by psychologist Tamaki Saito as a period of social isolation in the absence of any other clear mental health issues for a period of six months or longer, hikikomori (social withdrawal) emerged as a condition among Japanese youth in the late 1980s. Used as both a noun to identify those afflicted, as well as describe their condition, the word immediately captured the attention of the Japanese and international public. According to various government and third-party surveys, hikikomori number from approximately 500,000 to two million people. Thus, while hikikomori are understood to struggle with long bouts of loneliness and isolation from their peers and parents, due to constant anxiety over their inability to perform among Japan's competitive capitalist-oriented social expectations, both academics and professionals continue to struggle to comprehend exactly who hikikomori are and how to help them. Based on fieldwork at New Start, a non-profit organization located just outside the city limits of Tokyo that helps hikikomori recover, this article examines the ways residents at New Start navigate this uncertainty and gain moral agency. Drawing from over a dozen interviews with parents, clients, and staff conducted while working as a volunteer at New Start, I focus on three representative trajectories that demonstrate how residents navigate the competing discourses surrounding the clinical and social categories of hikikomori and NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), through which they embark on a journey from economically unproductive recluses, to productive capitalist citizens pursuing their own version of a "nearly normal" life. I argue that the various accomplishments of hikikomori, as individuals and as a social category, which both support existing social relations and provide an alternative mode of fitting within them, is "the work of hikikomori."

Drawing on fieldwork in four condition areas (rare diseases, childbirth, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and Alzheimer's disease), this article shows that patients' organizations' (POs) engagement with knowledge is neither limited to a set of diseases nor restricted to biomedical knowledge. Their work on and with academic and experiential knowledge contributes to an understanding of their conditions and the problems they induce, and to the shaping of the causes they defend. This results in the production of new evidence for grounding research and health policies in their condition areas. The authors propose the notion of "evidence-­‐based activism" to capture the centrality of knowledge activities in contemporary POs.

Drawing on fieldwork in four condition areas (rare diseases, childbirth, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and Alzheimer's disease), this article shows that patients' organizations' (POs) engagement with knowledge is neither limited to a set of diseases nor restricted to biomedical knowledge. Their work on and with academic and experiential knowledge contributes to an understanding of their conditions and the problems they induce, and to the shaping of the causes they defend. This results in the production of new evidence for grounding research and health policies in their condition areas. The authors propose the notion of "evidence-­‐based activism" to capture the centrality of knowledge activities in contemporary POs.

The article considers new tools and forms of digital control, as well as mechanisms of manipulation of behavior of users of digital platforms in the era of "surveillance capitalism". The business model of operation of techno-logical giants is analyzed, based on the retention of the user on the platform by filtering the information provid-ed to him ("filter bubbles"), increasing the time of the user's presence in the network, increasing the number of digital footprints left by him, which make the user "transparent" for the platform and allow to transform the col-lected data into forecast products for increase of incomes of "surveillance capitalists". The article raises the problem of lack of ethical standards of data extraction and use, problems of control over "fate" of provided per-sonal data and violation of privacy, and analyzes psychological hooks, used by technology platforms to keep users online, and possible strategies to resist the power of technology giants by fighting for a "new Internet" and spreading restrictive practices regarding digital media.

The author reveals theoretical approaches to the problem, interprets the views of otherresearchers. The problem of higher educational establishment deadaptation is cleared up in thearticle, interpretation of the phenomenon of teenagers' deadaptation in different spheres ofpsychological-pedagogical science is given. At the modern stage deadaptation is understood as atotality of features and manifestations, which affirm inconsistency of a person's interaction with hisor her environment. And as deadaptation ruins the results, which were achieved in the process ofadaptation, it is necessary in the first place to found out the essence of this phenomenon. Literatureanalysis and practical experience of work in the pedagogical university allow us to determine somecharacteristics of social status of a student of the first years of study. The analysis of different formsof pedagogical work as foe the overcoming of deadaptation manifestations of the future educatorsin higher educational establishment is done. The author analyses the questionering conducted atthe faculty of pre-school education, which allows to affirm that at the beginning of study studentsovercome educational difficulties and aren't very thoughtful as for the perspectives of their futureprofessional activity. In this period great responsibility is on the academic group supervisors. Toprevent the manifestations of deadaptation the supervisors should should create psychologicalcomfort in the group for the students – desirable for students state, affirming harmony in the inner,psychological and social life. To avoid the manifestations of deadaptation of the students-freshmenand in order to accelerate their adaptation, we have created the program for special course for theteachers and supervisors of academic groups

Maximum likelihood estimation is used widely in classical statistics. However, except in a few cases, it does not have a closed form. Furthermore, it takes time to derive the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) owing to the use of iterative methods such as Newton–Raphson. Nonetheless, this estimation method has several advantages, chief among them being the invariance property and asymptotic normality. Based on the first approximation to the solution of the likelihood equation, we obtain an estimator that has the same asymptotic behavior as the MLE for multivariate gamma distribution. The newly proposed estimator, denoted as , is also in closed form as long as the ‐consistent initial estimator is in the closed form. Hence, we develop some closed‐form ‐consistent estimators for multivariate gamma distribution to improve the small‐sample property. is an alternative to MLE and performs better compared to MLE in terms of computation time, especially for large datasets, and stability. For the bivariate gamma distribution, the is over 130 times faster than the MLE, and as the sample size increasing, the is over 200 times faster than the MLE. Owing to the instant calculation of the proposed estimator, it can be used in state–space modeling or real‐time processing models.

This article presents a historical perspective on the "feminization of poverty" by examining policies that affected women in the governmental work programs during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although the programs created problems for capital, they remained consistent with patriarchy, as well as with divisions based on race and class. That is, they limited women's participation to one-sixth of the participants; paid women less than they did men; and permitted women to do only "women's work. "