CORRUPTION: TOP DOWN OR BOTTOM UP?

This article studies the impact of corruption on an economy with a hierarchical government. In particular, we study whether centralizing corruption within the higher level of government increases or decreases the total amount of corruption. We show that when the after-tax relative profitability of the formal sector as compared to that of the informal sector is high enough, adding a layer of government increases the total amount of corruption. By contrast, for high-enough public wages and/or an efficient monitoring technology of the bureaucratic system, centralization of corruption at the top of the government hierarchy redistributes bribe income from the lower level to the upper level. In the process, total corruption is reduced and the formal sector of the economy expands.     

The symmetric and asymmetric Choquet integrals on finite spaces for decision making

In this paper, we give a mathematical analysis of symmetric and asymmetric Choquet integrals in the view of decision making in a finite setting. These integrals present two ways of dealing with negative integrands. The analysis is done with the aid of the Möbius and interaction transforms, this last one having an interesting interpretation in multicriteria decision making (MCDM). The last part of the paper shows the application of these two integrals in MCDM.     

Social choice with analytic preferences

Arrow's axioms for social welfare functions are shown to be inconsistent when the set of alternatives is the nonnegative orthant in a multidimensional Euclidean space and preferences are assumed to be either the set of analytic classical economic preferences or the set of Euclidean spatial preferences. When either of these preference domains is combined with an agenda domain consisting of compact sets with nonempty interiors, strengthened versions of the Arrovian social choice correspondence axioms are shown to be consistent. To help establish the economic possibility theorem, an ordinal version of the Analytic Continuation Principle is developed. Received: 4 July 2000/Accepted: 2 April 2001     

Catalogue of Group Structures for Three-level Fractional Factorial Designs

Taguchi (1959) introduced the concept of split-unit design to sort the factors into different groups depending upon the difficulties involved in changing the levels of factors. Li et al. (1991) renamed it as split-plot design. Chen et al. (1993) have given a catalogue of small designs for two- and three-level fractional factorial designs pertaining to a single type of factors. Aggarwal et al. (1997) have given a catalogue of group structure for two-level fractional factorial designs developed under the concept of split-plot design. In this paper, an algorithm has been developed for generating group structure and possible allocations for various 3^n-k fractional factorial designs.     

The free circulation of Individuals between the European Community member states: The practical implications for social security schemes

Freedom of movement in an integrated European Economic Area created the need to coordinate social security legislations by means of complex regulations. Improving their application calls for innovative solutions based on the experience of ISSA member institutions, ILO standards and the initiative of non-governmental organizations. These solutions are also of interest to institutions in states — even non-European states — linked to the Community by bilateral or multilateral conventions. The main objective is to simplify and speed up administrative procedures, notably for the award of pensions to migrants, given the desirability of identifying them and reconstructing their working careers at the earliest opportunity. Teleprocessing must gradually replace the international circulation of forms, facilitating in particular the provision of medical care during a temporary stay. Recipients'effective access to benefits can also be improved through the personal intervention of liaison offices, the use of migrants'own language and the aid of social services.     

Job displacement effects of Canadian immigrants by country of origin and occupation

"Some previous Canadian studies have shown that considering the labor market as a whole and also pooling all immigrants as a group, immigrants do not have any job displacement effects on the Canadian born. This study presents some new evidence. It disaggregates immigrants by country of origin and by occupation groups and provides an analysis of job displacement effects of immigrants on the native-born Canadians by these dimensions. The study finds that (1) U.S. immigrants and the Canadians are substitutes [for] competing groups in the labor market and the effect is quite significant; (2) Canadians and Europeans are competing groups in certain occupations, while they have complementary skills in others; and (3) immigrants from the Third World and the Canadians are slightly competing groups in certain occupations."     

The Development of Object Construction From Infancy Through Toddlerhood

Early in development, children explore and combine objects in increasingly complex ways. One manual skill, object construction, represents a major shift in how objects are explored relative to other objects. Despite recent connections with cognitive functioning such as spatial skills, the development of object construction ability has rarely been studied and its trajectory has not been adequately described. The purpose of this study was to describe the development of three types of object construction (stacking, nesting, and affixing) across 5 monthly infant visits and 7 monthly toddler visits using a longitudinal design and a large sample size. Infants (10–14 months, n = 131) and toddlers drawn from the infant sample (18–24 months, n = 65) were given sets of age‐appropriate toys each of which elicited at least one type of constructive play. We described success at different construction tasks and identified trends for construction skill for infant and toddler development using multilevel modeling. We found that each of the three construction actions developed in unique ways across the 10‐ to 24‐month period. Infant construction skill predicted the development of toddler skill, but toddler construction skill diverged from infant trajectories. We discuss the role of combination strategies in the development of object construction skill and how object construction could be related to other domains of development.     

A Network-Based Measure of the Socio-Economic Roots of the Migration Flows

Social Indicators Research - This paper provides a unified view for defining a measure of the reasons behind migration flows whose nature is of social and economic type. To this aim, worldwide...     

Asymptotic behaviour of binned kernel density estimators for locally non-stationary random fields

We investigate the asymptotic behaviour of binned kernel density estimators for dependent and locally non-stationary random fields converging to stationary random fields. We focus on the study of the bias and the asymptotic normality of the estimators. A simulation experiment conducted shows that both the kernel density estimator and the binned kernel density estimator have the same behavior and both estimate accurately the true density when the number of fields increases. We apply our results to the 2002 incidence rates of tuberculosis in the departments of France.