SUFFERING AND LEGITIMACY

This study aims to discover what sort of consumption culture developed among Yugoslavians due to the fact that in the 1960s and 1970s several thousands of them went to Western Europe as guest workers. By analyzing life interviews and literary works the author comes to the conclusion that while consumption culture had evolved in Yugoslavia much earlier than in any other socialist countries thanks to the returning guest workers, these people also created the ‘culture of suffering’ which emerged in the context of feeling homeless, strange and homesick. All of that also meant that in Yugoslavia the system was partly legitimized by the consumption culture imported by the guest workers.     

How to choose a non-controversial list with k names

Barberà and Coelho (WP 264, CREA-Barcelona Economics, 2007) documented six screening rules associated with the rule of k names that are used by diferent institutions around the world. Here, we study whether these screening rules satisfy stability. A set is said to be a weak Condorcet set à la Gehrlein (Math Soc Sci 10:199–209) if no candidate in this set can be defeated by any candidate from outside the set on the basis of simple majority rule. We say that a screening rule is stable if it always selects a weak Condorcet set whenever such set exists. We show that all of the six procedures which are used in reality do violate stability if the voters do not act strategically. We then show that there are screening rules which satisfy stability. Finally, we provide two results that can explain the widespread use of unstable screening rules.     

A characterization of strategy-proof social choice functions for economies with pure public goods

We characterize strategy-proof social choice functions when individuals have strictly quasi-concave, continuous and satiated utility functions on convex subsets of IR ^m , representing preferences for the provision of m pure public goods. When specialized to the case m=1, these assumptions amount to requiring that preferences are single peaked, and for such a domain there exists a wide class of strategy-proof social choice functions. These were studied by Moulin (1980) under strong additional assumptions. Our first results characterize the complete class, after an appropriate extension of the single-peakedness condition. The new characterization retains the flavour of Moulin's elegant representation theorem. For the general m-dimensional case, previous results have shown that there is no efficient, strategy-proof, nondictatorial social choice function, even within the domain restrictions under consideration (Border and Jordan 1983; Zhou 1991). In fact, Zhou's powerful result indicates that nondictatorial strategy-proof s.c.f.'s will have a range of dimension one. This allows us to conclude with a complete characterization of all strategy-proof s.c.f.'s on IR ^m , because restrictions of preferences from our admissible class to one dimensional subsets satisfy the slightly generalized notion of single-peakedness that is used in our characterization for the case m=1. We feel that a complete knowledge of the class of strategy-proof mechanisms, in this as well as in other contexts, is an important step in the analysis of the trade-offs between strategy-proofness and other performance criteria, like efficiency.This paper was written while both authors were visiting GREMAQ, Université des Sciences Sociales de Toulouse. We are thankful for its hospitality and good research atmosphere. Barberà's work is supported by the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales and by research grant PB89-0294 from the Secretaría de Estado de Universidades e Investigación, Spain. Jackson acknowledges the support of NSF grant SES8921409. We thank Jacques Crémer, Beth Allen, John Weymark and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts.     

Clinical and behavioral evaluation of pathological gambling in Barcelona,Spain

This paper assesses both the clinical characteristics and gambling behavior of 45 pathological gamblers (40 male, 5 female, average age 41) in a psychiatric hospital in Barcelona, Spain. These pathological gamblers tend to have other addictions and psychiatric disorders in addition to their pathological gambling. Suicidal ideation and attempts were one of the most frequent complications with these patients. Slot and fruit machines were found to be the most preferred form of gambling. Loans and crime were frequently used by the gambler to finance his or her gambling. Nevertheless, the gambler is rarely aggessive, and legal problems resulting from serious crimes are the exception. The profile presentes is similar to that found among pathological gamblers in other countries.     

Toolkits for Equity: An Antiracist Framework for Scholarly Publishing

Abstract

Fueled by a recent groundswell of support, scholarly publishing organizations are formalizing their focus on equity and inclusion, yet there is still a lack of effective programs and solutions actually in place. A cross-organizational working group is developing antiracism toolkits (for organizations, for allies, and for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) to transform scholarly publishing workplaces and organizational cultures. The resources, which will be hosted at c4disc.org, provide a common framework for analysis, a shared vocabulary, best practices, and training materials to guide individuals and organizations as they address systemic inequities specific to the scholarly publishing community. Originally planned as a presentation at the NC Serials Conference in March 2020, this article introduces the toolkits and explains why an antiracist framework is essential to transforming scholarly publishing.     

Latin Americans and Caribbeans in Europe: A Cross-Country Analysis

With the beginning of the 21st century, there has been an acceleration of migratory flows from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to Europe. As a result, and despite the negative impact of the economic crisis, 4.6 million Latin American and Caribbean immigrants reside in Europe, half of them in Spain. This article analyses the recent evolution of these migratory flows, their territorial distribution, and their demographic profiles according to the 2011 European census data disseminated by a new tool —the Census Hub— implemented by the European Statistical System. The analysis shows the existence of a high LAC immigrant concentration in Spain and in certain European cities, a marked young and feminized demographic profile, a great variety of educational levels and a different insertion in each European labour market, although many LAC immigrants work in low-skill occupations, being overqualified and underemployed in most of the countries.     

Job‐related stress,social support,and work–family conflict among Mexican workers in a multinational company: A case study of a Korean‐owned,US‐branded former “sweatshop” in Mexico

Due to globalization and outsourcing of commodity production, an estimated 60 million workers are employed in the garment industry by multinational corporations, yet relatively little is known about the work–family tensions experienced by these workers. Building on role stress and job demands–resources theories, this study employed mixed methods to examine job stressors, support, and work–family conflict (WFC) in a sample of 168 Mexican workers in a multinational factory, a rarely studied and underserved population. As hypothesized, results of hierarchical regression analyses indicated that workers experienced high job stress and WFC. Social support from spouses, family, and friends increased the positive association between job stress and WFC, suggesting that culturally relevant obligations increased WFC. This study highlights the need for multinational corporations to implement culturally adaptive, family‐friendly policies. Implications for social workers in multinational work organizations and for future research are discussed.     

A simple solution for spurious regressions

ABSTRACT

The literature on spurious regressions has found that the t-statistic for testing the null of no relationship between two independent variables diverges asymptotically under a wide variety of non stationary data-generating processes for the dependent and explanatory variables. This paper introduces a simple method which guarantees convergence of this t-statistic to a pivotal limit distribution, thus allowing asymptotic inference. This method can be used to distinguish a genuine relationship from a spurious one among integrated processes. We apply the proposed procedure to several pairs of apparently independent integrated variables, and find that our procedure does not find (spurious) significant relationships.     

Relabelling in Bayesian mixture models by pivotal units

Label switching is a well-known and fundamental problem in Bayesian estimation of finite mixture models. It arises when exploring complex posterior distributions by Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, because the likelihood of the model is invariant to the relabelling of mixture components. If the MCMC sampler randomly switches labels, then it is unsuitable for exploring the posterior distributions for component-related parameters. In this paper, a new procedure based on the post-MCMC relabelling of the chains is proposed. The main idea of the method is to perform a clustering technique on the similarity matrix, obtained through the MCMC sample, whose elements are the probabilities that any two units in the observed sample are drawn from the same component. Although it cannot be generalized to any situation, it may be handy in many applications because of its simplicity and very low computational burden.     

A Multi-Exchange Neighborhood for Minimum Makespan Parallel Machine Scheduling Problems

We propose new local search algorithms for minimum makespan parallel machine scheduling problems, which perform multiple exchanges of jobs among machines. Inspired by the work of Thompson and Orlin (1989) on cyclic transfer neighborhood structures, we model multiple exchanges of jobs as special disjoint cycles and paths in a suitably defined improvement graph, by extending definitions and properties introduced in the context of vehicle routing problems (Thompson and Psaraftis, 1993) and of the capacitated minimum spanning tree problem (Ahuja et al., 2001). Several algorithms for searching the neighborhood are suggested.We report the results of a wide computational experimentation, on different families of benchmark instances, performed for the case of identical machines. This problem has been selected as a case study to perform a comparison among the alternative algorithms, and to discover families of instances for which the proposed neighborhood may be promising in practice. Based on the results of the experiments, we can suggest which among the many possible variants of the proposed approaches may be more promising for developing local search algorithms based on multi-exchange moves for related problems. Also, on some families of instances, which are very hard to solve exactly, the most promising multi-exchange algorithms were observed to dominate, in solution quality and in computational time, competitive benchmark heuristics.