Changes in Income Concentration: Taxes or Macroeconomic Conditions?

We examine the relative importance of tax rates and macroeconomic fluctuations in explaining the share of national adjusted gross income (AGI) reported by the top 0.5% of all taxpayers. Results indicate that cutting the top income or capital gains tax rate would increase the top AGI share but not by enough to increase revenues. The preponderance of evidence suggests that the top AGI share is affected more by the capital gains tax rate than by the income tax rate but that real gross domestic product fluctuations have even larger effects.     

ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION AND WOMEN'S STATUS IN THE LABOR MARKET:

This study examines the effects of economic globalization on occupational sex segregation and occupational inequality. A theory of global economic restructuring and its impact on the quality of women's work suggests that national integration into the world economy significantly expands opportunities for women in the workplace but does not remove barriers to women's advancement or ameliorate the predominance of low-paying, menial jobs held by women. Two measures of gender occupational differentiation are employed as dependent variables in cross-sectional OLS regression analyses of fifty-six countries using data from 1970–1990. Results indicate that global economic forces reduce occupational sex segregation and inequality. However, these effects are determined by a country's world system position and region. The analyses illustrate that global economic restructuring is a gendered process that transforms and builds upon existing gender inequalities. Therefore, the inclusion of global structural characteristics into comparative research on occupational sex differentiation is essential.     

The impact of attitude strength on customer-oriented priority setting by decision-makers: An empirical investigation

A key question in marketing decision-making pertains to what makes decision-makers focus on various types of information in different ways. Particularly in relation to a key marketing and management variable such as customer satisfaction this is an important issue. Costly derived customer satisfaction measures need to provide customer-oriented guidance regarding where to prioritise. Traditional research on intelligence use has mainly focused on objective research attributes, such as research quality. In this article, however, we will adopt the idea that decision-makers weigh information differently based on their perception of its relevance. With respect to crucial customer satisfaction information this represents an exciting, but nevertheless unexplored field of research. The results of latent variable modelling show that the strength of decision-makers’ attitudes toward customer satisfaction leads to a differentiated usage of satisfaction intelligence. By taking this into consideration, management and intelligence providers will be able to more effectively disseminate customer satisfaction information and facilitate a more customer-oriented perspective within firms.     

"三个代表"与可持续发展

中国社会的可持续发展受到了人口、资源和环境等的限制,怎样做到社会的可持续发展,江泽民同志的“三个代表”思想为我们提供了思路。只有符合可持续发展的生产力和文化,才是先进的生产力,先进的文化,也只有这样的生产力和文化才是代表最广大人民根本利益的先进生产力和先进文化。唯有坚持以“三个代表”的思想指导我们实现现代化的行动,才会有中国社会的可持续发展。     

论中国哲学中的"渔翁"和"樵叟"

本文对出现在古代诗文中的“渔翁”和“樵叟”这一文化现象作了探索 ,认为出现这一文化现象的原因是在于文人想借“渔翁”和“樵叟”来寄托某种思想 ;而被借用的“渔翁”和“樵叟”也通过文人的笔端 ,留下了大量的充满哲理的话语和思想 ,并以这些思想来平息文人内心世界的不平和愤懑。这是与文人历来看重“渔翁”和“樵叟”的劳动场所和劳动对象———山水、鱼鸟有关。文人之所以能在“游山水 ,观鱼鸟”的过程中得出思想、精神 (理趣、心诀 ) ,是在于它是建筑在“天人相通 ,万物一体”、“天地之教”———向自然要学问的哲学基础上的     

I'm OK, You're (Not) OK: The Private Welfare State in the United States

The American welfare state has been premised on the mixture of substantial private, tax‐subsidized benefits rather than on more universalistic public benefits. That pattern is in some ways being undermined as private pension plans are increasingly going bankrupt and firms reduce the benefits they provide employees. On the other hand, however, the current Bush administration is attempting to enhance the private sector role by allowing individuals to invest at least a part of their social insurance contributions into private savings plans. These changes may in the end increase the role of the public sector as a regulator and underwriter at the same time that attempts are made to minimize public sector involvement.     

Bayesian palaeoclimate reconstruction

Summary.  We consider the problem of reconstructing prehistoric climates by using fossil data that have been extracted from lake sediment cores. Such reconstructions promise to provide one of the few ways to validate modern models of climate change. A hierarchical Bayesian modelling approach is presented and its use, inversely, is demonstrated in a relatively small but statistically challenging exercise: the reconstruction of prehistoric climate at Glendalough in Ireland from fossil pollen. This computationally intensive method extends current approaches by explicitly modelling uncertainty and reconstructing entire climate histories. The statistical issues that are raised relate to the use of compositional data (pollen) with covariates (climate) which are available at many modern sites but are missing for the fossil data. The compositional data arise as mixtures and the missing covariates have a temporal structure. Novel aspects of the analysis include a spatial process model for compositional data, local modelling of lattice data, the use, as a prior, of a random walk with long-tailed increments, a two-stage implementation of the Markov chain Monte Carlo approach and a fast approximate procedure for cross-validation in inverse problems. We present some details, contrasting its reconstructions with those which have been generated by a method in use in the palaeoclimatology literature. We suggest that the method provides a basis for resolving important challenging issues in palaeoclimate research. We draw attention to several challenging statistical issues that need to be overcome.     

Quantitative Risk Assessment for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in Low- or Zero-Prevalence Countries: The Example of Norway

A predictive case-cohort model is applied to Norwegian data to analyze the interaction between challenge and stability factors for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) during the period 1980-2010. For each year, the BSE risk in cattle is estimated as the expected number of cases. The age distribution of expected cases as well as the relative impact of different challenges is estimated. The model consists of a simple, transparent, and practical deterministic spreadsheet calculation model, in which the following country-specific inputs are entered: (i) annual imports of live cattle and meat and bone meal, (ii) age distribution of native cattle, and (iii) estimated annual basic reproduction ratio (R(0)) for BSE. Results for Norway indicate that the highest risk of BSE cases was in 1989, when a total BSE risk of 0.13 cases per year was expected. After that date, the year-to-year decrease in risk ranged between 3% and 47%, except for a secondary peak in 1994 at 0.06 cases per year. The primary peak was almost entirely (99%) attributable to the importation of 11 cattle from the United Kingdom between 1982 and 1986. The secondary peak, in 1994, originated mainly from the recycling of the U.K. imported cattle (92%). In 2006, the remaining risk was 0.0003 cases per year, or 0.001 per million cows per year, with a maximal age-specific incidence of 0.03 cases per million per year in 10-year-old cattle. Only 15% of the cases were expected in imported cattle. The probability of having zero cases in Norway in 2006 was estimated to be 99.97%. The model and results are compared to previous risk assessments of Norway by the EU.     

Bandwidth-based nonparametric inference

Nonparametric curve estimation is an extremely common statistical procedure. While its primary purpose has been exploratory, some advances in inference have been made. This paper provides a critical review of inferential tests that make fundamental use of a key element of nonparametric smoothing, the bandwidth, to determine the significance of certain features. A major focus is on two important problems that have been tackled using bandwidth-based inference: testing for the multimodality of a density and testing for the monotonicity of a regression curve. Early research in bandwidth-based inference is surveyed, as well as recent theoretical advances. Possible future directions in bandwidth-based inference are discussed.