bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
β-Blocker Use and Incidence of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Exacerbations
Authors: Farland Michelle Z , Peters Cassey J , Williams Juli D , Bielak Kenneth M , Heidel R Eric , Ray Shaunta' M
Published: April 2013

BACKGROUND

β-Adrenergic antagonist (β-blocker) use in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has been avoided as a result of potential risk of pulmonary adverse effects. However, recent studies indicate that β-blocker use in patients with COPD can decrease outpatient visits and either decrease or have no effect on the number of hospitalizations. Long-term treatment with β-blockers has been shown to increase survival and decrease exacerbations in patients with COPD.

OBJECTIVE

To assess the impact of β-blocker use on the incidence of exacerbations in patients with COPD.

METHODS

In a retrospective cohort study of patients with COPD from 2 academic primary care practice sites who were seen in 2010, patients were identified using International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision, Clinical Modification codes for COPD and reviewing active medication lists for COPD-specific medications (tiotropium). Patients were classified as either a β-blocker user or a nonuser. Primary outcomes were incidence and severity of COPD exacerbations. Secondary outcomes included COPD exacerbations distinguished by β-blocker cardioselectivity and all-cause hospitalizations.

RESULTS

The study enrolled 412 patients. Of those, 166 patients were β-blocker users and 246 were β-blocker nonusers. β-Blocker users were less likely to have a COPD exacerbation (OR 0.61, 95% CI 0.40–0.93) and had fewer mild exacerbations (OR 0.56; 95% CI 0.34–0.89). There was no significant difference in COPD exacerbations based on β-blocker cardioselectivity (OR 0.84, 95% CI 0.38–1.83). When controlled for, using a backwards stepwise logistic regression, β-blocker use was a variable in the model that predicted exacerbations but alone was not statistically significant (adjusted OR 0.62, 95% CI 0.39–1.01).

CONCLUSIONS

Patients with COPD prescribed a β-blocker were significantly less likely to have a COPD exacerbation and had fewer mild COPD exacerbations.
Ghost- and Guest-Authored Pharmaceutical Industry–Sponsored Studies: Abuse of Academic Integrity, the Peer Review System, and Public Trust
Authors: Flaherty Dennis K
Published: April 2013

Industry-sponsored ghost- and guest-authored clinical research publications are a continuing problem in medical journals. These communications are written by unacknowledged medical communication companies and submitted to peer-reviewed journals by academicians who may not have participated in the writing process. These publications, which are used for marketing purposes, usually underestimate the adverse effects and medical risks associated with the products evaluated. Since peer-reviewed data are used to develop health care paradigms, misleading information can have catastrophic effects. A failure to curb ghost and guest authorship will result in an erosion of trust in the peer-review system, academic research, and health care paradigms.
“To Glut a Menial’s Grudge”: Domestic servants and the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883
Authors: Dussart Fae
Published: April 2013

This article focusses on a particular political controversy in India surrounding the Ilbert Bill of 1883, in which domestic servants had an unwitting and significant role. The response to the Bill in the Anglo-Indian community was vehemently hostile. By considering how the potential threat posed by Indian domestic servants to their English mistresses became a rhetorical stick for servant employers to beat the Government with, this article demonstrates the centrality of the servant/employer relationship to the intertwined gender, class and racial assumptions of the English in India.
Christian Model, Mission Realities: The business of regularizing family in mission communities in late nineteenth-century north India
Authors: Semple Rhonda A.
Published: April 2013

The ideal modern evangelical mission family may be read as both representative of “the” imperial family—nuclear in its construction, religiously Protestant, culturally Western and materially progressive—yet a closer examination of those families can only complicate that understanding. Mission families very often either lived apart for long periods of time, or were contoured with the various additions of extended family members, with servants and mission adherents and with mission colleagues who lived together. Thus, if it is possible to examine the elements constitutive of “family,” and analyze the variety of relations that existed in mission communities, the concept of mission “family,” while valuable, must allow for a broader and more inclusive concept in order to fully account for the sorts of intense, long-lasting relationships that were formed in mission colonial communities. An intersectional analysis of mission families seems to suggest that—both in order to preserve mission-imperial community solidarity, or in some cases, because of quietly preserved space that existed in evangelical cultures for ecstatic spiritual sexuality, missions were less restrictive regarding “family” groupings in practice than has been acknowledged by those interested in the mission past. This article offers a critique of the notion that anything like a “model” mission family existed in reality by considering the work of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and its work in the Kumaon area of north India, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Its work there offers a snapshot of the various ways in which a heteronormative model of Christian married love was actually practiced in the mission-colonial encounter.
Colonial Intimacies in Comparative Perspective: Intermarriage, law and cultural difference in British Burma
Authors: Ikeya Chie
Published: April 2013

Since the pioneering work by Ann L. Stoler revealed that “matters of intimacy” were “matters of state,” there has been increased scholarly attention to colonial families, domesticities and sexualities. Yet this flourishing area of inquiry remains limited by its preoccupation with relations between European men and “Native” women and inattention to unions between locals and “Oriental” or “Asiatic” foreigners whose mass migration was encouraged throughout the various European empires. This paper examines comparatively these prevalent intimate encounters in British Burma and shows important commonalities in the way that affective ties, family affairs and anxieties about intermarriage were managed and confronted.
Exiles from the Children’s City: Archives, imperial identities and the juvenile emigration of Anglo-Indians from Kalimpong to Australasia
Authors: May Andrew J.
Published: April 2013

The “chi-chi” slur that haunted many Anglo-Indian families is being radically revised by a new generation of descendants now resident in Australasia, many of whom seek to locate the contingencies of their lives in the present within the transnational processes of imperialism. Utilising archived correspondence from old girls and boys from Dr Graham’s Homes in Kalimpong, this article argues the need for a collated and integrated digital archive in order to empower Anglo-Indian descendants in the construction and fashioning of self-identities and family histories, as well as a contextual understanding of the ideologies of child removal and institutional care.
Missing and Misrepresented: Portrayals of Other Ethnic and Racialized Groups in a Greater Toronto Area Ethnocultural Newspaper
Authors: Lindgren April
Published: April 2013

The vibrant ethnocultural press in the Greater Toronto Area is a testament to the multicultural reality of a metropolitan area where visible minorities are expected to be the majority by 2031. The GTA's ethnocultural and racialized communities are served by more than 200 newspapers, many of them published in languages other than English or French. What role do these publications play in shaping how ethnic and racialized groups "see" each other? This case study examines how other groups are portrayed in the Chinese-language daily newspaper Ming Pao . With the exception of members of the White community, it concludes that other racial and ethnic groups are represented only to a limited extent and that, in some cases, they are also misrepresented. La presse ethnoculturelle dynamique de la région de Toronto témoigne de la réalité multiculturelle de la zone métropolitaine où on prévoit que les minorités visibles seront majoritaires d'ici 2031. Les communautés ethnoculturelles et racialisées de la région de Toronto ont accès à plus de 200 journaux, dont plusieurs sont publiés dans des langues autres que l'anglais ou le français. Quel est le rôle de ces publications sur leur perception mutuelle les unes des autres? Dans cette étude, nous examinons comment le quotidien Ming Pao de langue chinoise dépeint d'autres groupes ethniques. Nous concluons que, à l'exception de la communauté blanche, les autres groupes ethniques et raciaux y sont peu et même, dans certains cas, faussement représentés.
L'identité multiculturelle au Canada depuis les années 1990 : de la consolidation à la mise en question?
Authors: Winter Elke
Published: April 2013

Dans cet article, nous soutenons que, dans les années 1990, le conflit entre les nations fondatrices du Canada, linguistiquement définies, a contribué à consolider le multiculturalisme et à en faire une partie intégrante de l'identité nationale canadienne. La conséquence de cette consolidation - ou encore sa condition - a été que celui-ci n'a plus été défini en termes de «groupes» mais en termes individualistes et libéraux. Il était donc peu propice à intégrer les revendications pour les droits collectifs et les institutions parallèles qui ont réémergé sur la scène politique au début des années 2000. Aujourd'hui, il semble que le Canada soit en train de joindre - bien que tardivement - les rangs des nombreux pays qui redéfinissent leur identité nationale en faisant à nouveau appel aux notions d'une culture et d'une Communauté unique.In this paper, I argue that the conflict between Canada's linguistically defined founding nations helped to consolidate multiculturalism as part of Canadian national identity in the 1990s. As a side-effect—or condition—of this consolidation, multiculturalism abandoned the language of groups and was redefined in liberal-individualist terms. As such, it was unprepared to reintegrate the claims for group rights and parallel institutions that reemerged on the political scene in the early 2000s. Today, it looks as if Canada is joining—albeit as a latecomer—the widespread trend of countries that are redefining their national identities yet again in terms of (one) shared culture and community.
Jeunes adultes immigrants de deuxième génération. Dynamiques ethnoreligieuses et identitaires
Authors: Lefebvre Solange , Triki-Yamani Amina
Published: April 2013

Au Canada, l'arrivée d'immigrants appartenant à des religions autres que chrétiennes contribue à relancer la prise en compte de la variable religieuse pour comprendre la construction identitaire et l'intégration des jeunes. Cet article aborde quatre questions à partir de l'analyse qualitative d'entrevues qui se sont déroulées avec des groupes ou de manière individuelle auprès de jeunes adultes immigrants de deuxième génération, issus de familles chrétiennes, en contexte montréalais et québécois : la jeunesse et ses caractéristiques; l'immigration de deuxième génération et ses formes de socialisation; la religion, sous l'angle des pratiques, du rapport à l'ethnicité et au projet familial, et l'individualisation contemporaine, et enfin l'influence du contexte sur l'expérience individuelle.In Canada, the arrival of immigrants belonging to religions other than Christianity invites researchers to take into account the religious variable for understanding the construction of identity and integration among young adults. This paper addresses four issues through qualitative analysis of focus group and individual interviews of young adult second-generation immigrants, from Christian families in the Montreal and Quebec context: youth and its characteristics; immigration and second generation forms of socialization; religion, in terms of practices, relation to ethnicity and family project, and contemporary individualization, and, finally, the influence of the context on individual experience.
Canadian Jews, Dual/Divided Loyalties, and the Tebbit "Cricket" Test
Authors: Weinfeld Morton
Published: April 2013

This article explores the issue of dual or divided loyalties for Canadian Jews, with reference to ties to Canada on the one hand, and Israel and the Jewish community on the other. The article contextualizes this issue within two academic literatures, which in recent years have had very little interconnection. The first is the general literature dealing with diasporic studies and transnationalism. The second is the literature dealing with modern Jewish studies. This second literature comprises the social scientific study of contemporary Jewry, and intellectual debates on Zionism and Jewish peoplehood. It is claimed these debates have relevance for many Canadian diasporic groups today, and more so in the post-9/11 period. A concluding section looks at how Jewish communal leaders in Canada wrestle with a version of the "cricket" test, coined by British parliamentarian Norman Tebbit, when asked which team they would support in a soccer final match, Israel or Canada. The pattern of responses confirms an ongoing discomfort and indeed ambivalence in making such choices linking identity and loyalty, for Jews and likely for other groups as well. Cet article porte sur la problématique de la double loyauté, soit celle, divisée, des liens des Juifs canadiens avec, d'une part, le Canada et, d'autre part, Israël et la communauté juive. Nous abordons ici cette question dans le contexte de deux types d'écrits universitaires qui, dans les dernières années, ont rarement été interreliés. Le premier des deux est dans le domaine de la recherche générale qui traite des études sur la diaspora ainsi que du transnationalisme, le deuxième dans celui des publications se rapportant aux études juives modernes. Celui-ci comprend l'étude socio-scientifique de la communauté juive contemporaine ainsi que les débats intellectuels sur le sionisme et la notion de peuple juif. D'aucuns allèguent que ces derniers sont pertinents pour plusieurs groupes canadiens de la diaspora, spécialement depuis les attentats du 11 septembre 2001. Nous concluons cet article en examinant comment les représentants de la communauté juive au Canada composent avec une variante du 'Test du cricket', expression forgée par le parlementaire britannique Norman Tebbit, alors qu'on leur demandait quelle équipe ils soutiendraient dans un match de soccer final entre Israël et le Canada. L'ensemble des réponses témoigne d'un malaise continu, et, de fait, d'une certaine ambivalence lorsqu'il s'agit de faire de tels choix qui mettent en jeu à la fois l'identité et la loyauté, que ce soit pour des Juifs, ou, aussi bien, pour tout autre groupe.
Yiddish and Multiculturalism: A Marriage Made in Heaven?
Authors: Margolis Rebecca
Published: April 2013

Yiddish has shifted from a Jewish immigrant language to a Jewish heritage and ethnic language within the rubric of Canadian multiculturalism. This paper examines the interplay between four decades of multiculturalism and the changing place of Yiddish within Canadian life. It discusses how multiculturalism has encouraged the maintenance of a distinct Yiddish culture as an expression of Jewish identity within the matrix of Canadian diversity, notably in the areas of literature and translation. At the same time, the integration of Yiddish into the wider fabric of Canadian society as a symbol of ethnic identity has resulted in increasingly symbolic usage of Yiddish in the mainstream. De langue juive immigrante, Le yiddish est devenu ethnique et patrimonial dans un contexte de multiculturalisme canadien. Ce travail porte sur l'interaction entre l'évolution du rôle du yiddish dans la vie canadienne et quatre décennies de multiculturalisme. Nous y examinons comment ce dernier a encouragé la maintenance d'une culture yiddish distincte comme expression d'une identité juive au sein de la diversité canadienne, notamment en littérature et en traduction. Par ailleurs, l'intégration de cette langue dans un tissu élargi de la société canadienne comme symbole d'iden-tité ethnique a mené à son usage symbolique de plus en plus commun.
The Canadian Ethnocultural Council and Evolving Multiculturalism
Authors: Dragasevich Diane
Published: April 2013

Following the announcement of the multicultural policy in October of 1971, the Federal Government appointed members of ethnic communities to the newly created Canadian Consultative Council on Multiculturalism to participate in the formulation of recommendations which would address the challenges of implementing that policy. When the work of that committee was concluded, some of the ethnocultural groups took the initiative to create a new body which would continue addressing policy matters of concern to the cross section of communities. Thus, the Canadian Ethnocultural Council, a grassroots organization comprised of voices representing many ethnic and racially diverse communities and organizations, was established in 1980. It played a key role in shaping the implementation of the policy. This paper discusses that role and the precedent set by the Canadian Ethnocultural Council in implementing cross cultural cooperation at the grassroots level. Suite à l'annonce de la politique du multiculturalisme en octobre 1971, le Gouvernement fédéral a nommé des membres des communautés ethniques au Conseil consultatif canadien sur le multiculturalisme nouvellement créé, pour contribuer à l'élaboration de recommandations qui visent à répondre aux défis posés par la mise en place de cette politique. Une fois que ce comité a eu terminé son travail, quelques groupes ethnoculturels prirent l'initiative d'en créer un second pour continuer à traiter de sujets qui préoccupent une variété de communautés. Ils ont donc fondé en 1980 le Conseil ethnoculturel du Canada, une organisation de base qui comprend des voix d'un nombre communautés ethniquement et racialement diverses. Cet organisme a joué un rôle clé dans la définition et la mise en oeuvre de la nouvelle politique. Cet article porte sur ce rôle et sur le précédent créé par le Conseil ethnoculturel du Canada dans la mise en place d'une coopération interculturelle au niveau de la base.
The Reversal of the Employment-Population Ratio in the 2000s: Facts and Explanations
Authors: Moffitt Robert A.
Published: April 2013

The decline in the employment-population ratios for men and women over 2000-07, just before the Great Recession, represents a historic turnaround in U.S. employment trends. The decline is disproportionately concentrated among the less educated and younger groups within the male and the female populations and, for women, especially among unmarried women without children. About half of the decline among men can be explained by declines in wage rates and by changes in nonlabor income and family structure, but the decline among women is more difficult to explain and requires distinguishing between married and unmarried women and between those with and without children, as these subgroups have experienced quite different wage and employment trends. Neither changes in taxes nor changes in government transfers appear likely to explain the employment declines, with the possible exception of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Other influences such as the minimum wage and health factors do not appear to play a role, but increases in incarceration may have contributed to the decline among men.
What Have They Been Thinking?: Homebuyer Behavior in Hot and Cold Markets
Authors: Case Karl E. , Shiller Robert J. , Thompson Anne K.
Published: April 2013

Questionnaire surveys undertaken in 1988 and annually from 2003 through 2012 of recent homebuyers in each of four U.S. metropolitan areas shed light on their expectations and reasons for buying during the recent housing boom and subsequent collapse. They also provide insight into the reasons for the housing crisis that initiated the current financial malaise. We find that homebuyers were generally well informed, and that their short-run expectations if anything underreacted to the year-to-year change in actual home prices. More of the root causes of the housing bubble can be seen in their long-term (10-year) home price expectations, which reached abnormally high levels relative to mortgage rates at the peak of the boom and have declined sharply since. The downward turning point, around 2005, of the long boom that preceded the crisis was associated with changing public understanding of speculative bubbles.
Capital Controls: Gates versus Walls
Authors: Klein Michael W.
Published: April 2013

This paper examines the pattern of controls on cross-border capital inflows and their association with measures of financial vulnerability, GDP, and exchange rates. A key distinction is made between long-standing controls that cover a broad range of assets (walls) and episodic controls that tend to be imposed on a narrower set of assets (gates). The paper presents a new data set that differentiates between controls on inflows and on outflows as well as among asset categories for 44 developed and emerging market economies over 1995-2010. The imposition of episodic controls is found not to have followed the prescriptions of theories that suggest first imposing controls on those inflows most likely to contribute to financial vulnerability. Estimates show significant differences in the partial correlations of long-standing and episodic controls with the growth of certain financial variables and with GDP growth, but these differences seem to arise because countries with long-standing controls are poorer on average than the other countries in the sample. With a few exceptions, estimates that control for GDP per capita find little evidence that capital controls affect the growth of these financial variables, the real exchange rate, or GDP growth at an annual frequency. These preliminary results raise doubts about assumptions behind recent calls for a greater use of episodic controls.
Political Polarization and the Dynamics of Political Language: Evidence from 130 Years of Partisan Speech
Authors: Jensen Jacob , Kaplan Ethan , Naidu Suresh , Wilse-Samson Laurence
Published: April 2013

We use the digitized Congressional Record and the Google Ngrams corpus to study the polarization of political discourse and the diffusion of political language since 1873. We statistically identify highly partisan phrases from the Congressional Record and then use these to impute partisanship and political polarization to the Google Books corpus between 1873 and 2000. We find that although political discourse expressed in books did become more polarized in the late 1990s, polarization remained low relative to the late 19th and much of the 20th century. We also find that polarization of discourse in books predicts legislative gridlock, but polarization of congressional language does not. Using a dynamic panel data set of phrases, we find that polarized phrases increase in frequency in Google Books before their use increases in congressional speech. Our evidence is consistent with an autonomous effect of elite discourse on congressional speech and legislative gridlock, but this effect is not large enough to drive the recent increase in congressional polarization.
The Ins and Outs of Forecasting Unemployment: Using Labor Force Flows to Forecast the Labor Market
Authors: Barnichon Regis , Nekarda Christopher J.
Published: April 2013

This paper presents a forecasting model of unemployment based on labor force flows data that, in real time, dramatically outperforms the Survey of Professional Forecasters, historical forecasts from the Federal Reserve Board's Greenbook, and basic time-series models. Our model's forecast has a root-mean-squared error about 30 percent below that of the next-best forecast in the near term and performs especially well surrounding large recessions and cyclical turning points. Further, because our model uses information on labor force flows that is likely not incorporated by other forecasts, a combined forecast including our model's forecast and the SPF forecast yields an improvement over the latter alone of about 35 percent for current-quarter forecasts, and 15 percent for next-quarter forecasts, as well as improvements at longer horizons.
"Reproducing" Custom: Mechanical Habits and Female Machines in Augustan Women's Education
Authors: Schillace Brandy Lain
Published: April 2013

In seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain (as in France), women's primary duties included reproduction, both in terms of procreation and, to a lesser extent, cultural reproduction. And yet, as women were also responsible for the early education of the very young, they were often the subject of educational debates attempting to determine how (and if) women could themselves be educated. The resulting pedagogy, designed by men like François Fénelon, trained women to "behave" rather than to reason. Pro-woman advocates like Bathsua Makin, Mary Astell, and Judith Drake worked to reassert a Cartesian separation of mind from body at a time when habituation and mechanistic philosophy, as well as medical rhetoric about reproduction, threatened to relegate them to a kind of birthing "cattle." Astell and her contemporaries used considerable rhetorical acumen to address this "unthinking mechanical way of living" by redressing a pedagogical rhetoric of habitual (re)production. This article provides a more nuanced view of the context in which these women wrote their polemics, while demonstrating the potential of women's rhetoric in the face of burgeoning mechanistic philosophy in education and, indeed, in the medical theater of reproduction technology.
The Gendered Working Lives of Seven Jamaican Women in Canada: A Story about "Here" and "There" in a Transnational Economy
Authors: Lawson Erica
Published: April 2013

The article discusses the 1978 case of seven Jamaican women who were to be deported from Canada and the questions the case raised about the value of women's labor and discriminatory immigration policies. Specifically, the article assesses the West Indian Domestic Scheme, an agreement between Canada and some English-speaking Caribbean countries to send Caribbean women to Canada to address the shortage of domestic labor. It argues that the terms of the agreement facilitated the deportation of domestic workers without consideration for how the process of migration had changed their social and personal relations with their children, families, and households, both "here" and "there," in ways that made it difficult for them to return home. In so doing, the article addresses the transnational complexities of women's lives that remain at odds with immigration and labor policies. The objective of the article is to elucidate why the women, in their roles as mothers, decided to challenge the orders to leave Canada and to illuminate the ways in which racialized women find the means to negotiate in-between spaces that allow them to survive.
The Compassionate Courtroom: Feminist Governance, Discourse, and Islam in a Bangladeshi Shalish
Authors: Ahmed Fauzia Erfan
Published: April 2013

Increasing the number of women as jurors is only the first step toward feminist governance in the courtroom. Discursive principles of feminist governance are also necessary for gender justice. Based on a case study of an informal court ( shalish ) on domestic violence mediated by female jurors, an innovation of the customary all-male, informal justice system in rural Bangladesh, the article explores the proceedings of an NGO-mediated shalish to develop principles of feminist governance: envisioning context, eliciting counter narratives, and utilizing feminist interpretations of Islam. Drawing on village norms, the Qur'an , and state law, jurors linked domestic violence to meanings of masculinity and marriage to reach consensus and increase social awareness about domestic violence. In conclusion, the article encourages scholars to develop a theory of feminist governance within informal justice systems, which has peace and safety for women at its epicenter.
Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy
Authors: Arvin Maile , Tuck Eve , Morrill Angie
Published: April 2013

The article explores two intertwined ideas: that the United States is a settler colonial nation-state and that settler colonialism has been and continues to be a gendered process. The article engages Native feminist theories to excavate the deep connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy, highlighting five central challenges that Native feminist theories pose to gender and women's studies. From problematizing settler colonialism and its intersections to questioning academic participation in Indigenous dispossession, responding to these challenges requires a significant departure from how gender and women's studies is regularly understood and taught. Too often, the consideration of Indigenous peoples remains rooted in understanding colonialism as an historical point in time away from which our society has progressed. Centering settler colonialism within gender and women's studies instead exposes the still-existing structure of settler colonialism and its powerful effects on Indigenous peoples and settlers. Taking as its audience practitioners of both "whitestream" and other feminisms and writing in conversation with a long history of Native feminist theorizing, the article offers critical suggestions for the meaningful engagement of Native feminisms. Overall, it aims to persuade readers that attending to the links between heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism is intellectually and politically imperative for all peoples living within settler colonial contexts.
For White Girls Only?: Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion
Authors: Butler Jess
Published: April 2013

Since its inception in the early 1980s, "postfeminism" has become a common appellation for the attitudes and behaviors of young women in the contemporary United States. The article assesses how postfeminism is connected to the discursive deployment of sexuality in the late modern era by examining the socio-historical context out of which postfeminism emerges, reviewing various definitions of postfeminism, and offering a conceptualization of postfeminism as a neoliberal discursive formation. After briefly analyzing the existing scholarship on postfeminism, particularly the ways in which this body of literature privileges a white middle-class, heterosexual subject, the article proposes an intersectional approach to postfeminism in order to more fully understand how postfeminist discourses reproduce inequalities of race, gender, and sexuality, and offers some preliminary thoughts about pop star Nicki Minaj's potential to symbolically rupture postfeminism's discursive boundaries.
Combating Racialized and Gendered Ignorance: Theorizing a Transactional Pedagogy of Friendship
Authors: Olson Philip , Gillman Laura
Published: April 2013

The article explores the problem of epistemological ignorance. Drawing on the literature of feminist epistemology, in particular the epistemologies of ignorance, it theorizes white ignorance and male ignorance and how it is possible to gain consciousness about one's ignorance, as well as how to be responsible for what one does not know. The article explores ignorance as unconscious habits that inform our mental schemas, our social interactions, and our physicality. It identifies and analyzes these habits of ignorance, drawing on our experiences as team teachers (one a philosophy professor, and the other a professor of women's studies and literary studies) who co-taught an interdisciplinary doctoral seminar in feminist epistemology. It describes and illustrates the pedagogical and scholarly processes that led us to view epistemology as a practice of inquiry that combats ignorance by demanding an inclusive partnership across traditional and counterhegemonic approaches to knowledge. The article claims that a transactional pedagogy of friendship makes possible the disruption and rehabituation of epistemic habits of ignorance, moving inquirers in the direction of more inclusive, reliable, and responsible knowledge.
Feminist Internships and the Depression of Political Imagination: Implications for Women's Studies
Authors: Taylor Judith , de Laat Kim
Published: April 2013

Scholars have paid ample attention to many of the effects of the institutionalization of the women's movement, but have not sufficiently attended to how such formalization has affected younger generations' perceptions of what it means to be politically active. The article uses interviews with an ethnically and racially diverse sample of Canadian university students who interned in feminist organizations to better understand their perceptions. The authors found the "feminist internship" to have predictable features that depress students' understanding of the kind of social change or challenges that are possible, and that train them to think of activism as another form of paid employment—a process the authors refer to as the routinization of political consciousness. Significantly, too, they found the likening of activism to work has also transformed social interactions among generations in the movement, replacing conflict and contestation about political goals and means with a script akin to employer/employee relations. Despite the trend towards formalization, students in the study most valued organizations in which staff members broke rules, attended to political ethics, eschewed hierarchy, strove for transparency, and openly debated ideas, signaling that de-professionalization may be a sound strategy for producing more movement adherents from emerging generations. Finally, the article reflects upon the role of women's studies units in brokering these relations between students and organizations, explicating how internships also lead students to revise their conceptions of women's studies curriculum as impractically critical and utopian.
A Demand for Cuban Tobacco Exports
Authors: Cantavella-Jordá Manuel , Guerra Carlos
Published: April 2013

The objective of this paper is to analyze the external sector on Cuban tobacco from the export demand perspective towards the euro area. A tobacco-specific exchange rate is built to better capture the distinctions of this sector when competing overseas. We apply cointegration in the Fully-Modified Ordinary Least Squares framework and complement an error correction mechanism. It is found that both long and short-run estimates of exchange rate elasticities are significantly inelastic but present, at the same time, a high degree of stability. This means that prices become a fundamental control variable for economic policy purposes. Moreover, there is statistical evidence that income elasticity plays a significant role in the determination of exports growth for Cuban tobacco.
Trade Liberalization and Import-Demand Behavior in Bangladesh, 1974–2008
Authors: Hossain Akhand Akhtar
Published: April 2013

From the early 1980s onwards, Bangladesh has undertaken a series of trade-liberalization measures. In combination with the steady rise in real income over the past two-and a half decades, these measures have raised the country’s import-orientation and brought structural change in the composition of imports in favor of consumer goods and materials for consumption. This paper investigates import-demand behavior in Bangladesh within the Autoregressive-Distributed-Lag (ARDL) modeling framework using annual data for the period 1974–2008. The empirical results suggest the presence of a well-behaved import-demand function, in the senses that (1) Bangladesh’s imports are income-elastic and price-inelastic and (2) there is no evidence of instability in the Bangladesh import-demand relationship.
Technological Diffusion Via Foreign Direct Investment: An Alternative Measurement
Authors: Gkasis Pavlos , Desli Evangelia , Tsaliki Persefoni
Published: April 2013

Technological diffusion is mainly measured by the impact of Foreign Direct Investment presence on Total Factor Productivity or on a number of constructed output related indices. We apply an alternative process where the influx of more advanced technology introduced by foreign firms alters the practice of domestically owned firms and leads to improvements in their technical efficiency levels. In the present paper, we define technological diffusion as the evolution of the efficiency gap between the domestically owned and multinational firms that operate in a country and we examine whether it can be attributed to Foreign Direct Investment. This new approach is applied to the Greek chemicals sector for the period 2001–2007. Our main findings are a persistent efficiency performance gap with multinational enterprises being more efficient than their domestic counterparts. We also find that technical efficiency performance strongly depends on firm specific characteristics such as already attained technical efficiency levels, firm size, return on assets, level of self-financing, in addition to the presence of Foreign Direct Investment. Overall, only already technically efficient firms have the potential of benefitting from Foreign Direct Investment presence.
Multidimensional Poverty and Child Well-Being in Kenya
Authors: Kabubo-Mariara Jane , Araar Abdelkrim , Duclos Jean-Yves
Published: April 2013

Previous child health evidence in Kenya has been based on uni-dimensional poverty analysis. Assessing the multiple aspects of child well-being can help, however, reveal complexities and ambiguities in the distribution of child well-being. This paper analyses multidimensional aspects of child poverty and well-being. Stochastic dominance approaches are used to contrast uni-dimensional and multidimensional poverty over health and assets. The results show that children with the lowest probability of survival are from households with the lowest level of assets, and that poverty assessments for child survival and assets are robust to the choice of poverty lines and to measures of well-being. The results suggest that analyzing poverty and well-being in a multidimensional context can generate a relatively rich understanding of both absolute and relative deprivation, especially where regional disparities are important. Provision of basic health care services and social protection schemes could help improve the multidimensional distribution of well-being for Kenya’s children.
The New Female Migrants: Do They Send More Money Home? A Case Study for Mexican Immigrants in the Houston Area
Authors: Balderas J. Ulyses , Blackburne Edward
Published: April 2013

This research studies the factors that influence Mexican migrants to remit. Specifically, we test for gender-specific patterns in both the propensity to remit and the amount remitted using original survey data collected in Houston, Texas from November 2006 through July 2007. Following previous studies, we estimate remittances via a Tobit procedure to allow for the left-truncation of remittances and an instrumental variables model to allow for endogeneity between income and remittances. Unique to this research, however, is the implementation of Heckman’s Selection Model where the decision to remit and the decision of amount to remit are simultaneously modeled. Final results indicate that 1) females are more likely to remit than males and 2) remittances from females are less sensitive to income changes. In addition to confirming Rodenburg’s (1993) theory that females have stronger emotional ties to their family left behind, these results reconcile the objections raised by Orozco at al. (2006).
Government Economic Intervention and Corruption
Authors: Lash Nicholas A. , Batavia Bala
Published: April 2013

Corruption is a serious problem worldwide, especially in developing countries. This study investigates the impact of eight forms of government economic intervention on corruption in 157 countries grouped either by per-capita income or by region, for the period 2000 to 2006. The evidence shows that property rights were consistently the most important source of corruption suggesting that anti-corruption efforts should start with reforming the legal system. Corruption was also found associated with government intervention in business and trade and less so in the financial and monetary areas. Government spending and taxation were negatively associated with corruption, implying that what contributes most to corruption is not government size or taxes, but instead regulations and the failure to adequately protect property rights. There appears to be ample room to reduce corruption, especially for developing economies by simplifying and reducing government economic intervention.
Determinants of Economic Growth in Ghana: Parametric and Nonparametric Investigations
Authors: Adu George
Published: April 2013

This paper’s goal was to look for robust evidence on the determinants of economic growth by complementing the usual parametric time series analysis with nonparametric local linear kernel regression. The evidence from the two seemingly competing approaches (parametric versus nonparametric), complemented each other in this paper. However, the nonparametric model provided further evidence on the non-linearity of the relationship between real GDP on the one hand and labor force and terms of trade on the other. In sum we have robust evidence that the labor force, investment rate, financial development, terms of trade and trade openness are key drivers of growth in Ghana. Inflation has been found not to be a robust determinant of long run economic growth in Ghana. With the exception of inflation and trade openness, all the other regressors have positive impact on growth from both the parametric and nonparametric models.
Do Fiscal Incentives Promote Investment?: Empirical Evidence from Nigeria
Authors: Fowowe Babajide
Published: April 2013

This study conducts an empirical investigation of the effects of fiscal incentives on investment in Nigeria. We constructed two indexes of fiscal incentives which track the different types and stages of incentives embarked upon since the 1970s and these indexes are then included in both private investment and foreign direct investment equations. The empirical results showed a significant negative effect of fiscal incentives on both private investment and foreign direct investment in Nigeria. Rather than focusing on fiscal incentives, the country should concentrate on removing the factors that discourage investors such as infrastructural bottlenecks, poor institutions and good legal framework.
Trade Globalization, Financial Globalization and Inequality Within South-East Europe and CIS Countries
Authors: Elmawazini Khaled , Sharif Adil , Manga Pran , Drucker Peter
Published: April 2013

This paper contributes to the empirical literature by investigating trade globalization and financial globalization as channels of inequality within South-East Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries from 1992 to 2007. In addition, the paper uses KOF (2010) index to measure the overall impact of globalization on income inequality in South-East Europe and the CIS countries. To overcome the limitations of the least squares dummy variables (LSDV) model, Parks method is used. The paper has two results. The first result is that both trade globalization and financial globalization deepen the income inequality within South-East Europe and the CIS countries. The second result is that the overall impact of globalization have adverse effect on inequality within South-East Europe and CIS countries from 1992 to 2007. These results support the hypothesis that globalization widens the income inequality within countries.
The Impact of Teenage Childbearing on Educational Outcomes
Authors: Ferre Zuleika , Gerstenblüth Mariana , Rossi Máximo , Triunfo Patricia
Published: April 2013

Based on data from the “Survey of Biological and Social Reproduction of the Uruguayan Population: an approach from the perspective of gender and generations” of 2004, we studied the impact of teenage motherhood on the educational outcomes of women. The results confirm the endogeneity of teenage motherhood on educational achievement. The partial effect of completing 9 years of formal education is between –10 and –16.5 pp, while that of completing 12 or more years is between –8 and –14.7 pp, depending on the estimation method used (probit, bivariate probit or propensity score), showing the overestimation of the naive probit models. The results of the bivariate probit models with endogeneity show that the probability of completing 9 years of formal education is 57% and that for 12 years or more is 24%. With regard to household characteristics, the biggest impact on the probability of completing any of the achievements specified corresponds to the education of the mother (19 pp basic achievement, 30 pp school achievement).
How Can Bank Reforms Assuage Socioeconomic Ordeals in Emerging Economies?: Lessons for Egypt from the Turkish Experience
Authors: Abdel-Baki Monal
Published: April 2013

This research utilises a three-stage Stochastic Frontier Analysis/Data Envelope Analysis to investigate the relationship between post-crisis banking reforms, bank efficiency and macroeconomic performance from 2000 till 2010. The study draws lessons for Egypt from the Turkish bank reforms which successfully addressed the popular economic aspirations of growth, employment and stable prices. Whilst Turkey ensured that economic and banking reforms trickle down to all income groups, soaring food prices and high youth unemployment exasperated living conditions in Egypt, which helped trigger the Revolution of January 2011. The contribution of this study is to measure bank efficiency in accomplishing popular macroeconomic aims, instead of fulfilling the bank-centric goals of enhancing bank profitability and cost efficiency. The results reveal that the average-sized banks and domestic private banks display highest efficiency. Public debt, inflation and concentrated markets have unfavourable influences on bank efficiency.
On the Implications of Trade Openness, Foreign Aid and Democracy for Wagner’s Law in Developing Countries: Panel Data Evidence from West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ)
Authors: Sakyi Daniel
Published: April 2013

The impact of trade openness, foreign aid and democracy on government expenditure in developing countries has been emphasized in the literature in recent decades. Nonetheless, most recent studies of Wagner’s law have often neglected the increasing role played by these policy variables. This paper provides an empirical analysis of the long run implications of trade openness, foreign aid and democracy for the fulfillment of Wagner’s law in West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) countries using panel data techniques for the period 1980–2008. The paper finds the existence of Wagner’s law in WAMZ countries, but only when the role of these policy variables has been catered for. Therefore, if these countries are to meet the fiscal convergence criteria and ensure the sustainability of a single currency area, explicit sets of restraint on the national authorities and innovative and efficient ways of domestic revenue generation necessary to ensure that government revenue keep pace with its expenditure become crucial, because monetary union may not necessarily ensure fiscal discipline.