How Bad Can a Crisis Be If It Does Not Top the News?

Sudden onset of front-page news about the U.S. financial crisis, beginning September 6, 2008, may have exacerbated underlying financial problems and facilitated the spread of risk panic to other nations.     

A Rational Theory of Mutual Funds' Attention Allocation

The question of whether and how mutual fund managers provide valuable services for their clients motivates one of the largest literatures in finance. One candidate explanation is that funds process information about future asset values and use that information to invest in high‐valued assets. But formal theories are scarce because information choice models with many assets are difficult to solve as well as difficult to test. This paper tackles both problems by developing a new attention allocation model that uses the state of the business cycle to predict information choices, which in turn, predict observable patterns of portfolio investments and returns. The predictions about fund portfolios' covariance with payoff shocks, cross‐fund portfolio and return dispersion, and their excess returns are all supported by the data. These findings offer new evidence that some investment managers have skill and that attention is allocated rationally.     

Effects of human-related disturbance on breeding success of urban and non-urban blue tits (<Emphasis Type=Italic>Cyanistes caeruleus</Emphasis>)

There is a need to study the effects of urbanization on wildlife in order to understand the ecological implications of increasing urbanization and find out how to reduce its threats to biodiversity. The blue tit evolved as a forest species and prefers deciduous and mixed forests, whereas its nesting in urban habitats is a more recent phenomenon. Our long-term study of blue tit populations has been conducted in two habitats: an urban parkland (frequently visited by people) and a deciduous forest outside of the city. Using linear mixed modeling, we revealed that a relationship of blue tit breeding success (and the number of fledglings) with thermal conditions in May differed between the urban parkland and the forest. While the relationship was positive in the forest, it was negative in the parkland. In addition, breeding success in the parkland increased with increasing number of rainy days in May. We argue that the main possible reason for such patterns is human activity in the parkland, which interferes with tit parental care, especially the regular feeding of nestlings, whereas it is evidently associated with weather conditions. Human disturbance in the forest is likely to be negligible.     

Measuring the Cultural Dimension of Migrant Integration and Integration Policy in the European Context: Dilemmas and Discussions1

Migrant integration is usually studied in four dimensions: economic, political, social and cultural. The cultural sphere seems to be the most ambiguous, but also the one that induces various interpretations as it touches upon core norms and values held both by migrants and by the receiving society. This paper aims to reconstruct research approaches to cultural integration and integration policy. Beside the receiving country’s language, that is the obvious differentiating factor of cultural integration, other aspects have been defined: migrants’ religion, knowledge of the receiving country’s symbolic culture, maintenance and transmission of cultural patterns, cultural identity. Furthermore, indicators which appear to adequately measure the effectiveness of integration activities have been assigned to the predefined aspects of cultural integration. They have been confronted with indicators used within integration policies of selected EU states and with expert statements (collected within the Delphi method‐based survey) on given aspects of policies aimed at cultural integration.     

Fertility among ethnic groups in the USSR

Thirty-six ethnie groups in the USSR are analyzed as to fertility differentials. The analysis is based on data from the 1959 nationwide census. To explain the fertility differentials found, ethnographic and sociological features of these groups are traced as a possible contributing factor. One of the poignant observations of the study is the fact that almost all ethnic groups with fertility above the median are those belonging to Moslem and Buddhist traditions. They are primarily located in the Central Asian republics, the Caucasus, and some parts of southern Siberia. Low fertility levels are by and large associated with the Eastern Orthodox Slavs and the Protestant Balts.Ratios of the number of children aged 0-9 to the number of women in the 20-49 age group are related to independent variables in the following order of importance: traditional religion, percentage of married women in the 20-49 age group, degree of literacy, male-female literacy differential, and sex ratio. The multiple correlation of 0.911 was obtained between the child-woman ratio and the first four of the most important independent variables. Sex ratio appeared significant only after the influence of the percentage of married women was eliminated from the analysis of multiple and partial correlations.The data suggest that the urban-rural differential is a non-linear function of the urban-rural migration. A more complete explanation of the divergence between urban and rural child-woman fertility ratios should be made the subject of separate studies.