THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION AND THE UNSECURED CREDIT MARKET

The information technology (IT) revolution coincided with the transformation of the U.S. unsecured credit market. Households' borrowing increased rapidly and there was an even faster increase in bankruptcy filings. A risk of default model with asymmetric information and costly screening is introduced to study this period. When information costs are high, the design of contracts under private information prevents some households from borrowing with a risk of default. As information costs drop, households borrow more and bankruptcy filings increase. Quantitative exercises suggest that the IT revolution may have played an important role in the transformation of the unsecured credit market. (JEL E43, E44, G33)     

Neoliberal discourses and ethnonormative regime in post-recognition Peru: redefining hierarchies and identities

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the impact of ‘recognition’ of cultural and ethnic diversity in Peru. It proposes that the rise of a new global ‘ethnonormativity’ – a regime to define and administrate cultural and identity differences, to establish boundaries between those who ‘are’ ethnic and those who are not, and to set rights and duties derived from identities – has had meagre effects in Peru. While the past decades have witnessed the emergence of Latin American political actors who regard indigenousness as their basic political identity, there has been no ‘emergence of indigenous movements’ in Peru. The discourses that highlight the importance of diversity have gained terrain – unsettling, to a certain extent, the narratives of assimilation through ‘development’ and mestizaje – and the Peruvian state has officially embraced ‘recognition’, including it in its official rhetoric and creating institutions to design policies to guarantee the rights of the indigenous and Afroperuvian ‘peoples’ (itself a label part of the language of multiculturalism). The state has also crafted a definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ and introduced ethnic variables in censuses and official statistics, thus being active in the production and regulation of subjects. Some civil society actors have also incorporated ethnic labels into their rhetoric to adapt to the global turn to identity politics. Peru remains, however, a fertile terrain for neoliberal policies and discourses of a different kind. A discourse that exalts ‘emprendedurismo’ (entrepreneurship) and states that success depends entirely on personal effort has become a new common sense, obscuring the structural inequality that has historically affected indigenous and Afroperuvian people. Extractivism continues to damage the environment and the rights of indigenous people, while the expansion of agribusiness in the coastal valleys of Peru keeps people – regardless of their ‘ethnic’ self-identification – in poverty and without basic labour and social rights. The article suggests that the ambiguities of the ethnonormative regime in Peru may serve as a diversion from structural issues in a context of neoliberalism and may re-elaborate racial hierarchies, racism and the narratives of mestizaje it allegedly opposes.     

Participatory Art as a Social Practice of Commoning to Reinvent the Right to the City

The right to the city is a concept that helps rethink spatial–social dynamics, which has recently reinvigorated the field of organization studies. Following Lefebvre and considering the failure of both the market and the state, other scholars pinpoint the need to rethink social–spatial and geographical–historical relations. They do so by theorizing the city as a host for urban commons. Collective and non-commodified, these spatial–social experiences need to be constantly reproduced and preserved through commoning practices in the struggle against spatial injustice. A case study shows that a civil society organization (CSO) uses participatory art to (re)produce urban commons at the level of a local community and to redress partially spatial injustice. We theorize participatory art-making as a social practice of commoning, i.e., a process of organizing for the commons—collective art-based activities to serve a community—and of the common—to (re)produce a community while performing them. Such commoning practices are not only about sharing urban resources but also about using and experiencing differently urban spaces. By making participatory artworks in public spaces and co-designing street furniture with residents of poor areas, TDA helps to better cope with the tensions between residents and local authorities and between amateurs and professional artists. By negotiating the long-term implementation of these creative artworks in the public space with public authorities, TDA has fostered the empowerment of inhabitants as they have experienced citizens’ reappropriation of some public spaces in Marseille.     

吉林省经济与资源、环境和谐发展的政策变革

中共十七大提出了以科学发展观为指导,实现经济发展又好又快的新时期目标,“社会更加和谐”是其中一个重要内容。结合经济社会的大背景和趋势以及吉林省的现状和问题,探讨致力于吉林省经济与资源、环境和谐发展的政策变革。     

宏观经济因素对中国城镇劳动供给的影响

为了从宏观经济层面分析中国城镇劳动参与率迅速下降的深层原因,本文综合利用各人口、制度、宏观经济等时间序列数据,通过建立因子分析、多元回归分析、向量自回归等模型,从同期和滞后两个方面来研究宏观经济因素对劳动供给的影响.得出经济发展水平提高、经济制度变革、失业率上升、劳动力供给增加是中国劳动参与率降低的主要原因,在此基础上,提出相关有意义的结论.     

从族谱编纂看满族的民族认同

族谱是民间最常见的传世文献 ,具有追根寻祖、辨别亲疏、敬宗收族等作用。本文指出 ,族谱在民族识别和民族认同方面具有不容低估的现实意义。这里 ,重要的不仅在于甄别史实的真伪 ,而且还在于理解特定社会氛围中族人对于族谱的策略性利用。本文以满族族谱为主要对象 ,将实地调查与文本分析相结合 ,尝试对族谱在民族认同中的功能进行个案研究。     

当代中国青年人际价值观发展研究

改革开放以来,中国青年的人际价值观出现了巨大的变迁,本文分析了中国青年在人际价值取向、人际价值目标、人际吸引影响因素、人际交往方式、人际关系状况等方面出现的不同程度的变化,指出了教育引导青年树立正确人际价值观的重要性。     

青年社工工作模式探究

本研究从实践研究和理论探索两条路径出发,探究社区青少年社会支持工作模式。研究通过访谈法、问卷法、资料分析法研究了上海市社区青少年心理健康服务的工作现状,验证了从社会支持出发,开展社会工作的意义,并结合理论分析和研究结果,提出社会支持工作模式的建议。     

Additive mixed effect model for recurrent gap time data

Gap times between recurrent events are often of primary interest in medical and observational studies. The additive hazards model, focusing on risk differences rather than risk ratios, has been widely used in practice. However, the marginal additive hazards model does not take the dependence among gap times into account. In this paper, we propose an additive mixed effect model to analyze gap time data, and the proposed model includes a subject-specific random effect to account for the dependence among the gap times. Estimating equation approaches are developed for parameter estimation, and the asymptotic properties of the resulting estimators are established. In addition, some graphical and numerical procedures are presented for model checking. The finite sample behavior of the proposed methods is evaluated through simulation studies, and an application to a data set from a clinic study on chronic granulomatous disease is provided.     

Affective capitalism,humanitarianism and extractivism in Colombia: old and new borders for future times

Contemporary Colombian conjuncture encompasses two dynamics. These incorporate social, economic, political and cultural aspects, whose related rationalities are yet to be mapped out and understood in their complex and multi-layered dimensions and registers. On the one hand, as I will explain throughout the text, we have been witness to on-going peace talks between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia guerrilla group, a whole set of practices of forgiveness, inaugurations of memory museums, the passing of the victims and land restitution law, as well as the recognition of victims and the effervescence of their movements and organizations. These factors have spiralled victims’ demonstrations and fuelled marches all over the country. On the other hand, there are increased rates of foreign investment in those regions that, until as little as a decade ago, were subject to appalling rates of internal displacement, massacres and disappearances, and which now constitute new borders where global capitalism has been able to reconfigure and increase its rates of capital accumulation. In this article, I analyse the processes referred to above and their complex relationships from the vantage point of a cultural studies interrogation of the affective and the popular, focusing on two Colombian regions: Montes de María and Mapiripán. My goal is to understand how different groups and actors are experiencing these processes in their everyday lives. Here, I include victims and their organizations but also government officials and entrepreneurs related to agro-industry initiatives – mentioned below – today refashioned within the new mantra of corporate responsibility. I want to understand the issue of where people are located and what they are doing, facing, consuming, or resisting in terms of these new challenges. Finally, I wish to offer an analytical study that can capture the everyday textures of these processes in a complex and concrete fashion.