Does Social Capital Make You Generous?*

Objectives. This article tests the hypothesis that social capital—measured in terms of civic group involvement, social and racial trust, and political engagement—leads to charitable behavior by individuals. Methods. I introduce measures of the “social capital elasticity of giving,” which facilitate comparisons between the effects on charity of different social capital types. Using data from the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, I estimate these elasticities with tobit regression models. Results. I find strong links between changes in social capital stocks and changes in giving levels. Furthermore, I find that different social capital types have differing levels of impact on giving. Conclusions. Charitable giving appears to be a beneficial consequence of some types of social capital.     

Introducing audio-vision into evidence: the impact of audio recordings and their technical limitations in police use of force cases

ABSTRACT

This article explores the technical limitations of audio recordings and how those limitations impact the reliability of sound evidence in police use of force cases. In audiovisual recordings, audio is often assumed neutral, redundant or to have the same limitations as its visual counterpart. Bringing together film theorist Michel Chion’s concept of audio-vision and the technical specifications of mobile audio recording, this article highlights how design priorities and compression processes can influence the way sound evidence is perceived. By failing to acknowledge audio recordings as distinct from their visual counterparts, they are rendered invisible and are therefore under scrutinized throughout legal processes. This neglect becomes notably problematic in cases of police use of force where audio/visual recordings often work to bolster the already privileged officer testimony.     

Adaptive learning,adaptive utility,and rational behavior in a repeated prisoner's dilemma

Two dimensions of learning are explored in a repeated prisoner's dilemma experiment. Subject update their perceptions of the true model of their opponent's behavior. Subjects also update their beliefs Kraft Funds at the Fuqua School of Business, helpful comments by Robert Axelrod, Michael Cohen, Fred Feinberg, J. Keith Murnighan, Kip Viscusi, Bob Winkler, and two anonymous referees, and the programming assistance of Oris Stuart and Michael Guiry.     

Adaptive sampling without replacement of clusters

In a common form of adaptive cluster sampling, an initial sample of units is selected by random sampling without replacement and, whenever the observed value of the unit is sufficiently high, its neighboring units are added to the sample, with the process of adding neighbors repeated if any of the added units are also high valued. In this way, an initial selection of a high-valued unit results in the addition of the entire network of surrounding high-valued units and some low-valued “edge” units where sampling stops. Repeat selections can occur when more than one initially selected unit is in the same network or when an edge unit is shared by more than one added network. Adaptive sampling without replacement of networks avoids some of this repeat selection by sequentially selecting initial sample units only from the part of the population not already in any selected network. The design proposed in this paper carries this step further by selecting initial units only from the population, exclusive of any previously selected networks or edge units.     

Testing for Circular Reflective Symmetry about a Known Median Axis

Circular data arise in many contexts, a particularly rich source being animal orientation experiments. Often, in the analysis of such data, a fundamental question of scientific interest is whether the underlying distribution is reflectively symmetric about some specific axis. In this paper, the situation in which the axis of interest is known to be a median axis is considered and a simple, asymptotically distribution- free test for circular reflective symmetry against skew alternatives is developed. The results from a simulation study lead to a testing strategy incorporating the new test and the circular analogue of the modified runs test of Modarres & Gastwirth (1996). The application of the testing strategy is illustrated using circular data arising from two animal orientation experiments.     

符号正义与公共行政 ——基于语言游戏的正义视角

公共行政是正义研究的重要领域。传统理论多采用罗尔斯、诺齐克和沃尔泽等人为正义提供的客观标准。但这些标准不仅在理论上相互冲突,而且在公共行政的实践中也常常会导致模棱两可的判断。本研究旨在提出一种符号正义的观念,来指导当代公共行政的理论与实践。这种观念认为正义并不存在中立客观的标准,而是被群体共享的信念和实践所建构。研究者只有将正义置于特定语言游戏的背景中,才能真正理解其发生和运作。因为和正义相关的不同语言游戏之间只存在家族相似性,所以公共行政必须面对相互冲突的复杂环境。符号正义的观念能够为这种公共行政问题的复杂性提供必不可少的分析框架。     

Toward Probabilistic Prediction of Flash Flood Human Impacts

This article focuses on conceptual and methodological developments allowing the integration of physical and social dynamics leading to model forecasts of circumstance‐specific human losses during a flash flood. To reach this objective, a random forest classifier is applied to assess the likelihood of fatality occurrence for a given circumstance as a function of representative indicators. Here, vehicle‐related circumstance is chosen as the literature indicates that most fatalities from flash flooding fall in this category. A database of flash flood events, with and without human losses from 2001 to 2011 in the United States, is supplemented with other variables describing the storm event, the spatial distribution of the sensitive characteristics of the exposed population, and built environment at the county level. The catastrophic flash floods of May 2015 in the states of Texas and Oklahoma are used as a case study to map the dynamics of the estimated probabilistic human risk on a daily scale. The results indicate the importance of time‐ and space‐dependent human vulnerability and risk assessment for short‐fuse flood events. The need for more systematic human impact data collection is also highlighted to advance impact‐based predictive models for flash flood casualties using machine‐learning approaches in the future.     

Führung in Familienunternehmen: Besonderheiten der Entscheidungsfindung und Verhaltenssteuerung und deren Auswirkung auf den Unternehmenserfolg

This paper draws on a survey design to investigate whether family ownership and leadership have an influence on the decision-facilitating and decision-influencing roles of management control. Moreover, we investigate whether the more intuitive decision making in family firms which is often said to be caused by a lack of professionalism, is indeed a disadvantage. The results indicate significant differences in the use of management controls between family firms and non-family firms. However, in contrast to the prevailing view in literature, the performance of family firms is not affected negatively by their specific way of making decisions and by their more centralized management style. According to our data, the prevailing characterization of family firms as being less professionally managed seems questionable.