Sociology and development in the 1990s: Critical challenges and empirical trends

Recent transformations of global economic structures have been accompanied by divergent national, regional, and local patterns of development, including severe socioeconomic crises for many Third World countries. At the same time, established conceptualizations of development processes have been called into question by divergent models of social change, such as those of world systems and postmodernist theorists. These phenomena present major analytical challenges for sociologists specializing in the study of development. New technologies and production processes, changing forms of international dependency, and the appearance of new social actors are among the most important topics for study. We argue that political economy, based on midrange propositions and comparative historical methods, constitutes the most fruitful approach to this task.     

Matrix variate Macdonald distribution

Abstract

In this article, we generalize the univariate Macdonald distribution to the matrix case and give its derivation using matrix variate gamma distribution. We study several properties such as cumulative distribution function, marginal distribution of submatrix, triangular factorization, moment generating function, and expected values of several functions of the Macdonald matrix. Some of these results are expressed in terms of special functions of matrix arguments and zonal polynomials.     

Preschool attendance and school-age profiles: A revision

Data collected from the Uruguayan household survey (ENHA) of year 2006 is used to provide more evidence and revision on the longer-term impact of pre-primary education on subsequent school attendance and accumulated years of education. In order to control for unobserved individual or household characteristics that may affect both the participation in a preschool program and the later educational attainment, we instrumented preschool attendance with average attendance rates by age in each locality. Previous research found a positive effect both on school attendance and accumulated years of education, and this effect magnifies as children grow up. But, till 2006 survey, there's no accurate data available to calculate properly the accumulated years of education a child should have and so the causality between preschool and the outcome accumulated years of education was only approximated. Thus, a major contribution of this paper is that for the first time, ENHA makes possible to work with real data on school grade repetitions (estimate accurately the possible lag in children education) and we find results which are different to previous findings. In sum, though preschool impacts positively on subsequent school attendance, preschool seems not to have an increasing impact on years of education as children grow up if we take into account new data on grade repetition. Also this paper broadens the scope of the previous research adding data on rural areas and taking also into account children who do not live with both biological parents. Spreading out preschool education seems to be a successful policy option in a country with large drop-out rates but to cope with school grade repetition new options should be studied.     

Interaction and effectiveness of corporate e-learning programmes

This study was conducted in a large Mexican organization running a virtual corporate university. It aimed to evaluate students' perceptions of three types of interaction (learner–teacher, learner–content and learner–learner) and their views on the effectiveness of online courses in terms of satisfaction, learning and behaviours. Twenty-six employees who had studied at least one online course within the organization answered an online survey. Four of them were interviewed. Results show that: (1) Learners value their interaction with the content the most. (2) Online learning is generally perceived as an effective method for delivering corporate training. (3) There is no perceived relationship between online interactions and training effectiveness. The findings are limited to the specific context of the participating organization. Further research into online learning in corporate settings is needed to understand training interactions and changes in job performance.     

RELATIVE FACTOR ENDOWMENTS AND INTERNATIONAL PORTFOLIO CHOICE

We present a model of international portfolio choice based on cross‐country differences in relative factor abundance. Countries have varying degrees of similarity in their factor endowment ratios, and are subject to aggregate productivity shocks. Risk‐averse consumers can insure against these shocks by investing their wealth at home and abroad. In a many‐good setup, the change in factor prices after a positive shock in a particular country provides insurance to countries that have dissimilar factor endowment ratios, but is bad news for countries with similar factor endowment ratios, since their incomes will worsen. Therefore countries with similar relative factor endowments have a stronger incentive to invest in one another for insurance purposes than countries with dissimilar endowments. The importance of this effect depends on the size of countries. Empirical evidence linking bilateral international equity investment positions to a proxy for relative factor endowments supports our theory: the similarity of host and source countries in their relative capital–labor ratios has a positive effect on the source country’s investment position in the host country. The effect of similarity is enhanced by the size of host countries.     

Hygiene Wars on the Mercosur Border: Local and National Agency in Uruguaiana (Brazil) and Paso de los Libres (Argentina)

Scholarly attention to the processes of globalization and the construction of regional blocs such as the European Union, NAFTA, and Mercosur has resulted in the relatively widespread belief that borders are in the process of disappearing. Yet, ethnographic studies on political borders have for several years been evincing various redefinitions of border areas comprising new conflicts and mechanisms for strengthening certain barriers between countries. This article attempts to contribute to the discussion of the interplay between nation, state, and border in the Mercosur by analyzing transformations on the Argentinian-Brazilian border. My particular interest is in examining how sociocultural conflicts and negotiations at borders in this region are affecting the construction of new meanings of nationality, and conversely, how new policies (especially "hygienic" barriers) being defined from the politico-economic centers are transforming local populations' everyday lives and experiences. Border populations can be as important in the construction of state and nation as are areas deemed to be central.     

Stability and voting by committees with exit

We study the problem of a society choosing a subset of new members from a finite set of candidates (as in Barberà et al. 1991). However, we explicitly consider the possibility that initial members of the society (founders) may want to leave it if they do not like the resulting new society. We show that, if founders have separable (or additive) preferences, the unique strategy-proof and stable social choice function satisfying founders sovereignty (on the set of candidates) is the one where candidates are chosen unanimously and no founder leaves the society.A previous version of this paper was entitled Voting by Committees with Exit. We are very grateful to the associate editor and two anonymous referees for their detailed suggestions and comments. We also thank Salvador Barberà, Carmen Beviá, Anna Bogomolnaia, Renan Goetz, Matthew Jackson, Howard Petith, Carmelo Rodríguez-Álvarez, James Schummer, and Tayfun Sönmez for their helpful comments and suggestions. The work of D. Berga, G. Bergantiños, and J. Massó is partially supported by Research Grants AGL2001-2333-C02-01, BEC2002–04102-C02-01, and BEC2002-02130 from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, respectively. The work of A. Neme is partially supported by Research Grant 319502 from the Universidad Nacional de San Luis. The work of D. Berga is also partially supported by Research Grant 9101100 from the Universitat de Girona. The work of G. Bergantiños is also partially supported by Research Grant PGIDT00PXI30001PN from the Xunta de Galicia. The work of J. Massó is also partially supported by Research Grant 2001SGR-00162 and the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA from the Generalitat de Catalunya. The paper was partially written while A. Neme was visiting the UAB under a sabbatical fellowship from the Generalitat de Catalunya.     

A method for K-Means seeds generation applied to text mining

In this paper, a methodology is proposed in order to produce a set of seeds later used as a starting point to K-Means-type unsupervised classification algorithms for text mining. Our proposal involves using the eigenvectors obtained from principal component analysis to extract initial seeds, upon appropriate treatment for search of lightly overlapping clusters which are also clearly identified by keywords. This work is motivated by the interest of the authors in the problem of identification of topics and themes previously unknown in short texts. Therefore, in order to validate the goodness of this method, it was applied on a sample of labeled e-mails (NG20) representing a gold standard within the field of text mining. Specifically, some corpora referenced in the literature have been used, configured in accordance to a mix of topics contained in the sample. The proposed method improves on the results of other state-of-the-art methods to which it is compared.