The Relationship Between Social Leisure and Life Satisfaction: Causality and Policy Implications

Social leisure is generally found to be positively correlated with life satisfaction in the empirical literature. We ask if this association captures a genuine causal effect by using panel data from the GSOEP. Our identification strategy exploits the change in social leisure brought about by retirement, since the latter is an event after which the time investable in (the outside job) relational life increases. We instrument social leisure with various measures of the age cohort specific probability of retirement. With such approach we document that social leisure has a positive and significant effect on life satisfaction. Our findings shed some light on the age-happiness pattern. Policy implications are also discussed.     

农业综合生产自组织功能优化探讨——基于耗散结构理论视角

农业综合生产系统具备耗散结构的基本条件,拥有自组织功能。城市化和工业化进程一定程度上削弱了它的自组织功能,应从系统负熵流的增加、非平衡性的加强、非线性特征的强化和巨涨落的催生等入手,优化农业综合生产的自组织功能。     

浅谈金融危机中加强社会主义核心价值体系建设

由美国次贷危机引发的全球性金融危机是一场经济危机、深度的思想道德危机和社会危机,对我国经济社会发展造成不小的冲击和影响,但同时,又是加强社会主义核心价值体系建设的有利时机。我们要抓住这一战略机遇,通过大众化、生活化、主流化、形象化和制度化的道路,使社会主义核心价值体系基本内容要求转化为我国人民的自觉追求,为应对国际金融危机和建设和谐社会构建强大的共同思想道德基础。     

基于SYS-GMM的中国人口结构变化与经济增长关系研究

本文利用中国29个省份20年的面板数据,探讨了人口结构变化对储蓄、投资和经济增长的影响。我们将人口结构指标引入传统的经济增长模型中,并用固定效应模型和SYS-GMM计量方法分别测算其对储蓄、投资和经济增长的效应。考虑到老年抚养比在经济增长方程的内生性,我们还将滞后30年的就业人数比率作为工具变量来识别老年抚养比对经济增长的因果效应。结果显示老年抚养率对储蓄、投资和经济增长存在显著的正相关。人口增长率对储蓄和投资有着负相关,但对经济增长没有影响。工作年龄人口比率对储蓄率存在负相关,对投资和经济增长存在正向影响但估计的回归系数不显著。在加入其它制度和人口变量之后回归结果依然稳定。     

A study of R2 measure under the accelerated failure time models

For right-censored data, the accelerated failure time (AFT) model is an alternative to the commonly used proportional hazards regression model. It is a linear model for the (log-transformed) outcome of interest, and is particularly useful for censored outcomes that are not time-to-event, such as laboratory measurements. We provide a general and easily computable definition of the R² measure of explained variation under the AFT model for right-censored data. We study its behavior under different censoring scenarios and under different error distributions; in particular, we also study its robustness when the parametric error distribution is misspecified. Based on Monte Carlo investigation results, we recommend the log-normal distribution as a robust error distribution to be used in practice for the parametric AFT model, when the R² measure is of interest. We apply our methodology to an alcohol consumption during pregnancy data set from Ukraine.     

Mildly explosive autoregression with mixing innovations

In this paper, the limit distribution of the least squares estimator for mildly explosive autoregressive models with strong mixing innovations is established, which is shown to be Cauchy as in the iid case. The result is applied to identify the onset and the end of an explosive period of an econometric time series. Simulations and data analysis are also conducted to demonstrate the usefulness of the result.     

Hong Kong: workfare in the world's freest economy

Chan CK. Hong Kong: workfare in the world's freest economy Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: 22–32 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. Workfare was introduced in many countries to suppress welfare dependency and reduce social security expenditures. However, workfare was launched in Hong Kong when there was only a relatively small social security budget and its citizens still strongly adhered to the ideologies of self‐reliance. It was found that workfare has performed several functions in Hong Kong. First, by forcing unemployed claimants to give up benefits, Hong Kong has been able to save on social security expenditures. Second, workfare has combined with Hong Kong's semi‐democratic polity so that extremely stigmatising welfare measures have been implemented. Third, it has pushed poor citizens into the labour market without having any protection over wages and working hours. Thus, the combination of workfare and a semi‐democratic polity has successfully suppressed Hong Kong's welfare demands and strengthened its self‐help spirit. As a result, Hong Kong's minimal social security scheme and its low tax policy have been maintained.     

From Transitional to Permanent Uncertainty: Employability of Middle‐aged Workers in Hong Kong

Since the 1990s, Hong Kong has experienced increasing economic uncertainty. Middle‐aged workers, who often have little formal education and limited skills, have been the first casualties of economic restructuring. Initially, their unemployment was considered transitional. Limited government‐sponsored retraining programs were expected to improve their employability. Subsequent economic crises, however, have undercut the hopes of both workers and policy‐makers. Despite improvements in the job market since the mid‐2000s, the belief that unemployment was transitional has been replaced by a permanent state of uncertainty and consequent anxiety. Flexibility is considered the key to sustaining economic growth, and would relieve the insecurity and anxiety associated with unemployment. Policies have been modified, but they are still based on a narrowly defined concept of individual employability, which consolidates the sense of uncertainty. To address the factors contributing to the perception of permanent uncertainty among middle‐aged workers, we advocate a pragmatic approach that takes reference from the notion of flexicurity to mitigate this sense of uncertainty.     

Hope as a coping resource among parents at risk for child maltreatment

This study investigated hope as a protective factor buffering the relationships between parenting stress and well-being among a sample of parents identified at moderate to high risk for child maltreatment. Two hundred parents were recruited from a nonprofit organization providing secondary and tertiary child maltreatment prevention programs. Results of the analyses showed that parental stress was negatively associated with subjective and emotional well-being. Hope was positively correlated with well-being and negatively associated with parenting stress. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that hope had a significant incremental relationship to well-being and that the negative effects of parenting stress fell below statistical significance. These findings provide preliminary support for hope as a coping resource social workers can target when working with parents in the prevention of child maltreatment.     

Food,Memories, and Identities in Hong Kong

This article adopts a processual and relational approach to study food remembrance and investigates how different ways of appropriating food reveal the politics of identities in Hong Kong. It examines how food memories reveal relationships between the past and the present, reflect epochal transformation, and mark changing identities of various groups of people through new ways of appropriations. It takes the case study of pancai, a special banquet food for the villagers in the New Territories of Hong Kong, to examine the relationships between food and identities. This article investigates how pancai is remembered, popularized, and reinvented with different variations and embodies shifting meanings for the New Territories inhabitants as well as other Hong Kong people in changing socioeconomic and political environments. Pancai has been imbued with multiple layers of significance, involving linkages between local and national, emigration and Chineseness, urbanization and rural heritage, as well as decolonization and identity politics. As identities are by nature negotiable, situational, and fluidic, pancai's multiple layers of meanings correspond to different levels of identities—identities of the New Territories inhabitants, the rest of the Hong Kong people, and the mainland Chinese.