Mirror Neurons and Practices: A Response to Lizardo

Lizardo argues that The Social Theory of Practices is refuted by the discovery of mirror neurons. The book argues that the kind of sameness of tacit mental content assumed by practice theorists such as Bourdieu is fictional, because there is no actual process by which the same mental content can be transmitted. Mirror neurons, Lizardo claims, provide such a mechanism, as they imply that bodily automatisms, which can be understood as the basis of habitus and concepts, can be shared and copied from one person to another. This response to Lizardo points out that the Gallese arguments on which Lizardo relies relate to phylogenetic and universal body movements, not to the learned movements characteristic of practices, and that there is no sameness producing mechanism parallel to the genetic one.     

BIRTHS, DEATHS, AND MARRIAGES IN THE U.S. COMMERCIAL BANKING INDUSTRY

Regulatory change not seen since the Great Depression swept the U.S. banking industry beginning in the early 1980s and culminated with the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994. This article examines whether deregulation affected new charter (birth), failure (death), and merger (marriage) rates of U.S. commercial banks from 1978 to 2004 after controlling for bank performance and state economic activity. We find strong evidence that intrastate and interstate deregulation stimulated marriages, but not births or deaths. Finally, temporal causality tests show that mergers temporally lead to new charters and that failures lead to mergers (a demonstration effect) . ( JEL G21, L51)     

MODELING GROWTH (AND LIBERALIZATION) USING SMOOTH TRANSITIONS ANALYSIS

Economic liberalization has been a pervasive phenomenon over the last twenty years. Programs have been initiated on the assumption that liberalization promotes economic growth, but the empirical evidence for this is limited. This paper takes a novel approach to modeling growth and structural change as smooth transitions. This allows us to model deterministic change without imposing discrete changes. We use smooth transition analysis to reappraise the time-series properties of long-run growth rates in a number of developing countries which have undertaken liberalization. Our results challenge conventional wisdom on both methodological and empirical grounds.     

On the Relationship between Directional and Omnibus Statistical Tests

Abstract.  A common statistical problem involves the testing of a K -dimensional parameter vector. In both parametric and semiparametric settings, two types of directional tests – linear combination and constrained tests – are frequently used instead of omnibus tests in hopes of achieving greater power for specific alternatives. In this paper, we consider the relationship between these directional tests, as well as their relationship to omnibus tests. Every constrained directional test is shown to be asymptotically equivalent to a specific linear combination test under a sequence of contiguous alternatives and vice versa. Even when the direction of the alternative is known, the constrained test in general will not be optimal unless the objective function used to derive it is efficient. For an arbitrary alternative, insight into the power characteristics of directional tests in comparison to omnibus tests can be gained by a chi-square partition of the omnibus test.     

Labour Force Activity of Women in Canada: A Comparative Analysis of Aboriginal and Non‐Aboriginal Women*

En s'appuyant sur les données du Fichier de mierodonnées à grande diffusion (FMGD) de 1996 sur les individus, cet article examine L'activité sur le marché du travail des femmes au Canada en mettant L'accent sur les effets du statut familial et de la structure du ménage pour déterminer si ces facteurs ont des réponses élastiques similaires chez les femmes autochtones et non autochtones. Nous avons trouvé que cette activité varie largement en fonction du statut d'autochtone. En général, les Indiens de plein droit avaient moms de chances de trouver un emploi que les autres autochtones ou les non‐autochtones. Alors que le niveau d'instruction, la présence d'enfants mineurs et la monoparentalité semblaient associés à une probabilité plus basse d'emploi, des différences significatives en fonction du statut d'autochtone ont été décelées. Les répercussions sur Pemploi du niveau d'instruction se sont révélées plus fortes chez les Indiens de plein droit. Using data from the 1996 Public Use Microdata File (PUMF) on individuals, this paper examines labour force activity of women in Canada, focussing on the effects of familial status and household structure to determine whether these factors have similar elasticities among Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal women. We found that labour force activity varied greatly by Aboriginal Status. In general, Registered Indians were less likely to be employed but more likely to be unemployed than Other Aboriginals and non‐Aboriginals. While lower educational attainment, presence of minor children and lone parenthood were found to be associated with a lower likelihood of being employed, significant differences by Aboriginal Status were found. The effect of educational attainment on employment was found to be higher among Registered Indians.     

On a Class of Random Probability Measures with General Predictive Structure

Abstract. In this study, we investigate a recently introduced class of non‐parametric priors, termed generalized Dirichlet process priors. Such priors induce (exchangeable random) partitions that are characterized by a more elaborate clustering structure than those arising from other widely used priors. A natural area of application of these random probability measures is represented by species sampling problems and, in particular, prediction problems in genomics. To this end, we study both the distribution of the number of distinct species present in a sample and the distribution of the number of new species conditionally on an observed sample. We also provide the Bayesian Non‐parametric estimator for the number of new species in an additional sample of given size and for the discovery probability as function of the size of the additional sample. Finally, the study of its conditional structure is completed by the determination of the posterior distribution.     

Convergence assessment techniques for Markov chain Monte Carlo

MCMC methods have effectively revolutionised the field of Bayesian statistics over the past few years. Such methods provide invaluable tools to overcome problems with analytic intractability inherent in adopting the Bayesian approach to statistical modelling.However, any inference based upon MCMC output relies critically upon the assumption that the Markov chain being simulated has achieved a steady state or converged. Many techniques have been developed for trying to determine whether or not a particular Markov chain has converged, and this paper aims to review these methods with an emphasis on the mathematics underpinning these techniques, in an attempt to summarise the current state-of-play for convergence assessment techniques and to motivate directions for future research in this area.     

Constructing First Order Stationary Autoregressive Models via Latent Processes

First order stationary autoregressive (AR(1)) models are introduced for which there exists a linear relation between the expectations of the observations, and where it is readily possible to arrange the marginal distributions to be other than normal.     

Including Families in Residential Work: Educational and Agency Tasks

Correspondence to Stephen Casson, Social Services Department, Civic Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8PA, England. Summary This paper identifies obstacles to the inclusion of familiesby residential establishments. A review of the literature indicatesthat the notion of including families is a worthwhile consideration,but that few programmes have committed themselves with sufficientenergies over time to test the worth of this assumption. Tobring families centre stage a set of obligations is proposedto managers and certain principles from the family dynamicsliterature are identified for inclusion in the training curriculumof residential workers.     

WHERE DOES ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT REALLY COME FROM? CONSTITUTIONAL RULE AMONG THE CONTEMPORARY SIOUX AND APACHE

Governments are public goods that provide the organizational and legal structures by which societies arrange and enforce "rules of the game" that enable divisions of labor, exchange, and collective action. We argue that shared, pre-constitutional cultural norms of political legitimacy among rational individuals provide the foundations of effective self-government. The performance of contemporary Apache and Sioux economies on Indian reservations governed by common federally imposed constitutions is examined to test the framework. Unlike the impoverished Sioux, the relatively successful Apaches are found to have pre-existing political norms that (serendipidously) match the structure of their formal constitution.