The behavioural wedge

When nations fail to agree, can individual citizens make a difference? The third of our post-Copenhagen features is by Jonathan Gilligan, Thomas Dietz, Gerald T. Gardner, Paul C. Stern , and Michael P. Vandenbergh . They look at the effects that voluntary actions by individuals can have, and at the policies that can best encourage such actions.     

Home prices and the 2008 presidential election: Evidence from state level data

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of housing prices in the outcome of the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Based on data for the 50 states, this study postulates a multivariate model in which the impact of home values is exposed while controlling for other explanatory factors might have exerted independent effects on the Democratic victory. Results of estimation indicate a significant inverse effect of property price appreciation on Democratic votes.     

Knowledge and Identity: A Review

This paper reviews the literature in a number of areas that converge upon the theme of the role of knowledge within professional identity. Within knowledge transfer literature the individual perspective is underdeveloped, and this paper seeks to contribute by exploring the function of knowledge within an individual's professional identity, thus unfolding a theoretical connection between the literatures of knowledge and identity. Its central argument concurs with Szulanski's notion of ‘internal stickiness’ as a barrier to knowledge transfer but extends this hypothesis into the psychological ownership of knowledge and to the idea of ‘possessiveness’. The paper argues that the value of self‐categorized knowledge places the latter within the individual's cognitive structure of their identity. It offers up the idea of valued knowledge to the knowledge transfer domain and suggests that feelings of possessiveness towards knowledge may intervene in the willingness of an individual to disclose knowledge in a knowledge transfer process.     

Trauma and the effects of violence exposure and abuse on children: A review of the literature

A number of studies examining violence exposure in the passeveral years have been successful in linking physical abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and community violence exposure to a wide variety of physiological, emotional, and behavioral problems manifested in short‐term, mid‐term, and long‐term effects. The literature on the effects of physical and sexual abuse is older than the research on children's exposure to domestic violence, which is a decade older than the research on the effects of community violence exposure on children. Despite the differences between the types of violence to which children are exposed, there are significantly similar findings, which point to a link between violence exposure and traumatization.     

Short Notices

Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (1978), xi+291 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £10.00).

D. W. Howell, Land and People in Nineteenth‐Century Wales (1977), xv+207 (Routledge &; Kegan Paul, £6.95).

Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London 1616–1649 (1977), xii+251 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £9.00).

George Huppert, Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes. An Essay on the Definition of Élites in Renaissance France (1977), xii+237 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, £12.95).

Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers ‐ Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (1977), 244 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £12.50).

D. Philips, Crime and Authority in Victorian England: The Black Country 1835–1860 (1977), 321 (Croom Helm, £8.50).

Brenda Swann and Maureen Turnbull, Records of Interest to Social Scientists 1919–1919: Employment and Unemployment (1978), v+590 (HMSO, paperback, £13.50).     

Central Limit Theorem approximations for the number of runs in Markov-dependent binary sequences

We consider Markov-dependent binary sequences and study various types of success runs (overlapping, non-overlapping, exact, etc.) by examining additive functionals based on state visits and transitions in an appropriate Markov chain. We establish a multivariate Central Limit Theorem for the number of these types of runs and obtain its covariance matrix by means of the recurrent potential matrix of the Markov chain. Explicit expressions for the covariance matrix are given in the Bernoulli and a simple Markov-dependent case by expressing the recurrent potential matrix in terms of the stationary distribution and the mean transition times in the chain. We also obtain a multivariate Central Limit Theorem for the joint number of non-overlapping runs of various sizes and give its covariance matrix in explicit form for Markov dependent trials.