净明道与传统道派关系考述

作者考察了宋元净明道的思想观念与宗教仪式,并探讨了其与传统道派如天师道、灵宝派、上清派、钟吕金丹道等的关系,认为净明道乃是当时融合了符箓与内丹之说为一体的新兴道派。     

Welfare generosity, pregnancies and abortions among unmarried AFDC recipients

Even before the 1996 overhaul of the U.S. welfare system, a number of states had ended the practice of paying extra benefits to families who have additional children while receiving welfare. Proponents believe that this reform can reduce births to recipients, however many worry that it may encourage women to obtain abortions. Using a sample of unmarried AFDC recipients from the NLSY, we estimate a bivariate probit model of pregnancy and, conditional on becoming pregnant, the probability of abortion. Our results lend some support for the proposition that reducing incremental AFDC benefits will decrease pregnancies without increasing abortions. Received: 16 April 1998/Accepted: 11 March 1999     

Decomposing primary and secondary effects: A new decomposition method

One strand of educational inequality research aims at decomposing the effect of social class origin on educational choices into primary and secondary effects. We formalize this distinction and present a new and simple method that allows empirical assessment of the relative magnitudes of primary and secondary effects. Contrary to other decomposition methods, this new method is unbiased, is more intuitive, and decomposes effects of both discrete and continuous measures of social origin. The method also provides analytically derived statistical tests and is easily calculated with standard statistical software. We give examples using the Danish Longitudinal Survey of Youth.     

The duration of unemployment in Russia

This paper uses longitudinal survey data to assess factors affecting the duration of unemployment in Russia. We examine four types of marginalised labour force participants, according to ILO guidelines and survey responses, and we estimate duration models for each type. It turns out that the sets of characteristics with the strongest effects on the duration are remarkably similar across the different unemployment definitions and model specifications. Therefore, despite the formidable practical measurement problems, problematic groups of individuals can actually be identified. Received: 27 January 1999/Accepted: 27 January 2000     

The macroeconomics of fertility in small open economies: A test of the Becker-Barro model for The Netherlands and New Zealand

Becker and Barro (1988) formulated a theoretical model which identified a range of macroeconomic variables which can temporarily or permanently affect fertility in small open economies. This article tests the Becker-Barro model with relevant data which covers most of the 20th century for two small open economies, namely The Netherlands and New Zealand. The results show that government subsidies for having children have a strong positive effect on fertility, while the provision of public pensions has a strong negative effect. The degree of intergenerational altruism appears to have been declining. Moreover, there is only weak support for the hypothesis that real interest rates positively influence fertility. Received: 2 March 1998/Accepted: 1 September 1999     

Age structure effects and growth in the OECD, 1950–1990

Economic growth depends on human resources and human needs. The demographic age structure shapes both of these factors. We study five-year data from the OECD countries 1950–1990 in the framework of an age structure augmented neoclassical growth model with gradual technical adjustment. The model performs well in both pooled and panel estimations. The growth patterns of GDP per worker (labor productivity) in the OECD countries are to a large extent explained by age structure changes. The 50–64 age group has a positive influence, and the group above 65 contributes negatively, while younger age groups have ambiguous effects. However, the mechanism behind these age effects is not yet resolved. Received: 16 January 1997/Accepted: 2 July 1998     

Noninformative priors for linear combinations of normal means with unequal variances

For normal populations with unequal variances, we develop matching priors and reference priors for a linear combination of the means. Here, we find three second-order matching priors: a highest posterior density (HPD) matching prior, a cumulative distribution function (CDF) matching prior, and a likelihood ratio (LR) matching prior. Furthermore, we show that the reference priors are all first-order matching priors, but that they do not satisfy the second-order matching criterion that establishes the symmetry and the unimodality of the posterior under the developed priors. The results of a simulation indicate that the second-order matching prior outperforms the reference priors in terms of matching the target coverage probabilities, in a frequentist sense. Finally, we compare the Bayesian credible intervals based on the developed priors with the confidence intervals derived from real data.     

Frequency domain bootstrap for ratio statistics under long-range dependence

A frequency domain bootstrap (FDB) is a common technique to apply Efron’s independent and identically distributed resampling technique (Efron, 1979) to periodogram ordinates – especially normalized periodogram ordinates – by using spectral density estimates. The FDB method is applicable to several classes of statistics, such as estimators of the normalized spectral mean, the autocorrelation (but not autocovariance), the normalized spectral density function, and Whittle parameters. While this FDB method has been extensively studied with respect to short-range dependent time processes, there is a dearth of research on its use with long-range dependent time processes. Therefore, we propose an FDB methodology for ratio statistics under long-range dependence, using semi- and nonparametric spectral density estimates as a normalizing factor. It is shown that the FDB approximation allows for valid distribution estimation for a broad class of stationary, long-range (or short-range) dependent linear processes, without any stringent assumptions on the distribution of the underlying process. The results of a large simulation study show that the FDB approximation using a semi- or nonparametric spectral density estimator is often robust for various values of a long-memory parameter reflecting magnitude of dependence. We apply the proposed procedure to two data examples.     

Conditional variance estimation via nonparametric generalized additive models

Generalized additive models provide a way of circumventing curse of dimension in a wide range of nonparametric regression problem. In this paper, we present a multiplicative model for conditional variance functions where one can apply a generalized additive regression method. This approach extends Fan and Yao (1998) to multivariate cases with a multiplicative structure. In this approach, we use squared residuals instead of using log-transformed squared residuals. This idea gives a smaller variance than Yu (2017) when the variance of squared error is smaller than the variance of log-transformed squared error. We provide estimators based on quasi-likelihood and an iterative algorithm based on smooth backfitting for generalized additive models. We also provide some asymptotic properties of estimators and the convergence of proposed algorithm. A numerical study shows the empirical evidence of the theory.