Please do not pirate it, you will rob the poor! An experimental investigation on the effect of charitable donations on piracy

Producers in the recording industry frequently market products for which a part of the proceeds goes to charitable causes. We investigate whether a corporate pledge to donate a portion of profits to a charitable cause will decrease the extent to which customers illegally obtain that company's products. Donations to charitable causes may increase the moral intensity of piracy (robbing the poor rather than robbing the rich) and consequently may reduce the willingness to pirate. This rationale is empirically tested through a dual empirical strategy, that is, a market survey and a laboratory experiment. We show that market piracy decreases when a very low or very high donation mechanism is implemented. Nevertheless, for intermediate levels of transfer, piracy increases again.     

Consistent selection of the actual model in regression analysis

SUMMARY In regression analysis, a best subset of regressors is usually selected by minimizing Mallows's C statistic or some other equivalent criterion, such as the Akaike lambda information criterion or cross-validation. It is known that the resulting procedure suffers from a lack of consistency that can lead to a model with too many variables. For this reason, corrections have been proposed that yield consistent procedures. The object of this paper is to show that these corrected criteria, although asymptotically consistent, are usually too conservative for finite sample sizes. The paper also proposes a new correction of Mallows's statistic that yields better results. A simulation study is conducted that shows that the proposed criterion performs well in a variety of situations.     

Estimating the concentration of the Langevin distribution

We propose an estimator of the concentration parameter of the Langevin distribution that is based on the spatial median. We derive its asymptotic distribution, compute its asymptotic efficiency, and show that it possesses some interesting stability properties under contamination.     

Postneonatal diarrhea mortality of Mexican American and Anglo American infants: Trends and context

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Mexican origin population of San Antonio, Texas, USA, was desperately impoverished and inhabited some of the worst slums in the USA. Mortality of Mexican origin infants in the 1930s and 1940s was dominated by diarrhea, a cause of death identified with fecal contamination of the environment. The postneonatal diarrhea mortality rate (risk) was 48 per 1,000 Mexican origin infants, but only 7 per 1,000 Anglo infants. By 1970 this cause of death had virtually disappeared in both populations, but in the 35 years of 1935-1969, Mexican origin infants accounted for over 90 percent of all diarrhea deaths in the city. Limited evidence suggests that miserable living conditions without proper water supplies and sanitation in the densely settled Mexican American neighborhoods gave rise to environmental contamination which resulted in high diarrhea morbidity and mortality. The hypothesis is suggested that reduction of mortality from diarrhea was a consequence of specific community interventions.     

WHY ARE THE 2000s SO DIFFERENT FROM THE 1970s? A STRUCTURAL INTERPRETATION OF CHANGES IN THE MACROECONOMIC EFFECTS OF OIL PRICES

In the 1970s, large increases in the price of oil were associated with sharp decreases in output and large increases in inflation. In the 2000s, even larger increases in the price of oil were associated with much milder movements in output and inflation. Using a structural VAR approach, Blanchard and Gali (in J. Gali and M. Gertler (eds.) 2009, International Dimensions of Monetary Policy, University of Chicago Press, pp. 373–428) argued that this reflected a change in the causal relation from the price of oil to output and inflation. They then argued that this change could be due to a combination of three factors: a smaller share of oil in production and consumption, lower real wage rigidity, and better monetary policy. Their argument, based on simulations of a simple new‐Keynesian model, was informal. Our purpose in this paper is to take the next step, and to estimate the explanatory power and contribution of each of these factors. To do so, we use a minimum distance estimator that minimizes, over the set of structural parameters and for each of two samples (pre‐ and post‐1984), the distance between the empirical SVAR‐based impulse response functions and those implied by a new‐Keynesian model. Our empirical results point to an important role for all three factors.     

How Job Characteristics Affect International Migration: The Role of Informality in Mexico

Despite the importance given to employment opportunities as a primary motive for migration, previous studies have paid insufficient attention to the kinds of jobs that are more likely to retain workers in their countries of origin. We use information from a panel survey of Mexican adults to examine how job characteristics affect the risk of international migration. The sampling strategy and overall size of the survey allow us to analyze the effect of employment characteristics on migration from urban areas, which have much greater labor market diversity, and to separate our analysis by gender. We also distinguish migrants according to whether they migrate for work or for other reasons. We find informality to be a significant predictor of international migration. Even after controlling for individual factors including workers’ wages, as well as various household- and community-level predictors, we find that workers employed in the informal sector have significantly higher odds of migrating than their counterparts in the formal sector. The pervasive nature of informality in many developing countries from which a high proportion of international migrants originate may therefore create a constant supply of workers who are predisposed to migrate. Our findings thus have important implications for a proper understanding of the effects of economic development on migration.     

Traditional society, political society and Québec sociology: 1945–1980

L'analyse de la production sociologique au Québec, de 1945 à 1980, ne saurait être entreprise sans faire référence à la transformation des conditions generates d'enonciation qu'a connue la société québécoise durant la période. On peut schématiquement regrouper cette sociographie en quatre courants distincts. Le premier, de 1945 à 1960, se donne comme un savoir critique dc l'adaptation illustrant l'inadéquation de la référence au traditionalisme. Le début des années soixante marque le passage à la dominance d'une forme de la représentation présentant désormais le Québec comme une société politique. Une sociologie fonctionnelle de l'adaptation se développe dés lors, liée à la mise en place de L'État keynésien. Les années soixante-dix voient au contraire l'affirmation d'une sociologie de l'émancipation. Divisée en deux courants antagonistes, culturaliste et politiste, cette sociologie travaille à la redéfinition d'une société québécoise dorénavant soumise aux pleines déterminations de la modernité. The modernity of sociological production in Québec from 1945 to 1980 cannot be attempted without referring to the transformation in the general conditions of Québec's expression of itself as a society during this period. We can regroup this sociography schematically into four distinct approaches: the first, from 1945 to 1960, presented itself as a form of critical knowledge of adaptation which illustrated the inadequacy of references to traditionalism. The beginning of the 1960s marked the transition towards the predominance of a representational form which thereafter presented Québec as a political society. In the third tendency a functionalist sociology, linked to the consolidation of the Keynesian state, took root. The 1970s saw in contradistinction the affirmation of a sociology of emanicipation. Divided between two mutually antagonistic approaches, culturalist and political, Québec sociology is working towards the redefinition of a Québecois society henceforth caught in the determining web of modernity.     

Accuracy of the judgment of facial expression of emotions as a function of sex and level of education

The purpose of this study is to examine the recognition of facial expressions of six emotions as a function of sex and level of education (high school, college, university) of the subjects. Three hundred French-speaking citizens of Quebec had to judge which emotion was expressed in various facial stimuli presented on slides. Results show that overall, the recognition of emotions was very good. However, there were significant and strong differences between emotions and sex and levels of education did not have strong effects on the results.This research was supported by grant EQ-1717 from Fonds FCAC (Gouvernment du Quebec).