文学批评的改造与独立——从艾·阿·瑞恰兹到诺斯罗普·弗莱

在英美文学批评的发展过程中,有一个阶段十分重要。在这一阶段,批评不但摆脱了传统的印象式文学鉴赏形式,在文学内部被重新定义,而且逐渐被专业化和制度化,成为大学教育中的一门学科。这一过程中,瑞恰兹、克莱恩、兰色姆和弗莱几位批评家起到了至关重要的作用,文章讨论这几位批评家是如何重新定义文学批评并使之适应大学教育,并最终使批评独立于其他学科的。     

Identities, conflicting behavioural norms and the importance of job attributes

The paper empirically expounds the richness of the identity approach to labour-market behaviour by allowing individuals to experience identity conflict. Specifically, it investigates the relationship between the importance individuals attach to labour-market activities - which is influenced by the identity to which they adhere - and their preferences for job attributes. The analysis shows that individuals who consider labour-market success as instrumental for achieving their life goals tend to attach importance to job characteristics such as pay level and career and training opportunities. Individuals for whom non-labour-market activities are important and in conflict with labour-market activities are found to attach importance to the possibility of working on a convenient time schedule. Moreover, consistently with the identity approach to labour-market behaviour, men appear to resolve the conflict between career and non-work activities in favor of the former.Finally, unobserved factors that increase the desire to work part-time have a negative impact on the likelihood of attaching importance to the training and career opportunities offered by the job.     

Internet‐Based Employer Search and Vacancy Duration: Evidence from Finland

This study investigates the effect of the introduction of the public employment agency's Internet‐based service on the duration of employer search. The analysis exploits the introduction of a web‐based service by the Finnish Employment Agency in October 2002. The results, based on information on job vacancies announced via the public employment agency between 2002 and 2003, indicate that the introduction of the web service, in general, shortened the duration of employer search. However, we find that the introduction of the web‐based service shortened the average duration of vacancies in some regions but not in others. In addition, employers in urban areas were more likely to benefit from the introduction of the online service.     

Unemployment and earnings for second generation immigrants in Sweden. Ethnic background and parent composition

This study sheds light on the labour market outcomes of children born to immigrants in the destination country, i.e. second generation immigrants. The study has the advantage of being able to (i) identify several different ethnic backgrounds and (ii) identify the parent composition, i.e. whether one or both parents of the individual are foreign born. The labour market outcomes of second generation immigrants mirror those of first generation immigrants in that we find heterogeneity in labour market outcomes to be associated with ethnic background. Moreover, these outcomes, especially for Southern and non-European backgrounds, are much worse than those for native-born with a Swedish background. Finally, the outcome is more favourable if one parent is born in Sweden compared to having both parents foreign born, especially if the mother is native born.All Correspondence to Dan-Olof Rooth. We are grateful for several helpful comments and suggestions from two anonymous referees. A research grant from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research is gratefully acknowledged. Responsible editor: Christoph M. Schmidt.     

The school-to-work transition of 2<Superscript>nd</Superscript> generation immigrants in Denmark

2^nd generation immigrants from less developed countries have less education and a lower employment frequency compared to the native Danish youth. We analyse the school-to-work transition of these groups using panel data for the years 1985–1997. The educational gap between 2^nd generation immigrants and the Danish youth is to some extent explained by age structure, while age does not explain the native-immigrant gap concerning the duration of waiting time until first job and the duration of first employment spell. Instead parental capital and neighbourhood effects seem to play a major role. We find large gender differences among 2^nd generation immigrants in the school-to-work transition.All Correspondence to Nina Smith. Thanks to Thomas Haugaard Jensen, Anne-Sofie Reng Rasmussen and Mette Skak-Nielsen who have done part of the computational work. We also want to thank two anynomous referees and participants in the ESF-conference on Migration and Development in Naples 2000 and the ESPE conference in Athens 2001 for many valuable comments. The project has been financed by the Danish Social Science Research Council (FREJA), the Danish Ministry of Labour and TSER. Furthermore, Helena Skyt Nielsen has been supported financially by the Danish Social Science Research Council (SSF), while this work was undertaken. Responsible editors: David Card and Christopher M. Schmidt.     

Immigrant earnings: Language skills, linguistic concentrations and the business cycle

This study of the determinants of earnings among adult foreign-born men using the 1990 Census of Population focuses on the effects of the respondent's own English language skills, the effects of living in a linguistic concentration area, and the effects of the stage of the business cycle at entry into the U.S. labor market. The analysis demonstrates the importance of English language fluency among the foreign born from non-English speaking countries. There is also strong evidence for the complementarity between language skills and other forms of human capital. Furthermore, there is strong evidence using selectivity correction techniques for the endogeneity between language and earnings. Received: 30 November 1999/Accepted: 6 February 2001     

Brother correlations in earnings in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden compared to the United States

The correlation in economic status among siblings is a useful “omnibus measure” of the overall impact of family and community factors on adult economic status. In this study we compare brother correlations in long-run (permanent) earnings between the United States, on one hand, and the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) on the other. Our base case results, based on very similar sample criteria and definitions for all countries, show that this correlation is above 0.40 in the United States and in the range 0.14–0.26 in the Nordic countries. Even though these results turn out to be somewhat sensitive to some assumptions that have to be made, we conclude that the family and community factors are more important determinants of long-run earnings in the United States than in the Nordic countries. Received: 27 July 2000/Accepted: 7 March 2001 All correspondence to: Anders Bj?rklund. Comments from two referees, conference participants at ESPE2000 and the Canadian Employment Research Forum, seminar participants in Aarhus, Uppsala, Bonn, and Stockholm are gratefully acknowledged. We thank NOS-S for financial support. The Swedish data collection was also supported by HSFR and SFR. The Finnish data were obtained with support from the Yrj? Jahnsson Foundation. We thank Tom Erik Aab? for preparing the Norwegian data, and Esben Agerbo for computational assistance with the Danish data. Responsible editor: John F. Ermisch.     

Bequest division and population growth: A lineal extinction probability approach

This study uses a lineal-extinction-probability-minimization approach proposed by Chu (1991) to study the relation between bequest division and population growth. Using a Markov branching process and “first-degree stochastic dominance” technique, our model's results imply that any specific bequest division, primogeniture or equal divisions, does not necessarily increase or reduce the population growth by itself. Whether the population does grow, or by how much, will be determined by the concurrent social-economic conditions. We find that if all family heads faced an increasing MRTS technology and/or a relatively unfair market chance, then they would tend to choose an unequal division as their optimal bequest policy, and population growth would increase. However, if an equal division was adopted involuntarily by family heads or was enforced by laws, then the population growth might decline. Received: 26 November 1999/Accepted: 26 October 2000     

Residential location and youth unemployment: The economic geography of school-to-work transitions

In response to increased international policy attention to youth unemployment this study investigates post-secondary school transitions of school leavers. Multinomial logit models are estimated for male and female German youth. The models control for individual, parent, and household characteristics, for those of the youth's region of residence and local labor markets. The findings suggest that immigrant youth has particularly low participation rates in continued education, and that youth unemployment is centered in high unemployment states and metropolitan areas. More generous academic benefit policies seem to be correlated with increased academic enrollment, and men's transitions to the military do reflect recent changes in defense policies. Received: 30 November 1999/Accepted: 3 August 2000     

Sex selection and fertility in a dynamic model of conception and abortion

This paper investigates the effect of prenatal sex selection on fertility through a stochastic dynamic model with uncertainty in conception as well as in gender, where a woman makes decisions on conception and abortion with or without gender detection tests (i.e. sex-selective or sex-unselective abortion). The paper shows that, when the cost of gender detection test falls, the sex ratio at birth rises due to more selective abortions, but fertility can rise or fall with rising sex ratio. Fertility may rise (fall) if there are more (less) women giving up unselective abortions for selective abortions than women giving up childbirths without test for selective abortions. Similarly the paper shows that the sex ratio can rise or fall, when fertility decreases as the cost of children increases. I test these propositions as well as their implications against micro survey data on the pregnancy history of Korean women.Responsible editor: Junsen Zhang.