Chinatown 2.0: the difficult flowering of an ethnically themed shopping area

Right in Amsterdam’s picturesque Canal Zone, on and around Zeedijk, Chinese entrepreneurs have carved out a presence in what seems like the local Chinatown. The businessmen have been targeting Asian and non-Asian customers by offering products that – to an extent – can be associated with Asia, China in particular. Since the early 1990s, individual entrepreneurs and their business organisations have campaigned for official acknowledgement of Zeedijk as an ethnic-only district and for governmental support of the enhancement of Chineseness. Following Hackworth and Rekers. [(2005). “Ethnic Packaging and Gentrification. The Case of Four Neighborhoods in Toronto.” Urban Affairs Review 41 (2): 211–236], we argue that this case challenges traditional understandings of ethnic commercial landscapes. In sharp contrast to the current orthodoxy, which would conceive the proliferation of such an ‘ethnic enclave’ as part of a larger process of assimilation, we have approached Amsterdam’s Chinatown first and foremost as a themed economic space: Chinese and other entrepreneurs compete for a share of the market and in doing also for the right to claim the identity of the area. What is the historical development of the Zeedijk area, how did Chinese entrepreneurs and their associations try to boost Chinatown and negotiate public Chineseness, and how did governmental and non-governmental institutional actors respond to those attempts?     

获得感：概念、机制与统计测量

获得感作为一个极具中国特色的本土化概念，近年来得到了越来越多的重视。获得感有一个从顾客满意度到获得感的发展过程，是指个体在获取某种利益之后，内心深处所产生的一系列主观感受，是一种满足和幸福的积极情绪体验，而这种感受要建立在实实在在的获得基础之上，具有主观性、客观性以及可测性等主要特征。基于此，获得感的结构兼具物质根源和心理根源，物质根源是获得感的基础，心理根源是获得感的核心。而获得感的测量方法应该注重自陈式路径，统计测量指标也需要主客观指标相结合。在技术上，研究者可利用自上而下的方法和自下而上的方法确定合理的指标维度，用主观评定法以及因子分析法确定获得感各指标的权重系数。     

Entrenchment in publicly traded family firms: Evidence from the S&P 500

Family involvement in corporate governance through ownership, management, and board membership presents a unique dilemma for understanding the strategic impetus and costs of entrenchment decisions. The presence of shared family ties and the family-centered goals of firm principals call to question the applicability of extant agency arguments regarding the nature and antecedents of managerial entrenchment. Exploring this, we develop and test a model of family firm-specific determinants (i.e., family ownership and family's involvement in management and governance) of entrenchment in publicly traded firms by drawing upon principal-principal agency theory. Findings of the empirical analysis of family owned S&P 500 firms suggest family firms are motivated to entrench managers when doing so supports the pursuit of family-centric goals. However, the extent to which entrenchment supports such goals varies at different levels of family ownership.     

ENTERTAINING MALTHUS: BREAD,CIRCUSES, AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

Motivated by the basic adage that man does not live by bread alone, we offer a theory of historical economic growth and population dynamics where human beings need food to survive, but enjoy other things, too. Our model imposes a Malthusian constraint on food, but introduces a second good to the analysis that affects living standards without affecting population growth. We show that technological change does a good job explaining historical consumption patterns and population dynamics, including the Neolithic Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Great Divergence. Our theory stands in contrast to models that assume a single composite good and a Malthusian constraint. These models generate negligible growth prior to the Industrial Revolution. However, recent revisions to historical data show that historical living standards—though obviously much lower than today's—varied over time and space much more than previously thought. These revisions include updates to Maddison's dataset, which served as the basis for many papers taking long‐run stagnation as a point of departure. This new evidence suggests that the assumption of long‐run stagnation is problematic. Our model shows that when we give theoretical accounting of these new observations the Industrial Revolution is much less puzzling. (JEL B10, I31, J1, N1, O30)     

Vocational Status,Hukou and Housing Migrants in the New Century: Evidence from a Multi-city Study of Housing Inequality

In the 1960s and 1970s, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union experienced an unanticipated stagnation in the process of mortality reduction that was accelerating in the west. This was followed by even starker fluctuations and overall declines in life expectancy during the 1980s and 1990s. We identify statistically the extent to which, since the 1990s, the countries of the post-communist region have converged as a group towards other regional or cross-regional geopolitical blocks, or whether there are now multiple steady-states (‘convergence clubs’) emerging among these countries. We apply a complex convergence club methodology, including a recursive analysis, to data on 30 OECD countries (including 11 post-communist countries) drawn from the Human Mortality Database and spanning the period 1959–2010. We find that, rather than converging uniformly on western life expectancy levels, the post-communist countries have diverged into multiple clubs, with the lowest seemingly stuck in low-level equilibria, while the best performers (e.g. Czech Republic) show signs of catching-up with the leading OECD countries. As the post-communist period has progressed, the group of transition countries themselves has become more heterogeneous and it is noticeable that distinctive gender and age patterns have emerged. We are the first to employ an empirical convergence club methodology to help understand the complex long-run patterns of life expectancy within the post-communist region, one of very few papers to situate such an analysis in the context of the OECD countries, and one of relatively few to interpret the dynamics over the long-term.     

Environmental Justice in the Context of Scientifi Uncertainty: On the Safety of Genetically Modifi Organisms

应对风险特别是科学不确定性所导致的风险，实现和维护环境正义是当今时代的 一个前沿核心议题。转基因生物安全为代表的科学不确定性背景下的环境正义，需要 建立在相应的科学研究基础之上，但在本质上乃是一种社会构建。对转基因生物技术 及其产品等现代科技的研发、应用和推广等活动，应当维护其市场自由，与此同时， 为了公共安全以及社会弱势群体的最大利益，还应当对相关科技活动进行必要的政府 干预和法律规制。     

Closure property of consistently varying random variables based on precise large deviation principles

Let X = {X₁, X₂, …} be a sequence of independent but not necessarily identically distributed random variables, and let η be a counting random variable independent of X. Consider randomly stopped sum S_η = ∑^η_{k = 1}X_k and random maximum S_(η) ? max?{S₀, …, S_η}. Assuming that each X_k belongs to the class of consistently varying distributions, on the basis of the well-known precise large deviation principles, we prove that the distributions of S_η and S_(η) belong to the same class under some mild conditions. Our approach is new and the obtained results are further studies of Kizinevi?, Sprindys, and ?iaulys (2016) and Andrulyt?, Manstavi?ius, and ?iaulys (2017).     

Subsampling-extrapolation bandwidth selection in bivariate kernel density estimation

This paper focuses on bivariate kernel density estimation that bridges the gap between univariate and multivariate applications. We propose a subsampling-extrapolation bandwidth matrix selector that improves the reliability of the conventional cross-validation method. The proposed procedure combines a U-statistic expression of the mean integrated squared error and asymptotic theory, and can be used in both cases of diagonal bandwidth matrix and unconstrained bandwidth matrix. In the subsampling stage, one takes advantage of the reduced variability of estimating the bandwidth matrix at a smaller subsample size m (m < n); in the extrapolation stage, a simple linear extrapolation is used to remove the incurred bias. Simulation studies reveal that the proposed method reduces the variability of the cross-validation method by about 50% and achieves an expected integrated squared error that is up to 30% smaller than that of the benchmark cross-validation. It shows comparable or improved performance compared to other competitors across six distributions in terms of the expected integrated squared error. We prove that the components of the selected bivariate bandwidth matrix have an asymptotic multivariate normal distribution, and also present the relative rate of convergence of the proposed bandwidth selector.