The effects of job displacement on job quality: Findings from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study

This study examines the extent to which job displacement divides the career experiences for a cohort of workers. Previous studies of job displacement find nontrivial economic losses for displaced workers, but the effects of displacement on “non-economic” properties of jobs have been largely overlooked. Results using the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study indicate that workers who were displaced have lower levels of occupational status, job authority, and employer-offered pension and health insurance than they would have had had they not been displaced. Difference-in-differences estimates, which control for temporally-invariant unobserved heterogeneity, are generally larger than cross-sectional estimates; still, there is a close correspondence of estimates across a range of methodological approaches attesting to the robustness of the estimates in the face of various technical assumptions and model specifications. Effects of displacement on job quality also exhibit conditioning by gender, education, occupation, and industry: while less educated, blue collar and manufacturing workers experience significant losses for employer-offered benefits, more educated, upper white collar and non-manufacturing workers experience significant losses for occupational status, job autonomy, and job authority.     

信息化条件下流通商主导的供应链动态联盟

供应链动态联盟是信息技术发达、市场需求主导的条件下实现敏捷生产和流通的重要组织形式。是一种基于非正式契约的不完全市场交易方式。在消费者占据主导权、生产企业逐渐归核化（refkusing）的条件下,流通商在联盟中居于重要地位。文章论述了信息网络技术高度发达的条件下流通商主导的供应链动态联盟的运作机制,以期能够为建立和谐高效的产销关系提供理论支持。     

要素匹配与中国投资效率空间差异性——基于双层嵌套型函数的分解研究

本文基于四要素双层嵌套的生产函数,利用1990-2016年全国层面及省际层面数据测算投资效率,并分析其空间结构特征及演变轨迹,检验投资效率匹配效应影响因素。研究发现：①1990-2016年我国整体投资效率呈下降趋势,资本-技能劳动匹配效应与整体投资效率走势趋同,快速累积的资本存量和不断升级的资本质量与短缺的技能劳动之间矛盾突出。②东中西部地区投资效率增长非一致性明显。东部地区资本相对投资效率明显高于中西部,但下降幅度大于中西部,中西部与东部地区之间差距缩小,其中匹配效应是区域间投资效率非平衡的主要成因。③若产业结构升级的技能劳动需求不能满足,将引发要素错配,不利于有效投资。房价与工资提升分别通过影响技能劳动供给和需求抑制要素匹配效率;教育和公路设施会对地区要素匹配产生积极影响,改善地区间投资效率非均衡性;地区投资效率存在显著正向空间相关性,毗邻地区的要素流动和经济发展相近地区的技术溢出均对投资效率产生积极的影响。     

Using the Standardized Difference to Compare the Prevalence of a Binary Variable Between Two Groups in Observational Research

Researchers are increasingly using the standardized difference to compare the distribution of baseline covariates between treatment groups in observational studies. Standardized differences were initially developed in the context of comparing the mean of continuous variables between two groups. However, in medical research, many baseline covariates are dichotomous. In this article, we explore the utility and interpretation of the standardized difference for comparing the prevalence of dichotomous variables between two groups. We examined the relationship between the standardized difference, and the maximal difference in the prevalence of the binary variable between two groups, the relative risk relating the prevalence of the binary variable in one group compared to the prevalence in the other group, and the phi coefficient for measuring correlation between the treatment group and the binary variable. We found that a standardized difference of 10% (or 0.1) is equivalent to having a phi coefficient of 0.05 (indicating negligible correlation) for the correlation between treatment group and the binary variable.     

杜子春音和二郑音的音义匹配

杜子春音和二郑音,无效音切的比例相当高。除读为外,杜子春音和二郑音都不是杜子春和二郑注的,而是陆德明注的。     

Stable matching problems with exchange restrictions

We study variants of classical stable matching problems in which there is an additional requirement for a stable matching, namely that there should not be two participants who would prefer to exchange partners. The problem is motivated by the experience of real-world medical matching schemes that use stable matchings, where cases have arisen in which two participants discovered that each of them would prefer the other’s allocation, a situation that is seen as unfair. Our main result is that the problem of deciding whether an instance of the classical stable marriage problem admits a stable matching, with the additional property that no two men would prefer to exchange partners, is NP-complete. This implies a similar result for more general problems, such as the hospitals/residents problem, the many-to-one extension of stable marriage. Unlike previous NP-hardness results for variants of stable marriage, the proof exploits the powerful algebraic structure underlying the set of all stable matchings. In practical matching schemes, however, applicants’ preference lists are typically of short fixed length, and we describe a linear time algorithm for the problem in the special case where all of the men’s preference lists are of length ≤3.     

收入风险、金融教育与家庭金融市场参与

运用中国城市居民消费金融调查数据,基于因果推断的分析框架,采用倾向分值匹配法研究了收入风险、金融教育对家庭金融市场参与的影响。研究发现,收入越稳定,家庭开展金融教育的概率越高;金融教育显著提高了家庭的金融市场参与;按收入风险将样本分组后,上述结论依然稳健,且金融教育对不同家庭金融市场参与的影响具有非对称性。在对家庭收入稳定性分类的基础上,有针对性地增加金融教育的供给,提升家庭整体的金融教育水平,有利于提高家庭金融市场参与度,优化家庭金融资产配置,进而改善家庭金融福利。     

The Demand for Labor: An Analysis Using Matched Employer–Employee Data from the German LIAB. Will the High Unskilled Worker Own-Wage Elasticity Please Stand Up?

This paper uses matched employee–employer LIAB data to provide panel estimates of the structure of labor demand in western Germany, 1993–2002, distinguishing between highly skilled, skilled, and unskilled labor and between the manufacturing and service sectors. Reflecting current preoccupations, our demand analysis seeks also to accommodate the impact of technology and trade in addition to wages. The bottom-line interests are to provide elasticities of the demand for unskilled (and other) labor that should assist in short-run policy design and to identify the extent of skill biases or otherwise in trade and technology.

Teacher shortages, teacher contracts and their effect on education in Africa

Summary.  To enhance primary enrolment rates, many African countries have launched large teacher recruitment programmes in recent years. Given tight budgetary constraints, teachers are no longer employed in civil service positions, but on the basis of (fixed term) contracts typically implying considerably lower salaries and a sharply reduced amount of professional training. We analyse the effect of this change on educational quality in Niger, Togo and Mali, on the basis of very informative data, which are comparable across these countries. We use a variety of estimation techniques, including a non-parametric estimation of quantile treatment effects. Our results demonstrate that contract teachers tend to reduce inequalities in student outcomes. Overall, the effects are positive in Mali, somewhat mixed in Togo and negative in Niger. This ordering is consistent with theoretical expectations related to the manner in which contract teacher programmes were implemented differently in each of the three countries under study.     

Bayesian and likelihood-based inference for the bivariate normal correlation coefficient

The paper develops some objective priors for correlation coefficient of the bivariate normal distribution. The criterion used is the asymptotic matching of coverage probabilities of Bayesian credible intervals with the corresponding frequentist coverage probabilities. The paper uses various matching criteria, namely, quantile matching, highest posterior density matching, and matching via inversion of test statistics. Each matching criterion leads to a different prior for the parameter of interest. We evaluate their performance by comparing credible intervals through simulation studies. In addition, inference through several likelihood-based methods have been discussed.