Notes of a serf woman by M. E. Vasilieva

Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation. Series 1, Volume II, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South. Edited by IRA BERLIN. STEVEN F. MILLER, JOSEPH P. REIDY and LESLIE S. ROWLAND. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1993. xxxvii, 776pp. £60.00 and $79.95. ISBN 0–521–41742–2.

Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti‐Slavery Society. DEBRA GOLD HANSEN. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1993. ix, 231pp. £28.50. ISBN 0–87023–848–5

John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union: A Biography. JOHN NIVEN. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. 1988. xvi, 367 pp. $12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–8071–1858–3.

Thackeray and Slavery. DEBORAH A. THOMAS. Athens: Ohio University Press. 1993. xvii, 245pp. £44. ISBN 0–8214–1038–5.

Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia. Edited by MARTIN A. KLEIN. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. xiv, 220 pp. $40 and $14.95. ISBN 0–299–13750–3 and 0–299–13754–6.

Islanders in the Stream. A History of the Bahamian People. Volume One. From Aboriginal Times to the End of Slavery. MICHEAL CRATON AND GAIL SAUNDERS. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. 1992. xxiii, 455 pp. $60. ISBN 0–8203–1382–3.

Victor Schoelcher et l'abolition de l'esclavage, NELLY SCHMINDT. Paris: Fayard, 1994. 440 pp. 150FF. ISBN 2–213–03058–8.     

Demographic change, macroeconomic conditions, and the murder rate: The case of the United States, 1934–2006

Fluctuations in aggregate crime rates contrary to recent shifts in the age distribution of the U.S. population have cast doubt on the predictive power of the age–crime hypothesis. By examining a longer time horizon, back to the early 1930s, we show that the percentage of the young population is a robust predictor of the observed large swings in the U.S. murder rate over time. However, changes in the misery index—the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates—significantly contribute to explaining changes in the murder rate. This applies, in particular, to those changes that are at odds with the long-run trend of the U.S. age distribution, such as the decline in the murder rate in the latter part of the 1970s or its increase starting around the middle of the 1980s.     

Long range planning of paper and board supplies

Most standard textbooks identify three essential elements of effective corporate planning: an information input of appropriate depth, critical appraisal of the company's relative position and application of advanced evaluation techniques. Extension of the vision period, for long range or strategic planning, will unavoidably introduce further complexities into these constituent routines of corporate planning as well as into the strategic decision making process. The author reviews the long term outlook for paper and board suppliers and users and points out the strategic advantages of these basic materials.     

INFORMATIZATION AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: A POLITICAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE

In recent years, both academic and policy making circles in the UK have shown a growing interest in the potential uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the delivery of government services. Much of the academic literature has been centred around the concept of 'informatization', and it has been suggested that the new technologies are transforming public services. Key theorists in the field of Public Administration have argued that informatization is one of a number of major trends likely to shape public services in the twenty-first century. However, the dominant theoretical approaches within public administration- those rooted in political sciencesuggest that inertia and stability are the norm in the public sector; clearly there is something of a contradiction between these two broad approaches. This paper outlines three political science perspectives that might be used in analysing informatization: the policy networks approach, rational choice and the new institutionalism. Evidence is then drawn from the social security, health care and social care sectors of the British public sector and related to the political science frameworks in order to examine their utility. Not only do these frameworks rightly highlight the incremental nature of change, but they also help to explain important variations in ICT use across the three policy sectors. It is concluded that combining the study of informatization and political science offers a fruitful avenue for future research.     

Modeling Endogenous Mobility in Earnings Determination

ABSTRACT

We evaluate the bias from endogenous job mobility in fixed-effects estimates of worker- and firm-specific earnings heterogeneity using longitudinally linked employer–employee data from the LEHD infrastructure file system of the U.S. Census Bureau. First, we propose two new residual diagnostic tests of the assumption that mobility is exogenous to unmodeled determinants of earnings. Both tests reject exogenous mobility. We relax exogenous mobility by modeling the matched data as an evolving bipartite graph using a Bayesian latent-type framework. Our results suggest that allowing endogenous mobility increases the variation in earnings explained by individual heterogeneity and reduces the proportion due to employer and match effects. To assess external validity, we match our estimates of the wage components to out-of-sample estimates of revenue per worker. The mobility-bias-corrected estimates attribute much more of the variation in revenue per worker to variation in match quality and worker quality than the uncorrected estimates. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

The non-null distributions in anoya

Under the traditional assumptions, any entry in ANOVA interpreted to include all Linear model analyses] is equivalent in disiributien to a quadratic form Q=[μ₁+σ₁Z₁]²+…+ [μ_ν+σ_νZ_ν]²]wherein Z₁..Z_ν are independent standard normal variables. Test statisics in ANOVE are distributed as ratio R of two depenbent such quadretic forms. The non-null distribution of R is a mixture of null distributions; the mixing variable is an easy generalitatlon of the Poisson variable. Fast algorithms yield the power function in both fixed and random effects models in AVOVA to user-specified accuracy.     

On the relative accuracy of certain bootstrap procedures

We show the second-order relative accuracy, on bounded sets, of the Studentized bootstrap, exponentially tilted bootstrap and nonparametric likelihood tilted bootstrap, for means and smooth functions of means. We also consider the relative errors for larger deviations. Our method exploits certain connections between Edgeworth and saddlepoint approximations to simplify the computations.