Institutional Conditions of Economic Globalization: Effects of Antitrust and Merger Laws on the Global Integration of the Acquisition Market1

A central insight from institutional theory about markets is that they cannot operate without governing rules to guide interactions among actors. Because most of these rules are made and enforced within national borders, international economic transactions are said to suffer from an “institutional abyss,” the lack of institutional arrangements for economic exchanges. Scholars have found that the abyss can be filled by two factors: network connectedness, such as inter-governmental organizations, and intercountry economic agreements, such as the World Trade Organization or free trade. This article proposes a third factor: the global diffusion of governmental regulations. When countries adopt highly standardized regulations on a particular transaction, it provides legal familiarity for foreigners and reduces procedural uncertainty surrounding how the transaction should be executed. Using fixed-effects models on longitudinal data, I show that the adoption of antitrust and merger laws increases the volume of cross-border mergers—the transaction the laws are meant to regulate. This result stands in direct opposition to financial scholars’ predictions that antitrust and merger laws will reduce cross-border mergers because the laws are meant to restrain, not liberate, the transaction. This article theorizes how the diffusion of regulations, not the elimination of regulations, can facilitate global market integration.     

Pricing and hedging equity-indexed annuities via local risk-minimization

Lin et al. (2009) employed the Esscher transform method to price equity-indexed annuities (EIAs) when the dynamic of the market value of a reference asset was driven by a generalized geometric Brownian motion model with regime-switching. Some rare events (release of an unexpected economic figure, major political changes or even a natural disaster in a major economy) can lead to brusque variations in asset prices, and hence we sometimes need to consider jump models. This paper extends the model and analysis in Lin et al. (2009). Specifically, we assume that the financial market has a regime-switching jump-diffusion model, under which we price the point-to-point, the Asian-end, the high water mark and the annual reset EIAs by exploiting the local risk-minimization approach. The effects of the model parameters on the EIAs pricing are illustrated through numerical experiments. Meanwhile, we present the locally risk-minimizing hedging strategies for EIAs.     

André Dabrowski's work on limit theorems and weak dependence

André Robert Dabrowski, Professor of Mathematics and Dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Ottawa, died October 7, 2006, after a short battle with cancer. The author of the present paper, a long‐term friend and collaborator of André Dabrowski, gives a survey of André's work on weak dependence and limit theorems in probability theory. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 37: 307–326; 2009 © 2009 Statistical Society of Canada     

互联网时代我国主流意识形态传播面临的挑战及对策

意识形态工作是党的一项极端重要的工作,在互联网时代尤其如此.面对网络社会发展新态势,由于未能充分顾及传播主体多元化、传播载体多样化以及传播内容复杂化、传播过程互动化带来的巨大挑战以及传播受众在信息传导中地位的空前提升,传统的主流意识形态传播方式在一定程度上失却效力,进而严重冲击了主流意识形态的主导地位.面对空前变局,主流意识形态传播亟需通过加强对传播主体的思想教育提升其认识水平、以严格监管来规范传播载体建设、建立多元立体审查机制对传播内容严加甄别以及增强全体网民的媒介素养与净化网络空间等手段,切实提升传播实效,进而完善互联网环境下主流意识形态的传播体系、增强传播效力,从根本上维护我国社会主义意识形态的主导地位.     

区域工业化进程中的技术扩散因素

中国经济增长已经进入了一个新的时期,本文认为有三个显著的特征:一是制造业结构中的技术因素不断增加,对经济结构调整的推动力度越来越大.二是区域技术产业的不同增长率造成了经济发展水平的差异,而区域制造业结构越趋于技术化,区域经济持续增长的可能性越大.三是新兴技术产业的兴起和扩大将加快区域工业化的速度.本文提出:区域实现工业化的战略是如何选择新技术产业来提升重化工业化的内涵,而不是讨论是否要发展技术产业和走重化工业化道路的问题.     

Knowledge and beliefs about national development and developmental hierarchies: The viewpoints of ordinary people in thirteen countries

Scholars and policy makers have for centuries constructed and used developmental hierarchies to characterize different countries. The hypotheses motivating this paper are that such social constructions have been circulated internationally, are constructed similarly in various countries, and follow the social constructions of elite international organizations, such as the United Nations. This paper uses data from 15 surveys in 13 diverse countries to study how developmental hierarchies are understood in everyday life. Our research shows that most people have constructions of developmental hierarchies that are similar across countries and are similar to the developmental hierarchies constructed by the United Nations. These findings suggest that developmental hierarchies are widely understood around the world and are widely available to ordinary people as they make decisions about many aspects of life.     

Infectious Innovations? The Diffusion of Tactical Innovation in Social Movement Networks,the Case of Suffragette Militancy

This paper explores the diffusion of a tactical innovation – militancy – within the British Suffrage Movement, 1905–1914. It concentrates upon the influences that arise from personal social networks and which affect ego's decision about whether to adopt the new tactic. UCINET is used to map and visualise the activist networks of two suffragettes who made different adoption decisions. This reveals that ‘weak ties’ to ‘innovation champions’ (i.e. suffragette ‘travelling organisers’) connected both women to opportunities to learn about, observe and adopt militancy. In order to explain why one suffragette adopted the tactic and the other did not, however, there is a need to link structural and cultural analyses of social networks together. Here, I do this by following up empirically what Fuhse [Fuhse, J. (2009). The meaning structure of social networks. Sociological Theory, 27, 51–73] has called the ‘meaning structure of the network’ consisting of interpersonal expectations and network culture. I propose that the ‘meaning structure’ of the network is linked to the structural patterning of social ties – and the subjective meanings of ego – through the communicative interaction in which they both are rooted [Mische, A. (2003). Cross-talk in movements: Rethinking the culture-network link. In M. Diani & D. McAdam (Eds.), Social movements and networks: Relational approaches to collective action (pp. 258–280). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press]. Focusing on communicative interaction and intersubjective meanings indicates that there is value in approaching personal networks as socio-cultural ‘lifeworlds’ [Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action, volume 2: System and lifeworld. Boston, MA: Beacon Press; Passy, F., & Giugni, M. (2000). Life-spheres, networks, and sustained participation in social movements: A phenomenological approach to political commitment. Sociological Forum, 15, 117–144.). This approach is particularly valuable in highlighting the construction of a ‘moral point of view’ within networks, which fundamentally shapes the symbolic legitimacy of culturally controversial tactics.     

Modelling free social spaces and the diffusion of social mobilization

Free social spaces have long been emphasized in the social movement literature. Under names such as safe spaces, social havens, and counterpublics, they have been characterized as protective shelters against prevailing hegemonic ideologies and as hubs for the diffusion of ideas and ideologies. However, the vast literature on these spaces has predominantly focused on internal dynamics and processes, thus neglecting how they relate to the diffusion of collective mobilization. Inspired by formal modeling in collective action research, we develop a network model to investigate how the structural properties of free social spaces impact the diffusion of collective mobilization. Our results show that the assumption of clustering is enough for structural effects to emerge, and that clustering furthermore interacts synergistically with political deviance. This indicates that it is not only internal dynamics that play a role in the relevance of free social spaces for collective action. Our approach also illustrates how formal modeling can deepen our understanding of diffusion processes in collective mobilizations through analysis of emergent structural effects.     

基于生存分析法的医疗电子病历系统采纳与扩散研究

医疗电子病历系统作为中国医疗信息化建设的核心,关注其采纳与扩散机理,对推进医疗卫生信息化建设,以及实现有意义地使用具有重要的理论和实践意义。基于云南省222家医院信息化建设的调研数据,运用半参数生存分析法即Cox回归模型探讨医院采纳电子病历系统的影响因素及扩散机理。研究表明,教学状态、医院规模和建院时间均为有利因素,即这三个因素积极促进医院采纳电子病历系统;时间×规模为不利因素,即它对医院采纳电子病历系统有负向影响;地理位置在分层和删减样本的模型分析中均表现为不利因素;医院等级影响并不明显。     

价格随供求变化的竞争扩散系统捕获模型(Ⅱ)

对价格随供求变化的竞争扩散系统的捕获模型中扩散和捕获并存的情形进行了分析．从生物学和经济学角度得出了扩散存在情形下开放式捕获所遵循的自然规律，为生物资源的实际管理提供了理论依据．