Figure and Ground in the Perception of Crime Severity

Existing group tensions provide a convenient background against which one might both judge the severity of a violent crime and understand the underlying motivation for such an act. By changing the presented context, one should be able to influence the perceived severity of the crime. In the present experiment, 33 Israeli policemen were presented with a series of vignettes describing incidents of an assault with bodily harm. Information included in the incidents was varied systematically according to a 4-way factorial design: Context (Extremist or Criminal), Identity of Assailant (Jew or Arab), Identity of Victim (Jew or Arab), and Degree of Bodily Harm (Low or High). The participants were asked to rate the severity of the assault and of their understanding of the assailant's motivation. The findings are discussed in terms of attributional tendencies.     

The decommodified security ratio: A tool for assessing European social protection systems

With a view to better assessment of the roles played by social security and social policy in determining well-being, this article introduces the "decommodified security ratio" (DSR), an instrument for evaluating an important duty of the social State, namely to maintain and improve people's economic security. To that end we describe the conventions for its use, analyse its main components in 20 European countries in 2002 and simulate the changes in it produced by ten variations in those components. From an analysis of the sensitivities of economic security we then demonstrate three different rationales.     

The labour market absorption of CIS immigrants to Israel: 1989-1994

The labour market absorption in the 1990s of some 600,000 immigrants from the ex-USSR has, on the whole, been a major success. The rate of unemployment among immigrants who came in 1990 has converged on the rate of unemployment for native Israelis. However, concern has been focused on the low rates of occupational retention and the waste of human capital that this implies. We use three micro data sets to investigate the absorption dynamics of CIS immigrants in the Israeli labour market in the 1990s.
Our findings suggest that the employment absorption process is steady, if slow. The Labour Force Survey suggests that "academics" experience positive duration dependence during the first four years in Israel. Vocational training did not appear to promote employment absorption. However, Hebrew training has a beneficial effect on employment absorption. We caution against the interpretation of occupational mismatch as being identical with the waste of human capital. It takes a long time until owners of human capital can fully adapt it to their new milieu.     

数学方法足以研究经济生活吗？——对数理经济学的逻辑批判

经济学是社会科学而不是自然科学,我们研究的是经济生活而不是无生气的事物。从形式上看,数学本身是由一些无意义的公式组成,只有把实体的东西加进去,数学才有意义。数理经济学重视经济变量之间的相互作用,而忽略了其因果关系。新古典理论通过构建高度简化的数理模型来研究复杂的现实世界,这犯了黑格尔式的错误。实际上,数理分析在自然科学中可以说是非常有效的,但在社会科学中必须加以限制,因为其前提假设如最优化、理性人及效率标准都是错误的。     

Immigrants in a Restructuring Economy: A Partial Test of Theories

The article addresses the occupational integration of immigrants from the former USSR into the economy of the city of Tel Aviv. This process is examined from a structural perspective, which focuses on the location of immigrants as a group in the restructuring economy of Israel's main business centre.
Data from labour force surveys and income surveys conducted in 1992 and 1994 by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics are used to analyse the distribution of veteran Israelis and recent immigrants among economic sectors and occupations.
Despite their superior academic and professional qualifications, immigrants were underrepresented in the business and financial services sector, the leading sector in post-industrial economies. They were most strongly represented in the personal services sector, where they replaced Palestinian workers. The findings lend support to both the restructuring and replacement hypotheses.