Timing of space: Some thoughts on building economics

The emerging field of building economics is gradually penetrating both professional practice and academic curricula in architectural design. This essay focuses on the contribution of building economics to architectural design. This contribution hinges on the notion of time. Building economics offers a systematic framework for the representation of time. An economic evaluation of a building is in fact impossible without the time-profile of the economic process it contains. This can be perceived as a problem of finding some numbers to “plug in” the prescribed formulae, but it can also be perceived as a valuable framework for design and building in time. The latter perspective is undeniably more challenging and exciting. The scope of architectural design is thereby considerably widened and enriched.     

Capacity building in trauma therapy and trauma research in Bosnia-Herzegovina

When Bosnia-Herzegovina was thrown into war in the summer of 1991, one and a half million people lost their homes and were in flight. It was clear from the beginning that the extent of trauma would be enormous and evident for generations to come.     

Behavioral economics and the economics of Keynes

The aim of this paper is two-fold: it first evaluates some of the psychological insights offered by Keynes in his economic theories, and secondly it weighs up these insights in the light of recent research in behavioral and experimental economics. We found that many of the psychological ideas set forth by Keynes in his economic works, especially in The General Theory, have a defensible behavioral foundation and fit broadly the actual behavior of economic agents in the real world as suggested by recent empirical evidence. As a consequence, we argue that Keynesian economics can benefit from this interaction, especially for issues related to judgment under uncertainty and building solid microfoundations for macroeconomics.     

Illinois's child welfare research agenda: an approach to building consensus for practice-based research

This article presents a consensus-building initiative to develop a statewide research agenda that responds to the needs of Illinois's child welfare community. Researchers conducted this process through a university-community partnership to engage those interested in child welfare services. The process and findings resulted in a living document that will guide child welfare research throughout the state. Findings of the inquiry suggest that the development of best practice models may be one of the most important contributions research can make to practice.     

关于把建筑业发展成天津市国民经济支柱产业的对策研究

一、天津市建筑业具备成为国民经济支柱产业的理论依据和条件1980年4月间,邓小平同志明确指出“从多数资本主义国家看,建筑业是国民经济的三大支柱之一,……是可以为国家增加收入、增加积累的一个重要产业部门。”1992年10月党的十四大再次提出:“振兴建筑业,使之成为国民经济的支柱产业。”十五大报告也明确提出要振兴支柱产业,积极培育国民经济新的增长点。我国即将入世,无论从建筑业自身的生存和发展,还是从其对天津市国民经济的带动作用来看,尽快把建筑业建成真正的支柱产业是迫在眉睫的,而且我们的建筑业也正处于活跃的发展时期,从以下三方面可以阐明:     

Organizational capacity building: addressing a research and practice gap

The purpose of this article is to address the gap between evaluation research, and the practice of capacity building with nonprofits. This study describes a 5-year capacity building initiative with grassroots organizations including a longitudinal evaluation of the implementation and outcomes achieved. Formative processes yielded many lessons that were used to improve the capacity building model of services. The results show that the majority of groups met a priori expectations for participation success. Organizational staff valued technology, consultants, and program funding the most. Increases were found in board membership and perceptions of visibility of the organization were enhanced. Executive directors reported greater awareness of needs and improved management knowledge. These small organizations fill many unmet needs and more capacity building evaluation studies are needed to understand the mechanisms that support their efforts and the impact on their sustainability.     

Integrating research and teaching in social work: building a strong partnership1

In recent years in social work we have increasingly come to address the issue of how to integrate research into practice. Implicit in the research and practice discourse is an assumption that there is an active and reciprocal relationship between research and teaching. In this paper, we question this assumption and after setting the political context, we review research into the relationship between discipline-based research and teaching. We then explore a proposal to redefine knowledge, research and teaching and examine the concept of scholarship. We go on to review some strategies we will be promoting in the UK Higher Education Funding Council's Learning and Teaching Network Support (ltsn) Social Policy and Social Work Subject Centre (SWAP) to support the development of positive linkages between teaching and discipline-based research, specifically on-line possibilities for supporting research mindedness among academics (and students and practitioners). Finally, we end by briefly discussing the equally important integration of pedagogic research into the practice of teaching.     

Personality preferences in laboratory economics experiments

Student volunteers at the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) participated in one of the following one-shot games: a dictator game, an ultimatum game, a trust game, or a prisoner's dilemma game. We find limited support for the importance of personality type for explaining subjects’ decisions. With controls for personality preferences, we find little evidence of behavioral differences between males and females. Furthermore, we conclude that seniority breeds feelings of entitlement—seniors at USNA generally exhibited the least cooperative or other-regarding behavior.     

The economics of short-term leasing

Short-term leasing is an everyday occurrence. Tax savings cannot account for the ubiquity of leasing by temporary users. Monopoly explanations are inconsistent with concurrent leasing and selling markets for perfect substitutes. Leasing economizes upon the costs of detecting, assuring, and maintaining quality, costs of search, and costs of risk-bearing. This view is based on standard economic reasoning and has numerous specific implications.     

The economics of employment protection

Empirical investigation of the labor market consequences of employment protection has mushroomed since Lazear's (1990) pioneering study. Having sketched the theoretical background, we chart the course of the modern empirical literature. We focus mainly on dismissals protection, distinguishing between the themes of employment and unemployment development and labor market dynamics proper. Our discussion of employment and unemployment largely deals with the effect of employment protection on levels of these outcome indicators. We distinguish between overall and compositional effects (e.g., by demographic group and type of contract), between developing and industrialized nations, and identify some key control variables. Our discussion of labor market dynamics focuses on the speed of adjustment issue and on gross flows. It also formalizes the link between analyses of levels of and changes in variables. At all times potential offsets to the adverse effects of employment protection receive consideration.     

On the economics of design

The emerging field of building economics is gradually penetrating both professional practice and academic curricula in architectural design. This essay focuses on the contribution of building economics to architectural design. This contribution hinges on the notion of time. Building economics offers a systematic framework for the representation of time. An economic evaluation of a building is in fact impossible without the time-profile of the economic process it contains. This can be perceived as a problem of finding some numbers to “plug in” the prescribed formulae, but it can also be perceived as a valuable framework for design and building in time. The latter perspective is undeniably more challenging and exciting. The scope of architectural design is thereby considerably widened and enriched.     

The economics of possible selves

This article proposes an economic model of how intentional self-change occurs. People have an array of possible selves. The self-system is multifaceted and dynamic, with different self-representations activated at different times. Comparison between the actual self and the ideal self has important motivational consequences. The response to perceived discrepancy can be shaped toward desired behavioral change. However, self-verification is also an important factor in the individual's motivational system. Self-verification is expected to undermine intentional self-change. Individuals may have an inert area within which they do not attempt self-change. The inert area idea permits both optimal and sub-optimal economic outcomes within the same model.     

The economics of performance management in nonprofit organizations

This article analyzes whether and how private‐sector notions of performance management apply to nonprofit organizations. To this end the author shows that each concept of performance management used in the private sector is based on a specific economic theory of the firm and its environment. Before transferring concepts and tools derived from a certain model of the firm and its environment to nonprofit organizations, one must determine whether the assumptions underlying this model are also adequate for nonprofit organizations. Otherwise, one must first adjust those assumptions and analyze whether the derived concepts and tools are still meaningful in the new context; if not, one must determine how to modify them accordingly. The analysis elaborates on the differences between for‐profit and nonprofit organizations that are important for applying performance management concepts. Moreover, the author discusses the practical implications for the use of balanced scorecards in nonprofits.     

Modelling the economics of gaming in South Africa

This paper considers the application of two models for determining the optimal location and characteristics of a casino in a post-apartheid South Africa. The intention in developing the models was to allow provinces a facility for considering how to maximize the return to the stakeholders in the license award process, namely society at large, as represented by the provincial government, and the casino operator. The Allocation Model works on an estimate of total potential gambling spend and how that may be best distributed amongst a number of casinos. The Profitability model takes the estimated gaming spend from the allocation model and assesses the appropriate size and characteristics of the casino best suited to this level of gaming spend. It can then simulate levels of profitability for different proposed sizes and characteristics of proposed casinos. Together these models represent a powerful assessment mechanism for a country considering the introduction or radical changing of gaming legislation.     

Transaction fee economics in the Ethereum blockchain

We study the economic determinants of transaction fees in the Ethereum blockchain. We estimate an empirical model based on queueing theory and analyze the factors determining the “gas price” (transaction cost per unit of service, “gas”). Using block- and transaction-level data from the Ethereum blockchain, we show that changes in service demand significantly affect the gas price—when there is high block utilization, per-unit fees increase on average, with strong nonlinear effect above 90% utilization. The transaction type is another important factor—larger fraction of regular transactions (direct transfers between users) is associated with higher gas price.