庚子赔款的四次变故

庚子赔款这一近代史上列强向中国勒索的数额最大的赔款 ,在支付过程中又发生了四次重大变故。贪得无厌的列强再次施展蛮横手段 ,通过“赔银给银”变成“赔银给金”及“金法郎案”等 ,进行新的敲诈勒索 ,扩大赔款数额 ;辛亥革命期间乘机夺取了对中国关税的控制权 ;列强又以退还部分庚款的伪善面目出现 ,掩盖其对华文化侵略及经济掠夺的实质     

我国国际收支对货币政策有效性的影响

在我国现有外汇管理制度下 ,国际收支通过对货币乘数和基础货币的影响从而对货币供应量产生较大的冲击 ,进而使货币政策的有效性受到影响。论文就这一影响进行了理论探讨和实证分析 ,并提出政策建议。     

Examining the association between Medicaid coverage and preterm births using 2010–2013 National Vital Statistics Birth Data

Reducing the number of preterm births is a high public health priority in the U.S. Preterm birth, affecting an estimated 380,000 infants annually, is a leading cause of infant mortality and morbidity and is associated with individual and systemic characteristics. Preterm birth is estimated to cost society $26 billion annually. Despite an elevated financial burden caused by preterm birth, very little is known about who bears these costs. This study seeks to understand the relationship between Medicaid and private insurance payment for preterm birth, using multiple years of vital statistics data, which for the first time since 2010 include information on payment source. The nationwide data cover births that occur in all settings, including non-hospital settings, and many maternal characteristics not available in other datasets, improving upon previous analyses. These data can be used to promote better Medicaid coverage of interventions known to be effective in reducing preterm births.     

Then press enter: digital payment technology and the history of telephone interface

The internet and other digital networks in the U.S. (and beyond) remain essentially an upgrade of the national telephone network built by AT&T over the first half of the twentieth century, and digital payment remains tethered to telephony at the level of infrastructure. Telephone history also continues to inform digital payment at the level of interface. Debit card readers feature a keypad nearly identical to those introduced (also by AT&T) to the dialling public a half-century ago on touch-tone telephones. In this essay I highlight the development of the touch-tone keypad as a transformative payment technology. There have been three great leaps forward in the history of telephone interface: the dial, the keypad and the touch screen. Each corresponds to a period of technological transformation in the telephone industry and society more broadly: the rotary dial and automation, touch-tone keypads and digitization, and touch screens and computerization. The successful careers of the dial and the keypad, especially when read in tandem, suggest that touch screens will alter the everyday economics of retail payment even more radically than its predecessors. I also describe a broader trajectory of digital naturalization, whereby telephone numbers have proliferated into a personal identification number, passwords and a plethora of personalized information. Payments increasingly circulate today as subsets of personal information within the vast sea of big data. Payment apps are demonstrating a capacity to reorganize retail transactions on a scale as vast as any technology since the cash register. The history of retail payment finds the point of sale heading from the till into shoppers’ pockets. As a result, consumers are increasingly shouldering the costs of purchasing, maintaining, upgrading and securing the technology used for everyday transactions.     

The European delay in transition to parenthood: the Italian case

A delay in the transition to parenthood is common to all European countries, but Mediterranean and North European young people follow different pathways of transition to adulthood, which are described in the article. Since 2003, we have conducted four social inquiries in Italian urban contexts involving male and female young people with and without children and the article is therefore focused on Italy. The principal purpose of this research programme is to interpret the determinants of the Italian phenomenon of delaying the birth of the first child. The interpretative axes for conceptualizing the problem are intergender and intergenerational comparisons. In particular, the results of these inquiries indicate that in Italy the delay of the parenthood transition is linked to the policy-makers' ‘delay’ in realizing that the decision to postpone having children is not strongly linked to any ‘crisis of family values’. The real problem is that since the beginning of the twentieth century, the present younger generation is the first to suffer from a general decrease in social opportunities as compared with the previous one. The mechanism is illustrated by Bourdieu: the new generation's members continue to form their life expectations on the basis of their parents' situations without considering the changes in conditions (e.g. inflation of study titles) that restrict their access to social resources. According to our results, the delay in the assumption of the parental role is an unintentional effect of a set of intentional actions aimed at creating and consolidating life conditions supporting self-realization. ‘Delayers’ continually try to resist the distressing sensations of precariousness, instability, vulnerability and uncertainty recognized by influential sociologists as distinctive features of contemporary life. Consequently, the delay in the family-building process takes on an active connotation: the attempt is to fill the gap in life chances related to gender and generational memberships. The last part of the article is dedicated to a comparison of European countries' social policies in support of parenthood.     

Impulsivity as a Risk Factor for HIV Transmission in Men Who Have Sex with Men: A Delay Discounting Approach

Delay discounting (DD) is a measure of impulsivity that describes the subjective decline in value of a consequence as the delay to that consequence increases. We sought to assess whether the results of a monetary DD task would be predictive of sexual risk-taking in a group of Internet-using men who have sex with men (MSM). 1402 participants completed an online survey that included questions about the participant’s demographics, sexual history and behavior, drug use, sexual compulsivity, and a monetary DD task. High DD was associated with increased odds of reporting >2 UAI partners in the past 12 months [aOR = 1.5 (1.1–2.1)]. Future studies should examine the utility of DD as a predictor of risky sexual behavior, as well as explore the possibility of HIV prevention interventions targeting DD.     

Unaliasing of aliased line component frequencies

This paper is concerned with undoing aliasing effects, which arise from discretely sampling a continuous‐time stochastic process. Such effects are manifested in the frequency‐domain relationships between the sampled and original processes. The authors describe a general technique to undo aliasing effects, given two processes, one being a time‐delayed version of the other. The technique is based on the observations that certain phase information between the two processes is unaffected by sampling, is completely determined by the (known) time delay, and contains sufficient information to undo aliasing effects. The authors illustrate their technique with a simulation example. The theoretical model is motivated by the helioseismological problem of determining modes of solar pressure waves. The authors apply their technique to solar radio data, and conclude that certain low‐frequency modes known in the helioseismology literature are likely the result of aliasing effects. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 38: 116–135; 2010 © 2010 Statistical Society of Canada     

A diagnostic statistic for functional-coefficient autoregressive models

In this paper, functional coefficient autoregressive (FAR) models proposed by Chen and Tsay (1993) are considered. We propose a diagnostic statistic for FAR models constructed by comparing between parametric and nonparametric estimators of the functional form of the FAR models. We show asymptotic properties of our statistic mathematically and it can be applied to the estimation of the delay parameter and the specification of the functional form of FAR models.     

Surveillance of the interaction parameter of the ising model

Surveillance to detect changes of spatial patterns is of interest in many areas such as environmental control and regional analysis. Here the interaction parameter of the Ising model, is considered. A minimal sufficient statistic and its asymptotic distribution are used. It is demonstrated that the convergence to normal, distribution is rapid. The main result is that when the lattice is large, all approximations are better in several respects. It is shown that, for large lattice sizes, earlier results on surveillance of a normally distributed random variable can be used in cases of most interest. The expected delay of alarm at a fixed level of false alarm probability is examined for some examples.     

双重权衡机制下地方财政决策及其风险

为研究地方政府的财政实际能力究竟是否存在一定的赤字，以及公共财政预算赤字决策等问题，将公共预算视作地方政府可通过财政征收力度来进行调控的内生变量，对中央与地方政府的财政收支进行分析。研究认为，在加入地方非公共财政预算收入后，发现地方财政实际能力并不存在赤字反而表现为盈余；与既往文献将公共财政预算收入作为与政府行为无关的外生变量不同，地方政府在制定财政决策时需要同时考虑“公共财政预算总收入与公共财政预算净收入”的短期权衡和“经济增长竞争与财政收入”的长期权衡，使得地方政府在短期权衡中偏向于调节财政征收力度实现最优而非财政预算收入最大化，在长期权衡中偏向于持续调控公共财政预算收入而保持公共财政预算赤字；双重权衡机制会扩大央地财政不平衡，在一定程度上影响中央财政的长期稳健和削弱地方公共财政预算支出增长的可持续性；应该进一步推进财政体制改革，寻找到央地财政关系的新平衡点，以适应新时代发展需求和保障财政能够始终成为经济发展的重大推动力。