Black Immigrants in the United States and the "Cultural Narratives" of Ethnicity

This article argues that social science representations of post-1965 Black immigrants in the United States employ the concept of "ethnicity" in ways that reinforce the racialist myth of Black (American) cultural inferiority. Specifically, the discursive use of Black immigrant "ethnic" and "cultural distinctiveness," while admittedly reflecting an important recognition of the heterogeneity of the United States Black populations, is in fact predicated upon a repackaged "culture of poverty" discourse that serves to reaffirm the overarching racial order. In a discussion of the theoretical and historical development of the concept, I show how the current discourse of "ethnic distinctiveness" perpetuates a form of racism under a theory that denies the relevance of race while it continuously recodes the biological notions of race as "culture." Thus, Black immigrant distinctiveness, when presented through the prism of the cultural narratives of ethnicity, allows for the perpetuation of a "cultural racism" that adversely affects all Blacks in this country. I therefore call for a rejection of ethnicity theory as it is currently conceptualized and suggest the need to ground theories of Black distinctiveness within analyses of power relations and ongoing practices of racial subjugation.     

The theatre of war: art,organization and the aesthetics of strategy

Recent Anglo-Saxon writings on management regard “vision” as being of strategic importance to leadership. Whilst such an approach has led to socio-psychological inquiries into “visionary leadership” the equally relevant phenomenological “philosophy of the eye” has remained unexplored by organizational scholars. This European philosophical tradition is closely connected to theories of art. In three cases, it will be shown how continental reflection on the strategic management of warfare has taken the eye seriously and thereby gained insights from aesthetics. It will be argued that the understanding of civilian strategic management also might benefit from such s connection between Strategy and Art.     

Pay-as-you-go social security in a changing environment

In this paper, we examine the optimal pay-as-you-go social security scheme which reallocates resources across generations in a changing environment, that is, with fluctuations in population growth rates and in productivity levels. We use an overlapping generations model along with a social welfare function consisting of the sum of generational utilities either unweighted or weighted by population size and a discount factor. We show how intergenerational resource sharing can be used to improve social welfare even though the extent of intergenerational redistribution is hampered by payroll tax deadweight losses in the spirit of the optimal taxation literature. Also it appears that resource sharing is much more restricted in a closed economy that in an open economy, which is not subject to a national resource constraint at each period of time. This paper was presented at the 1990 ISPE-Conference on the Fiscal Implications of an Ageing Population, Vaalsbroek Castle, Netherlands. The authors wish to thank the participants and particularly B. van Praag and W. Peters for their comments. They also thank the two referees and Philippe Michel for very helpful comments and discussions. The financial support of CIM during his sabbatical year is greatly acknowledged by the second author.     

The determinants of breast-feeding in sri lanka

Breast-feeding is the focus of rapidly growing interest. Research on the determinants of breast-feeding is only beginning. The research in this paper is based on World Fertility Survey data for Sri Lanka. We develop what we believe to be an appropriate probit model and find that there are significant socioeconomic factors that influence breast-feeding, in addition to the demographic factors focused upon in the literature. Moreover, some of them have clear policy implications, which are elaborated herein with respect to labor force, education, family planning and internal migration policies. In the course of the paper we also address a number of generally neglected statistical issues that should be considered in analyzing the determinants of breastfeeding, including problems resulting from digit preference or age heaping, the need to use dichotomous dependent variables, unavoidable truncation biases in the basic data, and structural shifts in the determinants of breastfeeding at different durations.     

Effects of sleep inertia on cognitive performance following a 1-hour nap

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of a 1-h nap on subsequent performance in spatial memory (SM) and logical reasoning (LR) tasks. The objective was to evaluate the duration of the effects of sleep inertia (SI). The performance was measured in two independent groups of subjects. The 1-h nap took place at 00:00 h in group 1 and at 03:00 h in group 2. In each task, the experimental design comprised one no-nap condition in which subjects had no sleep before the night tests, and a nap condition that comprised the 1-h nap followed by the test sessions. To measure the duration of SI effects, the subjects were tested in two 30-min sessions and the data in each session were analysed in sub-units of time of 3 min each. In each task the results showed no effects on accuracy, and no circadian effects of napping were found. In each task, analyses of pooled data of the two groups showed that the performance in the 1-h nap condition exhibited significant reductions of speed immediately following awakening, when compared with no-nap, reflecting SI effects. In SM, the slowing lasted 24 min, and 27 min in LR. Practical implications of the results are discussed.     

BIDDING FOR HORIZONTAL MULTINATIONALS

We present a model in which governments bid for firms by taxing/subsidizing setup costs. Firms choose both the number and the location of the plants they operate, and the equilibrium industry structure is affected by governments' subsidy choices. We show that the endogenous presence of horizontal multinationals attenuates the race to the bottom and yields some results that run counter to traditional findings in the literature. First, in the presence of multinationals, increasing subsidies decrease firms' profits by exacerbating price competition due to more firms going multinational. Second, instead of being always subsidized, firms may actually be taxed in equilibrium. Last, subsidies may become strategically independent policy instruments, instead of being strategic complements. (JEL: F12, F23, H27, H73, R12)     

RELATIVE RISK AVERSION IS CONSTANT: EVIDENCE FROM PANEL DATA

Most classical tests of constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) based on individual portfolio composition use cross‐sectional data. Such tests must assume that the distributions of wealth and preferences are independent. We use panel data to analyze how individuals’ portfolio allocation between risky and riskless assets varies in response to changes in total financial wealth. We find the elasticity of the risky asset share to wealth to be small and statistically insignificant, supporting the CRRA assumption; this finding is robust when the sample is restricted to households experiencing large income variations. In addition, we find a small but significant negative correlation between wealth and risk aversion. Various extensions are discussed.     

The Dynamics of Inequality

The past forty years have seen a rapid rise in top income inequality in the United States. While there is a large number of existing theories of the Pareto tail of the long‐run income distributions, almost none of these address the fast rise in top inequality observed in the data. We show that standard theories, which build on a random growth mechanism, generate transition dynamics that are too slow relative to those observed in the data. We then suggest two parsimonious deviations from the canonical model that can explain such changes: “scale dependence” that may arise from changes in skill prices, and “type dependence,” that is, the presence of some “high‐growth types.” These deviations are consistent with theories in which the increase in top income inequality is driven by the rise of “superstar” entrepreneurs or managers.     

DO PRICES TRANSMIT RATIONALLY EXPECTED INFORMATION?

A simple model with asymmetric information, in which inventory holders or traders submit demand curves to an auctioneer, has a unique partially revealing equilibrium. We wonder whether the agents can plausibly coordinate on this equilibrium through “eductive” reasoning relying on common knowledge. The analysis stresses the role of two effects, sensitivity and amplification, whose product should be small enough. The property is obtained whenever the equilibrium excess demand is steep enough, i.e., when the search for information does not distort demand too much. Neither the influence of the number of informed agents nor that of noise trading are monotonic. Real‐time learning has strikingly different features. (JEL: D82, D84)