Macau’s Heterotopias: Ruins of St. Paul’s as a Spatial and Temporal Disruption

This article explores and decodes the social experiences of the ruins of St. Paul’s in Macau. The depictions of St. Paul’s as a disruptive social space are elucidated by the concepts of heterotopia, palimpsest and liminality. As a palimpsest, Macau’s ruins comprise a variety of concealed and superimposed semantic layers. One can read the ruins and decipher these semantic tiers. The reading of buildings as palimpsests recognises the paradoxical combination of their durable and transitory nature. St. Paul’s ruins encompass several stratified discourses such as cultural, historical, aesthetic. All of them are deciphered in their multivalent configurations, revealing their overarching heterotopic quality. This article aims to display St. Paul’s ruins as a culturally meaningful urban space of otherness within the ambivalent spatial realm of Macau while unfolding its disruptive nature.     

Cohabitation in Spain: No Longer a Marginal Path to Family Formation

Although many indicators reflect the marked retreat from marriage occurring in Spain since the 1980s, the diffusion of cohabitation has been slow. The confluence of very low and late fertility, latest‐late marriage, and low cohabitation has been largely regarded as defying the predictions of the second demographic transition and has fueled a debate over the distinctiveness of the Mediterranean model of family formation. Comparative analyses based on the Family and Fertility Survey documented the marginal role of cohabitation in Spain and in the rest of southern European countries by the mid‐1990s. In this research, the authors used more recent data from the 2006 Spanish Fertility, Family and Values Survey (N = 5,750) to reveal that cohabitation has spread significantly among younger cohorts and hence can no longer be considered as playing a marginal role in the family formation process.     

Comparing pre-war and forced Ukrainian migrants in Poland: Challenges for the labour market and prospects for integration

Before full-scale war broke out in 2022, over 1 million Ukrainians resided legally in Poland. Within weeks of Russia's aggression, around 1.5 million new Ukrainian forced migrants had arrived, many of whom remain in Poland. As of September 2023, 970,000 Ukrainian refugees were still in Poland, where they enjoyed temporary protection status. This paper analyses data from a 2022 survey of both forcibly displaced and pre-war Ukrainian migrants with the aim of establishing what measures are needed to facilitate the economic integration of the former group. The two cohorts differ in terms of gender, age, family status, ways of seeking employment, employment situation and aspirations. Although 66 per cent of respondents had completed tertiary education, only 30 per cent of the forcibly displaced group had Polish-language skills. The paper recommends strategies for the provision of language education along with solutions to enable the labour market participation of this group and otherwise support their integration.     

Mapping the Field of Donation-Based Crowdfunding for Charitable Causes: Systematic Review and Conceptual Framework

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This study compiles the main findings in the field of academic research on pure donation-based crowdfunding (DCF)...     

Modeling rare events through a pRARMAX process

7 and 8 introduce a power max-autoregressive process, in short pARMAX, as an alternative to heavy tailed ARMA when modeling rare events. In this paper, an extension of pARMAX is considered, by including a random component which makes the model more applicable to real data. We will see conditions under which this new model, here denoted as pRARMAX, has unique stationary distribution and we analyze its extremal behavior. Based on Bortot and Tawn (1998), we derive a threshold-dependent extremal index which is a functional of the coefficient of tail dependence of 14 and 15 which in turn relates with the pRARMAX parameter. In order to fit a pRARMAX model to an observed data series, we present a methodology based on minimizing the Bayes risk in classification theory and analyze this procedure through a simulation study. We illustrate with an application to financial data.     

Moderators of Stress in Salvadoran Refugees: The Role of Social and Personal Resources1

Refugee research has tended to focus exclusively on the mental health consequences of migration with little attention being devoted to factors that facilitate adjustment. Recently, several cross‐cultural researchers have suggested that the growing literature on moderators of stress may elucidate why some migrants experience adverse effects whereas others remain relatively unscathed. This study examines the moderating effects of social and personal resources on the relationship between stress and subjective well‐being in 60 recently‐arrived and 60 established Salvadoran refugees in Canada. The participants completed a questionnaire that included scales pertaining to stress (life events, hassles, migration‐related events), resources (social support, locus of control, self‐esteem) and well‐being (quality of life, life satisfaction). Varying results were found for both groups. For Recent Refugees, personal resources were found to moderate migration stress. In particular, locus of control buffered the relationships between migration stress and quality of life and life satisfaction, whereas self‐esteem buffered the migration stress‐quality of life relation. For Established Refugees, social support and self‐esteem moderated the relationship between life events and life satisfaction. In addition, social support buffered the effects of hassles on quality of life. The findings underscore the relevance of integrating more firmly the study of refugee adjustment with current developments in stress research.     

Satisfaction and Tourism Expenditure Behaviour

In the literature, the quantification of the effect of satisfaction on tourists’ expenditure behaviour has not been extensively studied. This research aims to fill in this gap, providing additional information about this crucial relation by analysing it from a microdata perspective. In particular, the Fuzzy Double-Hurdle model, a new model which combines the well-known Double-Hurdle model and the fuzzy set theory, is suggested and presented, both technically and by means of a real case study. The proposed model gathers the advantages of the Double-Hurdle model and the fuzzy set theory together producing a suitable model for the analysis of censored observations in presence of imprecise data. Specifically, the Double-Hurdle model allows to efficiently estimate the average values of a non-negative, non-normally distributed variable characterised by high frequency of zero values, as tourists’ expenditure can be, considering the two-stages nature of the decision process. On the other end, the inclusion of the fuzzy set theory in the regression model allows to cope with the imprecision of both collected information (i.e. levels of satisfaction) and kind of measurement used (i.e. Liker-type scale). The results will help tourism managers to more accurately evaluate the efficacy of their policies and marketing strategies in enhancing tourists’ satisfaction and, consequently, in increasing the level of spending at the destination.

     

Robust estimation for linear regression with asymmetric errors

The authors propose a new class of robust estimators for the parameters of a regression model in which the distribution of the error terms belongs to a class of exponential families including the log‐gamma distribution. These estimates, which are a natural extension of the MM‐estimates for ordinary regression, may combine simultaneously high asymptotic efficiency and a high breakdown point. The authors prove the consistency and derive the asymptotic normal distribution of these estimates. A Monte Carlo study allows them to assess the efficiency and robustness of these estimates for finite samples.