Job Mobility and Early Career Wage Growth of White,African‐American,and Hispanic Women*

Objective. This article examines whether and how young women's job mobility influences racial and ethnic wage‐growth differentials during the first eight years after leaving school. Methods. We use the NLSY‐79 Work History File to simulate the influence of job mobility on the wages of skilled and unskilled workers. Results. African‐American and Hispanic women average less job mobility than white women, especially if they did not attend college. Unskilled women who experience frequent job changes during the first four postschool years reap positive wage returns, but turnover beyond the shopping period incurs wage penalties. Job mobility does not appear to boost wage growth for college‐educated women. Conclusions. Among unskilled women, race and ethnic wage disparities partly derive from group differences in the frequency of job changes, but unequal returns to job mobility drive the wage gaps for skilled women. We discuss several explanations for these disparities.     

Pollutant Ground Concentrations of Nonneutrally Buoyant Particles

A methodology is suggested for the estimation of the mass density and the cumulative ground deposition of a nonvolatile, nonneutrally buoyant, air pollutant (liquid or solid) released from a polluted column (following an explosion caused during routine operation in, e.g., the chemical industry or due to any kind of hostile act) and deposited on the ground via gravitational settling. In many cases, the deposited mass due to gravitational settling constitutes a significant fraction of the original inventory released from the source. Implementation of the methodology in preliminary risk assessments can serve as an efficient tool for emergency planning for both immediate and long‐term measures such as evacuation and decontamination. The methodology considers, inter alia, an estimation of the critical particle diameter, particle size, and mass distributions along the polluted column. This methodology was developed to apply in rural regions since proper application of relevant meteorological input data can be accomplished mainly for such areas.     

Role of Comparative Risk Assessment in Addressing Environmental Security in the Middle East

During the 21st century, environmental challenges are likely to intensify across the world and possibly lead to violent conflicts. Strategies for conflict avoidance will be incomplete unless they recognize, discuss, and mitigate regional environmental stress factors. Comparative risk assessment (CRA) is one of the most critical tools emerging to influence modern environmental policies and is increasingly used to create a common language to help reconcile competing interests in development and environmental disputes around the world. This article considers the environmental challenges facing the Middle East in light of their "transboundary" nature and proposes CRA as a framework for setting environmental priorities and reducing tensions in the region.     

The Local Life of Nationhood

What characterises many studies that invoke the local can be described as a logic of transcendence. This logic of transcendence does not reject nor disregard the local. Rather, it affirms the centrality of the local. At the same time, the focus is on how the local is historically transcended into higher levels of generality and abstraction; the argument is that only through attention to these higher levels that the meanings of the local become clear. In contrast, the other local which we refer to in this essay is a set of practices which emerges in intimate relationship to nationalism, which in some ways even sustains nationalism, even though the places it produces cannot be understood within the same logic of transcendence. At times, this other local refers to the political and conceptual practices that emerged at the limits of the abstract time and space that constituted nationalism. At other times, this local refers to the marginal in order to represent nationhood anew. Nationhood does not exhaust, sublate or transcend this local; rather, this local continues to live, in the era of nationhood, not so much outside the national, but beyond and alongside it. This other local is explored in this essay by discussing the cases of Germany and India.     

The inverse Banzhaf problem

Let ${\mathcal{F}}Let F{\mathcal{F}} be a family of subsets of the ground set [n] = {1, 2, . . . , n}. For each i ? [n]{i \in [n]} we let p(F,i){p(\mathcal{F},i)} be the number of pairs of subsets that differ in the element i and exactly one of them is in F{\mathcal{F}}. We interpret p(F,i){p(\mathcal{F},i)} as the influence of that element. The normalized Banzhaf vector of F{\mathcal{F}}, denoted B(F){B(\mathcal{F})}, is the vector (B(F,1),...,B(F,n)){(B(\mathcal{F},1),\dots,B(\mathcal{F},n))}, where B(F,i)=\fracp(F,i)p(F){B(\mathcal{F},i)=\frac{p(\mathcal{F},i)}{p(\mathcal{F})}} and p(F){p(\mathcal{F})} is the sum of all p(F,i){p(\mathcal{F},i)}. The Banzhaf vector has been studied in the context of measuring voting power in voting games as well as in Boolean circuit theory. In this paper we investigate which non-negative vectors of sum 1 can be closely approximated by Banzhaf vectors of simple voting games. In particular, we show that if a vector has most of its weight concentrated in k < n coordinates, then it must be essentially the Banzhaf vector of some simple voting game with n − k dummy voters.     

When should organizational change be implemented? The moderating effect of environmental dynamism between dynamic capabilities and new venture performance

The purpose of this study is to explore the moderating effect of environmental dynamism on the relationship between dynamic capabilities and new venture performance using the rapidly changing environment in China as a case. Using a sample of 115 firm observations, we applied the partial least squares structural equation modeling approach to model these relationships and found that opportunity-sensing capability and reconfiguration capability have significant impacts on new venture performance. Additionally, each of these capabilities has a stronger impact on new venture performance at higher levels of environmental dynamism. We conclude that dynamic capabilities are more effective in implementing organizational change at high degrees of environmental dynamism.     

A comment on the axiomatics of the Maxmin Expected Utility model

Theory and Decision - Maxmin Expected Utility was first axiomatized by Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989) in an Anscombe–Aumann setup Anscombe and Aumann (1963) which includes exogenous...     

Downloading culture: community building in a decentralized file-sharing collective

File-sharing collectives have significantly disrupted models of digital media distribution since their emergence and widespread popularization in the late 1990s. This study investigates how semi-anonymous and decentralized collectives construct their communities of practice. Conducting a case study of a private torrenting community, data were gathered via participant observation, interviews, and online postings (i.e., blogs and forums). Findings challenged dominant notions of opportunism, selfishness and task-oriented individualism advanced by Human–Computer Interaction scholars. Three key constructs were identified in private torrent community building: boundary construction, membership maintenance, and a sense of belonging and solidarity. Findings illustrate how a file-sharing community cultivates the formation of prosocial digital peers, fosters an affective approach to peer-to-peer collectives, and ultimately forges a downloading virtuoso community. This sisyphean, goal-oriented community seeks to create a comprehensive archive of media artifacts independent of and in opposition to dominant corporate platforms. The community demonstrates a downloading culture inspired by technological design, yet driven by trust and solidarity.     

Utilitarianism and discrimination

Since Becker (1971), a common argument against asymmetric norms that promote minority rights over those of the majority is that such policies reduce total welfare. While this may be the case, we show that there are simple environments where aggregate sum of individual utilities is actually maximized under asymmetric norms that favor minorities. We thus maintain that without information regarding individual utilities one cannot reject or promote segregation-related policies based on utilitarian arguments.     

Review article

Simonetta Soldani and Gabriele Turi (eds), Making Italians. School and Culture in Modern Italy. Vol. I, The Birth of the Nation‐State, Vol. II, A Mass Society (1993), 521 + 509 (Il Mulino, Bologna).