Potential roles of small and linear habitat fragments in satoyama landscapes for conservation of grassland plant species

By comparing with the historic semi-natural grassland and woodland vegetation data compiled in the 1970s and 1980s, we aimed to reveal potential roles of small and linear habitat fragments remaining in the urbanized satoyama landscape (i.e., agricultural landscape) in Japan for conservation of grassland plant species. TWINSPAN cluster analysis differentiated the current vegetation from historic one. Current vegetation of Miscanthus grassland was classified into two different groups and one of the two was equivalent to current understory vegetation of fragmented woodland. The linear woodland edge vegetation along the roads was classified into one group and separated from the other current vegetation groups. The current vegetation groups were characterized by higher richness of exotic species than historic vegetation groups. Detrended correspondence analysis (DCA) revealed that there were no groups of current vegetation that is equivalent to historic woodland understory vegetation. The vegetation quality of the current group of Miscanthus grassland and secondary woodland remaining on urban public properties, and the group of linear roadside vegetation were almost equivalent to that of historic semi-natural grassland. Both of the small and linear habitat fragments might have functioned as habitats for grassland species under regular mowing management. Although small and linear habitat fragments would not be sufficient for sustaining grassland populations in the future, these habitats can serve as key reservoirs for grassland species recovery in the conservation and restoration of grassland communities in the urbanized satoyama landscape.     

Strategy-proofness versus efficiency on the Cobb-Douglas domain of exchange economies

We study the optimal design of an organization in which a team of fallible individuals with heterogeneous abilities collectively decides whether to accept or reject projects. Conventional wisdom tells us that the opinion of those individuals with better decision-making abilities should be given a “larger” weight in the decision. We formalize this intuition in a sequential evaluation process and provide specific ways to characterize the optimal decision weights, as well as demonstrate that the magnitude of the weights depends on the relative abilities of the decision-makers, as well as where the decision-makers are placed in the project evaluation sequence.     

An axiomatic approach to intergenerational equity

We present a set of axioms in order to capture the concept of equity among an infinite number of generations. There are two ethical considerations: one is to treat every generation equally and the other is to respect distributive fairness among generations. We find two opposite results. In Theorem 1, we show that there exists a preference ordering satisfying anonymity, strong distributive fairness semiconvexity, and strong monotonicity. However, in Theorem 2, we show that there exists no binary relation satisfying anonymity, distributive fairness semiconvexity, and sup norm continuity. We also clarify logical relations between these axioms and non-dictatorship axioms. Received: 30 August 2000/Accepted: 18 March 2002 This paper is based on Chapt. 4 of my Masters Thesis [15] submitted to Kobe University, and won the Kanematsu Fellowship from the Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration of Kobe University in May 2001. I am grateful to Jun Iritani for helpful discussions and encouragement, two anonymous referees of this journal, three anonymous referees of the Kanematsu Fellowship, Eiichi Miyagawa, Noritsugu Nakanishi, Nguyen Huu Phuc, Hiroo Sasaki, Koji Shimomura, William Thomson, and Toyoaki Washida for detailed comments. I also thank participants at the spring meeting of Japanese Economic Association at Yokohama City University in May 2000, at the annual meeting of the Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies in Tsukuba in September 2000, and at the Kanematsu Fellowship Seminar at Kobe University in May 2001 for valuable comments.     

南京国民政府时期的陆军大学——以其组织结构与教学内容改革以及兵学研究院为探究对象

南京国民政府时期的陆军大学负责人杨杰积极参与该校运营,如亲自监督实地演习,积极研究军事战略,进行改革以提高学术水平,附设兵学研究院,将优秀毕业生留校继续深造,部分人被派往欧美留学,录用优秀人才来校任教,等等。其结果是,陆军大学的人才质量上乘。这些人才在以后的抗日战争中发挥了重要作用。     

Dichotomous preferences and the possibility of Arrovian social choice

Consider an individual whose judgments are always based on a fundamental criterion such as a political ideology or a religious doctrine. In a choice situation, he always prefers any alternative that is compatible with the criterion to any that is not. When individuals are allowed to have preference spaces restricted in this manner, we investigate Arrow-consistent domains. We observe that a diversity of attitudes is essential in order to escape an Arrovian impossibility.This paper received the Kanematsu Fellowship from RIEB, Kobe University in May 2002. We are much indebted to two anonymous referees of this journal, three anonymous referees of the Kanematsu Fellowship, Jun Iritani, William Thomson, and John Weymark for helpful comments. We also thank Takashi Kamihigashi, Tetsuya Kishimoto, Ryo-ichi Nagahisa, Hiroaki Nagatani, Tadashi Sekiguchi, Koji Shimomura, Tomoichi Shinotsuka, Koichi Suga, Makoto Tanaka, Ken Urai, and participants at the Kobe-Osaka Joint Seminar in Mathematical Economics at Osaka University in March 2001, the meeting of the Japanese Economic Association at Hiroshima Syudo University in May 2001, the Far Eastern Meeting of the Econometric Society in Kobe in July 2001, the Seventh Decentralization Conference at Waseda University in October 2001, the Sixth International Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare at Caltech in July 2002 for valuable suggestions. The first version was written while we were graduate students in Economics at Kobe University.

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Intergenerational equity and an explicit construction of welfare criteria

Ranking infinite utility streams includes many impossibility results, most involving certain Pareto, anonymity, or continuity requirements. We introduce the concept of the future agreement extension, a method that explicitly extends orderings on finite time horizons to an infinite time horizon. The future agreement extension of the given orderings is quasi-transitive, complete, and pairwisely continuous. Furthermore, its asymmetric part is larger than that of any other pairwisely continuous extension of the orderings. In case of anonymous and strongly Paretian orderings, their future agreement extension is variable step anonymous and strongly Paretian. Characterizations of the future agreement extensions of the utilitarian and leximin orderings are obtained as applications.     

Estimation of time-varying coefficient dynamic panel data models

In this paper, we consider dynamic panel data models where the autoregressive parameter changes over time. We propose the GMM and ML estimators for this model. We conduct Monte Carlo simulation to compare the performance of these two estimators. The simulation results show that the ML estimator outperforms the GMM estimator.