Comparison of leadership styles in Confucian Asian countries

The purpose of this study was to examine the overall impact of four leadership styles (charismatic, directive, participative, and supportive) in four Confucian Asian countries, China, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, by reviewing recent studies conducted in those countries. By reviewing 38 studies selected from 430 studies published between 2005 and 2016, we identify the impact of the four leadership styles in the four Asian countries. We start with the research question and purpose, and then propose criteria for selecting the relevant recent studies followed by a review of cultural heritage and its influence on leadership in the four Asian countries. We summarize and review the studies and, finally, discuss the theoretical and practical contributions of this study.     

Perceived Environmental Uncertainty, Entry Mode Choice and Satisfaction with EC-MNC Performance

Previous theoretical and empirical research provides substantial support for a contingency approach toward international entry-mode selection. Similarly, additional empirical research supports the notion that different international ownership-based entry modes tend to be associated with varying performance levels. In this study we provide an initial attempt to use Werner, Brouthers and Brouthers' (1996) multiple measures of Perceived Environmental Uncertainty (PEU) to determine the entry mode choices of firms and link these risk-adjusted mode choices to managerial satisfaction with firm performance. We hypothesize and find that firms which make PEU risk-adjusted entry mode choices are significantly more satisfied with their firm's performance than firms whose entry mode choices cannot be predicted using multiple PEU risk measures.     

Improved cross-entropy method for estimation

The cross-entropy (CE) method is an adaptive importance sampling procedure that has been successfully applied to a diverse range of complicated simulation problems. However, recent research has shown that in some high-dimensional settings, the likelihood ratio degeneracy problem becomes severe and the importance sampling estimator obtained from the CE algorithm becomes unreliable. We consider a variation of the CE method whose performance does not deteriorate as the dimension of the problem increases. We then illustrate the algorithm via a high-dimensional estimation problem in risk management.     

基于SYS-GMM的中国人口结构变化与经济增长关系研究

本文利用中国29个省份20年的面板数据,探讨了人口结构变化对储蓄、投资和经济增长的影响。我们将人口结构指标引入传统的经济增长模型中,并用固定效应模型和SYS-GMM计量方法分别测算其对储蓄、投资和经济增长的效应。考虑到老年抚养比在经济增长方程的内生性,我们还将滞后30年的就业人数比率作为工具变量来识别老年抚养比对经济增长的因果效应。结果显示老年抚养率对储蓄、投资和经济增长存在显著的正相关。人口增长率对储蓄和投资有着负相关,但对经济增长没有影响。工作年龄人口比率对储蓄率存在负相关,对投资和经济增长存在正向影响但估计的回归系数不显著。在加入其它制度和人口变量之后回归结果依然稳定。     

农业综合生产自组织功能优化探讨——基于耗散结构理论视角

农业综合生产系统具备耗散结构的基本条件,拥有自组织功能。城市化和工业化进程一定程度上削弱了它的自组织功能,应从系统负熵流的增加、非平衡性的加强、非线性特征的强化和巨涨落的催生等入手,优化农业综合生产的自组织功能。     

生态文明视野中的明清采木

明清时期奢侈之风兴盛,朝廷采办大量木材用于薪炭、造船、建筑以及家具。木材采办主要分布于四川、湖广、浙江等地,采伐后经过陆运、水运两种形式将木材从产地运送到京城,并储存在木厂之中。由于没有得到妥善的管理,在运输和贮藏的过程中造成了大量的浪费。重点研究木材运输、贮藏过程及其特点,认为这一时期朝廷的采木超出了生态和社会的承受能力,不利于人与自然、社会的和谐共生与良性循环。     

美国核能工业管制体系的演变及其借鉴分析

在原子时代的开端 ,核能的前途似乎是一片光明。在五六十年代的美国 ,核能经历了一个不受约束的扩张阶段。但是 ,随后公众的支持和经济利益转向了反对核能技术。从 70年代后期开始 ,美国公用事业公司再没有订购新的核电站。美国核能管制体系在决定核能命运的选择过程中扮演了一个没有预计到的重要角色。文章详细地描述了这个体系的演变历程 ,以及它在公众对核能的信心的消逝这个过程中所产生的影响 ,核能管制体系对公众的这种信心的影响主要有三个方面 :管制体系具有的促进和管制核能这两个目标之间的冲突、管制过程的保密以及一种幼稚的与大众沟通的策略     

Moments of Inertia and Graph Separators

Graphs that arise from the finite element or finite difference methods often include geometric information such as the coordinates of the nodes of the graph. The geometric separator algorithm of Miller, Teng, Thurston, and Vavasis uses some of the available geometric information to find small node separators of graphs. The algorithm utilizes a random sampling technique based on the uniform distribution to find a good separator. We show that sampling from an elliptic distribution based on the inertia matrix of the graph can significantly improve the quality of the separator. More generally, given a cost function f on the unit d-sphere Ud, we can define an elliptic distribution based on the second moments of f. The expectation of f with respect to the elliptic distribution is less than or equal to the expectation with respect to the uniform distribution, with equality only in degenerate cases. We also demonstrate experimentally that the benefit gained by the use of the additional geometric information is significant. Some previous algorithms have used the moments of inertia heuristically, and suffer from extremely poor worst case performance. This is the first result, to our knowledge, that incorporates the moments of inertia into a provably good strategy.     

Governing police practice: limits of the new accountability

The advent of public-sector managerialism has brought with it a new principle of police accountability in Western democracies such as Australia and Britain. The new accountability gives emphasis to managerial rather than legal or public-interest standards, favours external oversight combined with self-regulation rather than centralized control, and promotes risk management rather than rule enforcement. This article makes use of the experience of an Australian police force to show that the new accountability has not been successful in holding police accountable, while elements of the old accountability have re-emerged to dominate public debates. It is argued that in the area of police governance, the neo-liberal state does not necessarily pursue a coherent strategy of 'acting at a distance' (cf. Miller and Rose 1990), partly because of the inability of accountability technologies to deliver substantially the promised policy outcomes and partly because of the sensitivity of its political arm to the public's moral outrage against corruption (cf. Garland 1996).     

Physical and mental health effects of being stalked for men and women

Stalking is relatively common yet little is known of the longer-term health effects of stalking. Using the National Violence Against Women survey, we estimated lifetime stalking victimization among women and men, ages 18 to 65, identified correlates of being stalked, and explored the association between being stalked and mental and physical health status. With a criterion of being stalked on more than one occasion and being at least "somewhat afraid," 14.2% of women and 4.3% of men were victims. Among those stalked, 41% of women and 28% of men were stalked by an intimate partner. Women were more than 13 times as likely to be "very afraid" of their stalker than men. Negative health consequences of being stalked were similar for men and women; those stalked were significantly more likely to report poor current health, depression, injury, and substance use. Implications for victims, service providers, and the criminal justice system were reviewed.