An Eleventh-Century View of Chinese Ethnic Policy: Sima Guang on the Fall of Western Jin

Abstract  At the start of the fourth century, China's Western Jin dynasty (265–317 AD) faced insurrection from non-Chinese ethnic groups that resided as its internal clients. It fell to these barbarian usurpers in 317. Throughout the eleventh century, the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) felt its sovereignty endangered by foreign states to the north. Parallels between the ethnic policies of Western Jin and Northern Song emerge from the representation of Western Jin's dynastic fortunes that the eleventh-century statesman and historian Sima Guang (1019–1086) offered in his famous chronicle, Zizhi tongjian ( A Comprehensive Mirror to Aid Government ). The present article takes that text as its focus. It examines the textual and ideological spin that Sima Guang gave his account of fourth-century ethnic tensions. It argues that his characterisation of the barbarians that threatened Western Jin resonated with his response to eleventh-century foreign relations. And it shows that for Sima Guang the integrity of the Chinese imperial state, and even Chinese identity, was at stake.     

COLLECTION SALES: GOOD OR BAD FOR JOURNALS?

This article discusses the impact of collection sales (i.e., the bundling of several journals for sale by publishers to libraries) on journals. The advent of electronic journal distribution implies that bundling is an efficient sales strategy and can act to extend the reach of a journal. Current arrangements are discussed and shown to lead to tensions between commercial publishers and nonprofit journals. The article argues that nonprofit journals should not necessarily abandon collection sales programs. Rather, nonprofit journals may benefit from withdrawing from commercial publishers which distribute their own for-profit journals, and joining together to be distributed by less commercial publishers who set relatively low prices for their collections. ( JEL D82, L31, L42, L82)     

Attitudes of Managers Who Are More or Less Career Plateaued

This study investigated demographic and attitudinal differences across managers classified as nonplateaued, content plateaued, hierarchically plateaued, or both content and hierarchically plateaued. The results revealed significant demographic differences across the 4 groups on a variety of variables. Managers who were classified as both hierarchically and job content plateaued tended to report less favorable job attitudes than managers who were plateaued for one reason only or managers who were nonplateaued. Managers who were only job content plateaued tended to report less favorable job attitudes than managers who were only hierarchically plateaued.     

Financial Edgework and the Persistence of Rogue Traders

This work explores financial edgework by professional speculative traders as an explanation for the persistence of rogue trading in financial markets. The article joins in the scholarly application of “edgework,” the social psychological study of voluntary risk, to speculative trading. The discussion focuses on the origins and persistence of that subset of behavior wherein the trader knowingly creates the condition in which he or she endangers the brokerage house that employs them and even, at times, threatens the public's perception of the integrity of the securities industry. Going over the edge between risk taking and unauthorized rogue trading is explained by looking at five inducements to escalate risk taking provided in the securities industry. This examination of financial edgework demonstrates how and, to a lesser degree, why rogue trading is a result of the security industry's pursuit of and desire to capitalize upon yet not publicize an occupational culture stressing a “risk‐and‐win” ethos.     

FINANCIAL MARKET VARIABLES DO NOT PREDICT REAL ACTIVITY

The past decade has seen an extensive empirical reassessment of the information content of financial market variables sensitive to monetary policy. Particularly provocative are recent papers suggesting that some interest rates and interest rate spreads contain more information about economic activity than monetary aggregates. This paper reviews important methodological pitfalls in these studies. We then show that none of the commonly employed measures of monetary policy contain incremental information useful in forecasting real economic activity. Two conclusions are possible. Either monetary policy innovations have no significant real effects, or we (collectively) have failed in our efforts to measure monetary policy. ( JEL E52)     

STOCK PRICE EFFECTS OF PERMANENT AND TRANSITORY SHOCKS

This paper exploits the long-run equilibrium relationship between stock prices and dividends, implied by the present value model, to structurally identify a dynamic model that governs the behavior of stock prices. The innovations to the data are dichotomized into those that leave a permanent imprint on both series and those that have only transitory effects. Unlike previous studies, however, we do not impose arbitrary identifying restrictions to decompose the joint process, restrictions that may not be consistent the data. ( JEL C12, C32, E24)     

Energy Conservation and Attitudes toward Technology

An exploratory survey of a small suburban community near LosAngeles investigated the attitudes and values underlying acceptanceof technological applications, examined the relationship ofgeneral attitudes toward technology to conservation attitudesand behavior during the energy crisis of 1973–1974, andcontrasted college students with the surrounding community intheir regard for technology and energy conservation. Two distinctdimensions of attitudes toward technology utility and affect–weredefined and found to relate to belief in the reality of theenergy crisis and preferred solutions, but not to reported conservationbehavior. Moreover, in contrast to popular images, no strongantitechnology sentiment was found among the college sample     

INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR AND BIDDING HETEROGENEITY IN SEALED BID AUCTIONS WHERE THE NUMBER OF BIDDERS IS UNKNOWN

This article uses laboratory data from a series of first‐price (FP) and second‐price (SP) sealed bid auctions in which the number of bidders is unknown to test for possible deviations of individual behavior from theory and study the source of heterogeneity in bidding. In SP auctions we find a substantial amount of coincidence with theory. We observe systematic deviations from risk neutral bidding in FP auctions and show theoretically that these deviations are consistent with risk averse preferences. We find essentially no heterogeneity in bidding in SP auctions where risk preferences and the number of bidders do not affect the optimal bid, while in the FP auctions heterogeneity in bidding persists with experience. We find that heterogeneity in bidding in FP auctions is consistent with heterogeneity in risk preferences, the attempt to count the number of bidders in the auction, and bidder specific noise. (JEL D44, C91)     

Southwest Ethnic Literature of China in English-speaking World---An Interview with Professor Mark Bender of Ohio University,USA

Professor Huang Li conducted an interview with Professor Mark Bender of Ohio Uni-versity in 2013.Their discussion focuses on the translation and propagation of the ethnic literature of Southwest China ...     

DO PRICES LEAD MONEY? A REEXAMINATION OF THE NEUTRALITY HYPOTHESIS

In one class of theoretical models, real epects occur only if changes in money growth are expected to occur in some future period, if expected in the current period, they are neutral. Some empirical models examine the neutrality of expected current money growth and therefore do not directly address the neutrality of expected future growth. This paper develops an empirical model that explicitly incorporates expected future changes in money growth. A reexamination of the rationality, neutrality, and macro-rational expectations hypotheses over a sample of four countries suggests that the use of expected future money growth results in strong rejections of the neutrality hypothesis.