Enclaves, neighbourhood effects and employment outcomes: Ethnic minorities in England and Wales

Ethnic minorities in England and Wales are spatially concentrated in relatively-deprived urban areas. Both geographic clustering and the economic characteristics of ethnically-concentrated neighbourhoods can impact upon the opportunities and constraints facing residents of such areas. This paper explores the relationship between the existence of enclaves and the employment prospects of ethnic minorities in England and Wales. It is shown that there is considerable spatial variation in employment outcomes. There is a lower incidence of self-employment in more ethnically-concentrated urban areas, which contradicts the view of ethnic entrepreneurship as an enclave phenomenon. Unemployment rates are also higher for minorities living in more concentrated areas. Enclaves in England and Wales do not appear to offer many economic benefits to minority individuals. Received: 31 December 1999/Accepted: 27 November 2000     

无政府主义认识论的再认识

人们之所以不断地误解无政府主义认识论,其主要根源是忽视了它是侧重反面论证的治疗性理论。"怎么都行"不是费耶阿本德对于科学研究方法和准则的描述和提倡。他不过是以一种非常戏剧化的修辞学方式表达一个朴素的真理:任何规则都有其局限性。无政府主义认识论的修辞学特点:隐喻和反证法的大量使用也是其理论内容的本质体现。从修辞学策略的角度看,无政府主义认识论不是费耶阿本德心目中的真理,只是他用于治疗目前人类思想疾病的良药。理论除了具有正面的建设性功能之外,还具有反面消解的治疗性功能。     

Family size and optimal income taxation

This paper studies the role of family size in the design of optimal income taxation. We consider a second best setting where the government observes the number of children and the income of the parents but not their productivity. With a linear tax schedule the marginal tax rate is shown to decrease with the number of children, while the relationship between the demogrant and family size appears to be ambiguous. With two ability levels, optimal non-linear income tax implies zero marginal tax rates for the higher ability parents; low ability parents have positive marginal tax rates that decrease with family size. Received: 4 September 2000/Accepted: 17 May 2001     

氢化非晶硅膜的光学特性

用辉光放电法制备了氢化非晶硅(a-Si:H)膜,并对其光电导、光吸收特性进行了研究。结果表明,a-Si:H膜具有良好的光电导和光吸收性,是一种理想的廉价太阳能电池材料。     

HOW DO ELECTORAL SYSTEMS AFFECT FISCAL POLICY? EVIDENCE FROM CANTONAL PARLIAMENTS, 1890–2000

Using a new data set on Swiss cantons since 1890, we analyze how the adoption of proportional representation affects fiscal policy. In line with economic theory, we show that proportional systems shift spending toward broad goods (like education and welfare benefits) but decrease spending on geographically targetable goods (like roads). We find little evidence that proportional representation increases the overall size of government. An analysis of the underlying theoretical mechanisms reveals that proportional representation increases electoral turnout, left‐wing representation, and political fragmentation. These changes in political representation explain a substantial share of the rise in education spending, but a small share of the rise in welfare spending or the decline in road expenditures.     

OUTSOURCING WHEN INVESTMENTS ARE SPECIFIC AND INTERRELATED

Using the universe of large Canadian manufacturing firms in 1988 and 1996, we investigate to what extent outsourcing patterns concord with the predictions of a simple property rights model. The unique availability of disaggregate information on outputs as well as inputs permits the construction of a detailed measure of vertical integration. We rely on five measures of technological intensity to proxy for investments that are likely to be specific to a buyer–seller relationship. A theoretical model that allows for varying degrees of investment specificity and interrelatedness—externalities between buyer and supplier investments—guides the analysis. Property rights predictions on the link between investment intensities and optimal ownership are strongly supported, but only for transactions with low interrelatedness. High specificity and low risk of appropriation strengthen the predictions in the model and in the data.     

UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE AND CULTURAL TRANSMISSION: THEORY AND APPLICATION TO EUROPEAN UNEMPLOYMENT

This paper emphasizes the two‐way causality between the provision of unemployment insurance and the cultural transmission of civicness. The returns to being uncivic are increasing in the generosity of unemployment insurance; but this generosity is decreasing in the number of uncivic individuals. In this context, I determine the evolution of preferences across generations and show that cultural heterogeneity is sustained over the long‐run. The dynamics of cultural transmission can generate a long lag between the introduction of unemployment insurance and an increase in people's willingness to live off government‐provided benefits. Hence, it offers an explanation to the ‘European unemployment puzzle’ due to the coexistence of generous unemployment insurance and low unemployment in the 1950s and 1960s.     

张学良西北开发思想及其启示

张学良不仅是一位爱国将军,一位民族英雄,也是中国现代化建设的先驱。早在20世纪30年代,他就提出开发西北的一些设想,认为开发西北是复兴中国的基础,开发西北要革除私心,一致动员,借鉴美国的西部开发,同时要注意交通、环境、民族等问题。这些设想虽在当时由于缺乏现实条件难以实现,但是其现代化建设思想的重要组成部分,对今天的西部大开发仍有借鉴意义。     

The protestant work ethic,human values and attitudes towards taxation

The literature on demographic determinants of attitudes towards taxation was briefly reviewed. Whereas most previous concerned the relationship between such things as income, vote etc. and tax attitudes, this study examined the relationship between Protestant Work Ethic beliefs, social value systems and attitudes toward taxation. It was demonstrated that subjects who strongly endorsed the Protestant Work Ethic were more opposed to taxation than those who did not strongly endorse these beliefs. Further many of the instrumental and terminal value systems of subjects who were pro-taxation were significantly different from those who were anti-taxation. The results are discussed in terms of the psychology of lay-economic beliefs and implications for social change were noted.     

Binary-image restoration

We consider the problem of binary-image restoration. The image being restored is not random, and we make no assumption about the nature of its contents. The estimate of the colour at each site is a fixed (the same for all sites) function of the data available in a neighbourhood of that site. Under this restriction, the estimate minimizing the overall mean squared error of prediction is the conditional expectation of the true colour given the observations in the neighbourhood of a site. The computation of this conditional expectation leads to the formal definition of the local characteristics of an image, namely, the frequency with which each pattern appears in the true unobserved image. When the “true” distribution of the patterns is unknown, it can be estimated from the records. The conditional expectation described above can then be evaluated using the estimated distribution of the patterns, and this procedure leads to a very natural estimate of the colour at each site. We propose two unbiased and consistent estimates for the distribution of patterns when the noise is a Gaussian white noise. Since the size of realistic images is very large, the estimated pattern distribution is usually close to the true one. This suggests that the estimated conditional expectation can be expected to be nearly optimal. An interesting feature of the proposed restoration methods is that they do not require prior knowledge of the local or global properties of the true underlying image. Several examples based on synthetic images show that the new methods perform fairly well for a variety of images with different degrees of colour continuity or textures.