"天书降神"新议--北宋与契丹的文化竞争

宋真宗"天书降神"一事,不但为当时"不语怪力乱神"的儒者反对,亦为今世秉后见之明,崇尚"理性"、"科学"的学人严厉批判.但元儒修撰<宋史>,于此曾表"同情之理解".本文即以此为起点,以考据为基础,试图揭示"天书降神"背后的文化意蕴和实际效果,并提出与亨廷顿"文明冲突"(the clash of civilizations)不同的观念--"文化竞争"(the cultural struggle).     

论西域文化与民族关系的发展

文章从汉文化在西域的传播条件、西域的屯垦移民促使汉文化的广泛传播、西域教育使汉文化逐步植根于少数民族文化等方面论述了文化维系力的重要性。     

纳西族空间观念之色彩表象

空间是抽象的 ,只有对它们进行具体的表象 ,才能将抽象还原成具体。无论在纳西族民俗中 ,还是在其他民族的民俗中 ,色彩常常成为对空间方位进行表象的具体手段之一。由色彩所表象的空间不仅决定着民俗活动的性质 ,也规范着民俗活动的形式与内容。本文从前空间、原空间等方面对纳西族民俗中空间的色彩表象作了介绍和分析     

A Level Playing Field: An Optimal Weighting Scheme of Dismissal Protection Characteristics

In collective redundancies, employers are forced to regard certain characteristics when deciding who to dismiss. This paper develops a procedure to derive an empirical‐based weighting scheme between protection characteristics in Germany (age, disability, dependencies, and tenure). Up to now, an objective weighting scheme is missing, and employers bargain with employee's representatives about the weighting of the characteristics. In the suggested procedure, the relationships of the four characteristics with reemployment probabilities and the quality of the new job are estimated. Then, the relevant outcome variable is chosen applying life satisfaction analysis. Finally, based on the empirical results, a weighting scheme for the characteristics is proposed, which serves as a guideline in the process of collective redundancies.     

Gender Unemployment Dynamics: Evidence from Ten Advanced Economies

The paper investigates gender unemployment dynamics in 10 advances economies applying a recent methodology on widely available Labour Force Surveys data. We calculate the job finding and separation rates for each gender and use them to construct the steady‐state unemployment gap as well as two counterfactual gender unemployment gaps: one generated by differences only in job finding rates and the other by differences only in separation rates. We find that in all countries the gender unemployment gap attributed to differences in the job finding rate is lower than the gap attributed to differences in the separation rate, suggesting that gender differences in the separation rate are the major factor behind the gender unemployment gap.     

What Survey Data Reveal about Price and Wage Rigidity in Portugal

This paper exploits the information collected from a survey conducted on a sample of Portuguese firms to study the patterns of firms’ price and wage adjustments and the extent of nominal price and wage rigidities. The evidence shows that the frequency of price changes varies substantially across sectors and depends on the intensity of competition, the share of labor costs and firms’ price reviewing behavior. The results also suggest that the constraint imposed by the presence of downward nominal wage rigidity is less important in firms where the fraction of permanent and high‐skilled workers is lower and the share of flexible pay components is higher.     

New Firms as Employers: The Wage Penalty for Voluntary and Involuntary Job Switchers

According to previous research, new firms pay lower wages. However, previous studies have been unable to control for the possibility that the opportunity costs of accepting employment at new firms may differ across individuals. In this paper, we investigate whether a wage penalty for being employed at a new firm exists if we take the individual employee's experience and status in the labour market into consideration. We focus on individuals who decide to switch jobs and use matched employee–employer data about all firms and employees in Sweden for the period 1998–2010. Our results show that the share of job transitions into lower wages are higher for those who switch to new firms compared with incumbent firms (40 per cent and 31 per cent, respectively). Our endogenous wage equation estimates indicate that being an involuntary job switcher has an equally negative effect on wages at both new and incumbent firms. However, the positive effect of education on wages is more pronounced for job switchers selecting into incumbent firms.     

Is There a Double‐Negative Effect? Gender and Ethnic Wage Differentials in Italy

This paper investigates the gender and ethnic wage differentials for female migrants in Italy by applying the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition, with and without Heckman correction, to account for self‐selection into the labour market. The gender wage gap is nearly 15 per cent, more than 60 per cent of which is unexplained by observable differences. The ethnic wage gap is much larger (39 per cent), but endowments explain 53 per cent of the gap. We also estimate the double‐negative effect of being both female and a migrant. A female migrant earns 42 per cent less than an Italian male; the unexplained component is estimated to be 53–65 per cent. Results are robust to different specifications.     

THE INEFFICIENCY OF WORKER TIME USE

Much work is carried out in short, interrupted segments. This phenomenon, which we label task juggling, has been overlooked by economists. We study the work schedules of some judges in Italy documenting that they do juggle tasks and that juggling causally lowers their productivity substantially. To measure the size of this effect, we show that although all these judges receive the same workload, those who juggle more trials at once instead of working sequentially on few of them at each unit of time, take longer to complete their portfolios of cases. Task juggling seems to have no adverse effect on the quality of the judges' decisions, as measured by the percent of decisions appealed. To identify these causal effects we estimate models with judge fixed effects and we exploit the lottery assigning cases to judges. We discuss whether task juggling can be viewed as inefficient, and provide a back‐of‐the‐envelope calculation of the social cost of longer trials due to task juggling.