bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Taxes and Transfers in Japan’s Local Finances
Authors: Machida Nobuki
Published: October 2023

Japanese local public finances account for roughly 70 per cent of general public expenditure and 80 per cent of public capital formation. This suggests that, in implementation terms at least, local governments play an important role in the provision of public services. The efficiency and equity characteristics of the Japanese local government system are, therefore, likely to have an important effect on regional and national development. The purpose of this chapter is to examine Japan’s intergovernmental relations from a fiscal view point. It is divided into four sections. The first section provides an outline of the basic framework of the system. The second provides an analysis of the local tax system. The third provides data on the regional equalization effect of intergovernmental transfers. The fourth and concluding section discusses some lessons of experience to date for other countries as well as for Japan.
Local Policy Initiatives
Authors: Kitayama Toshiya
Published: October 2023

How has the Japanese government dealt with the social and economic change of the post-war period, especially the achievement of economic growth and the resolution of problems caused by industrialization? This chapter suggests that local governments in Japan have played an important role in coping with post-war socio-economic change, in particular by embarking on a series of innovative policies which responded to the evolving needs and demands of citizens during the process of industrialization and beyond. Why and how did this come about? One explanation certainly lies in the institutional setting of local governments in Japan.
The Franc in Peril, 1924–1926
Authors: Mouré Kenneth
Published: October 2023

The French path from wartime inflation and budget deficits through the years of major reconstruction of devastated areas to stable currency and finance after 1926 was far from exemplary From early 1924 to mid-1926, France made significant progress in eliminating the budget deficit, but increased taxation and tighter control on expenditure were decided as a product of sharp crises. The franc, having fallen dramatically in 1919–20, tell by a further 50 per cent in this period. and parliament voted the toughest tax measures in seeking to end flight from the franc. The unwillingness of French politicians to vote tax increases vas a persistent factor producing financial and monetary instability. The resolution of the currency crises in March 1924 and July 1926 owed a great deal to the crises having confronted politicians with a worse alternative than voting new taxes: collapse of the franc. But successful resolution of the crises depended on co-ordinated action between the central bank and the government, as the crises were in part a product of conflict between the Bank of France and the Treasury.
The Gold Standard Illusion, 1928–1936
Authors: Mouré Kenneth
Published: October 2023

The franc’s return to gold did not end inter-war currency instability and secure the foundations for a new era of global economic prosperity. Beginning in the summer of 1928, policy decisions by individual central banks set in train restrictive monetary policies in the United States and in capital-importing nations. The gold standard transmitted this contractionary turn system-wide, amplifying national monetary policy decisions to produce a worldwide contraction, setting off the Great Depression. The key monetary decisions were taken in the United States. One recent analyst contends that American policy was in part ‘hostage to the dynamics of French gold absorption’, and that while American policy errors were unrecognized by contemporaries, French policy was immediately seen as harmful and criticized as such. Thus Clark Johnson argues that ‘French errors were avoidable’, and blames French policy for the Great Depression.1
Conclusions
Authors: Mouré Kenneth
Published: October 2023

The gold standard earned a better reputation than its actual performance merited. The smooth functioning of the classical gold standard owed a great deal to favourable historical circumstances (Chapter 1). The First World War sent a seismic shock through the international economy, with the worst effects felt at its epicentre among the European belligerents. War finance produced inflation and instability: high levels of government debt, rising prices, and currency depreciation. Looking back from the early 1920s, the classical gold standard seemed to have provided an ideal system of balanced budgets, stable currencies, and stable prices.
Stalinist Art: Tractor Drivers’ Supper
Authors: Caute David
Published: October 2023

The years before the 1917 Revolution had been a time of brilliant artistic innovation. Chagall, Kandinsky, Malevich, Goncharova, Tatlin, Lissitsky, and Rodchenko were at work, and Russian art was hurtling out of isolation. The Bolshevikseizure of power gave grounds for hope that the long-awaited marriage of the political and artistic avant-gardes would be consummated.
Gladstone and the Greeks: The Extraordinary Mission to the Ionian Islands, 1858–1859
Authors: Holland Robert , Markides Diana
Published: October 2023

On the rainswept afternoon of Friday, 10 December 1858 the rising hope of British politics, William Gladstone, was attempting to cross the narrow bridge leading to the town of Argostoli, on the island of Cephalonia in the Ionian archipelago. Gladstone had recently arrived in the Islands and had thrown himself energetically into his task as Extraordinary High Commissioner to investigate the ills and discontents of Ionian society after four decades under British protection. As his carriage clattered over the bridge, a crowd of about a thousand quickly gathered on the town side, and rushed to surround the prestigious visitor, the cry of ‘Hurrah for union with Greece’ (zito ì enosis) being endlessly repeated. Audible above this out-burst, however, was another, more menacing assertion, with a clear anti-British meaning: ‘Down with the Protection.’ The hubbub panicked the horses, and they had to be taken in hand by the crowd.
Love, Deception and Anglo-Hellenic Politics
Authors: Holland Robert , Markides Diana
Published: October 2023

The range of historical experience covered in these pages has been very considerable. In navigating a path across it, we have sought to draw out the comparative dimension in essentially four intense island experiences. This conclusion will be restricted to rehearsing some of the common threads. An outstanding feature has been the ideological sensitivity which issues of Hellenic irredentism caused in British policy making. The uncomfortableness of the British position in the Ionian Islands arose, as one Lord High Commissioner observed, because they constituted ‘a stage very open to the observation of Europe’, and as such vulnerable, as more distant possessions were not, to Britain’s international detractors. A couple of decades later Lord Salisbury identified the same weakness when forewarning a newly appointed High Commissioner of Cyprus that the principal challenge surrounding this new acquisition came from ‘the reflex operation on the public feeling of the island when thrown back, in a magnified and distorted form, by the exaggeration of European controversy’. Such magnification was experienced during the European occupation of Crete after 1897, when the criticisms of local Christians concerning British peacekeeping in Candia interacted with wider attacks on England’s ‘splendid isolation’ and unilateral diplomacy. But Salisbury’s concern that Cyprus in particular might prove an embarrassment was to be all too amply fulfilled at the end of our period.
The Psychology of Irrationality: Why People Make Foolish, Self-Defeating Choices
Authors: Baumeister Roy F
Published: October 2023

Self-destructive or self-defeating behavior has been an enduring fascination in psychology. One reason for this fascination is that it shows the limits of the model of the human being as a rational decision-maker. A rational being should by definition pursue enlightened self-interest. Self-defeating behavior constitutes a failure to pursue enlightened self-interest. Such patterns suggest dark psychological motivations or at least troubling, costly failures of human reason.
Information and Self-Control
Authors: Brocas Isabelle , Carrillo Juan D
Published: October 2023

Nobody doubts that the behavior of agents often violates the most basic premises of rationality imposed in economics. Examples of such violations are provided in some of the essays in this volume. They suggest that looking for a purely rational explanation is sometimes either hopeless or absurd. On the other hand, labeling as irrational any conduct for which the explanation is not immediate, seems also a quite unsatisfactory strategy. In this essay, we show that if we keep the traditional ingredients of economic analysis and enrich these models in a few (and fairly natural) directions, then it is possible to rationalize some puzzling patterns of behavior.
Self-Knowledge and Self-Regulation: An Economic Approach
Authors: Benabou Roland , Tirole Jean
Published: October 2023

In forecasting how Homo Economicus would evolve into Homo Sapiens, Thaler (2000) predicted that he would gradually ‘begin losing IQ’, but warned at the same time against simply ‘making [him] dumber’. He recommended instead that economists pay closer attention to the actual processes of human cognition, which psychologists have shown to be subject to a number of specific imperfections and biases.
A New Challenge for Economics: ‘The Frame Problem’
Authors: Gabaix Xavier , Laibson David
Published: October 2023

Consider the problem of a travelling salesman who must map out a route that includes visits to K cities. If an economist were asked to predict the path chosen by the traveller, the economist might begin by conceptualizing an optimization problem.
Degrees of Exclusion: Developing a Dynamic, Multidimensional Measure
Authors: Burchardt Tania , Le Grand Julian , Piachaud David
Published: October 2023

Interpretations of the term ‘social exclusion’ are legion—as outlined in the Introduction to this volume—but empirical treatments are scarcer. Some analysis has been framed in terms of social exclusion, while focusing on a particular symptom or aspect (for example, crime or long-term unemployment: Jones Finer and Nellis 1998; Lawless et al. 1998). Others have produced summaries of a wide range of indicators (Rahman et al. 2000), or supplemented research on poverty with evidence on access to services and social support (Gordon et al. 2000).
Time, uncertainty, and liquidity
Authors: Allen Franklin , Gale Douglas
Published: October 2023

Financial economics deals with the allocation of resources over time and in the face of uncertainty. Although we use terms like “present values,” “states of nature,” and “contingent commodities” to analyze resource allocation in these settings, the basic ideas are identical to those used in the analysis of consumer and producer behavior in ordinary microeconomic theory. In this chapter we review familiar concepts such as preferences, budget constraints, and production technologies in a new setting, where we use them to study the intertemporal allocation of resources and the allocation of risk.
Asset markets
Authors: Allen Franklin , Gale Douglas
Published: October 2023

In the last chapter, we examined the role of intermediaries as providers of liquidity and risk sharing. We did so under the assumption that intermediaries operated in isolation. There were no other financial institutions and no financial markets. In the present chapter, by contrast, we restrict our attention to asset markets and assume that there are no ?nancial institutions. In the chapters that follow, we use the building blocks developed in these two chapters to study economies in which ?nancial intermediaries and fionancial markets coexist and interact with each other.
Contagion
Authors: Allen Franklin , Gale Douglas
Published: October 2023

Financial contagion refers to the process by which a crisis that begins in one region or country spreads to an economically linked region or country. Sometimes the basis for contagion is provided by information. Kodres and Pritsker (2002), Calvo and Mendoza (2000a, b) and Calvo (2002) show how asymmetric information can give rise to contagion between countries that are affected by common fundamentals. An example is provided by asset markets in two different countries.
Ethnic Conflict and Minority Responses
Authors: Hart Peter
Published: October 2023

All of Europe’s new post-war states had minority problems: hostile or vulnerable populations offering at least a potential threat-directly or by proxy-to new-found sovereignty.’ Such groups often ended up as other states’ problems, in the form of exiles, refugees, or irredentists. Anglo Irish relations were not ultimately thus affected, but Ireland certainly was. As a result of revolution and regime change, both northern Catholics and southern Protestants were harassed, persecuted, and terrorized by virtue of their ethnicity and perceived loyalties. Both groups were cut off from their preferred states and tended to see their new government as an alien imposition. However similar their dilemmas, though, northern and southern minority responses were strikingly different. While Protestants left the twenty-six counties in large numbers (falling by 34 per cent), the Catholic population of Northern Ireland stayed about the same (falling by 2 per cent-the same proportion as in the Free State).
Prologue
Authors: Shanon Benny
Published: October 2023

In the summer of 1983 I took a walking tour in the jungle of the Oriente of Ecuador. I joined four other people, two couples, and together we hired an Indian woman as our guide. The two couples kept very much to themselves, and I, being alone and much more interested in the locals than in my fellow tourists, paired with the guide. We walked and talked. When the woman found out that I was a psychologist, the topics she discussed became more and more personal. She recounted her life, critically examining her relationships with her parents when she was young.
Time
Authors: Shanon Benny
Published: October 2023

Temporality is perhaps the most fundamental constituent of human cognition. Kant (1781 / 1953) characterized time as the primary formal condition of experience, both external (of the physical world) and internal (of the psychological one). Empirical phenomenological inspection reveals that, indeed, human cognitive behaviour is grounded in time: Everything psychological takes time. This is true even of performances-like sensory perception-that, on the face of it, are either immediate or static.
A General Theoretical Perspective
Authors: Shanon Benny
Published: October 2023

Our charting of the phenomenology of the Ayahuasca experience is now complete. First- and second-order, dynamical, and contextual questions have been examined. I turn now to the theoretical cognitive-psychological level Taking a broad, unified perspective, I shall attempt to make sense of the special state of consciousness that Ayahuasca induces. What happens to the mind under the intoxication? How should the visions and ideations experienced with Ayahuasca be conceived?
The Stirrings of New Nationalism
Authors: Boehmer Elleke
Published: October 2023

Colonial literature in its exploratory and expansionist phases proclaimed cultural superiority and rightness. However, as was suggested earlier, the confidence which underlay colonial activity was not to last. Conrad’s dark colonial tales and Kipling’s brooding hymn ‘Recessional’ (1897) were proved percipient in their foreboding. By the beginning of the twentieth century Britain had begun to show signs of severe imperial overstretch. The humiliations of the Anglo-Boer War, in particular, laid bare the vulnerability of the Empire.
Afterword: Belated Reading
Authors: Boehmer Elleke
Published: October 2023

The world today has become so intensively interconnected that globalization is seen by many, those of the well-oﬀ north in particular, as the definitive condition of twenty-first-century humanity. ‘Trans-societal ﬂows’, a ‘borderless global economy’, and electronic communications increasingly undermine the former centrality of national structures and institutions, and demand a re-figuration of the languages of everyday life.1 Indeed, global interconnection has ramified to such an extent that postcolonial literature itself is now.
The Causes of the ‘Youth Employment Problem’:
Authors: Wasmer Etienne
Published: October 2023

In all OECD countries, young workers are the demographic category which has suffered most in the labour market over the past decades, either in terms of high unemployment, low wages or reduced participation. In 1990 in Europe, the unemployment rate of workers aged 25 and less reached 31.5 per cent in Italy, 19.3 per cent in France, 32.3 per cent in Spain, 6.1 per cent in Sweden (in 1991), and 6.4 per cent in Germany (in 1989), whereas the rates of unemployment of workers aged 26 and older was, respectively, in these countries, 7.0, 7.8, 12.2, 2.0, and 6.9 per cent. Between 1963 and 1987 in the US, the relative wage of the male workers with 1-10 years of potential experience declined by 70 per cent with respect to the 26-35 years of experience, controlling for education and other characteristics (Juhn et al., 1993). In the UK, young male workers withdrew massively from the labour force. This evidence points out the fact that the youth problem in the labour market is two-fold, both in terms of low employment and in terms of low wages. Hereafter, by the denomination ‘youth employment problem’, I will refer to both aspects, which, combined, imply a downward trend to labour income of the young labour market participants.
Unequal Societies: Income Distribution and the Social Contract
Authors: BÉnabou Roland
Published: October 2023

The social contract varies considerably across nations. Some have low tax rates, others a steeply progressive fiscal system. Many countries have made the financing of education and health insurance the responsibility of the state. Some, notably the US, have left it in large part to families, local communities, and employers. The extent of implicit redistribution through labour-market policies or the mix of public goods also shows persistent differences.
Unemployment, Specialization, and Collective Preferences for Social Insurance
Authors: Hassler John , RodrÍguez Mora JosÉ V , Storesletten, Kjetil , zilibotti Fabrizio
Published: October 2023

Two facts are the driving motivation behind this chapter. On the one hand, the average unemployment rate in Continental Europe is about twice as large as that of the US. Moreover, the duration of unemployment is substantially larger in Europe; more than 50 per cent of the unemployed in Europe have been unemployed for more than a year, while the corresponding figure for the US is a mere 10 per cent (see, for instance, Table 1 in Ljungqvist and Sargent, 1998). On the other hand, the generosity of the unemployment insurance (UI) remains substantially higher in most of Continental Europe than in the US. According to the summary measure of the OECD Data-base on Benefit Entitlements and Gross Replacement Rates, constructed as a weighted average of extent, duration and coverage of insurance for different types of workers, workers in Continental Europe enjoy government provided insurance that is more than three times higher than do workers in the US.
External Effects Theory Applied
Authors: Rahnasto Ilkka
Published: October 2023

It can be easily seen that a rights holder may use intellectual property rights to oppose imitations. The case law and commentaries have generally adopted the approach that any enforcement activities directed against competitors to stop imitations are privileged. This is the ‘core’ or ‘specific subject matter’ of any intellectual property laws. The courts and commentators are universally reluctant to overrule the legal presumption that activities with the sole aim of stopping imitations are privileged from intervention by anti-trust laws.1 An innovator’s most immediate concern is to enjoy the advantage of its innovation in the market for its product. Competitors in the same market threaten the activities of the rights holder in an immediate way.2 This author supports this view.
Introduction
Authors: Ramberg Christina
Published: October 2023

Many believe that the technical possibilities for establishing meeting places on the Internet with the purpose of assembling the worldwide supply and demand of almost any kind of product will create a revolution for business. The fact that the Internet makes it possible easily to gather a large amount of the supply and demand and thereby establish increased liquidity in the markets, is likely to Jead to a substantially increased use of electronic auctions and exchanges.1 If this prediction comes true, business will face tremendous changes in how to buy and sell products and services. This study with analyse the new legal questions that will follow the changes in business concepts.
Determination of the Winning Bid And The Price
Authors: Ramberg Christina
Published: October 2023

At first sight it may appear quite simple to determine which bid is the winning bid. how bids are to be matched and what the purchase price is. However, this is not necessarily simple. This chapter will illustrate some particularly difficult situations and provide recommendations on how to avoid uncertainty by express regulation in the conditions of sale or membership terms. There are different methods in use as to how to determine the winning bidder in auctions and exchanges. It is particularly difficult to establish the winning bidder when the bidders are allowed to submit combinations of bids that are not exactly the same. Modern technology makes it possible to compare bids that are combined in complicated ways. and it is then necessary to explain how the winning bid is determined.
The Operator’S Liability In Case Of Inaccessibility
Authors: Ramberg Christina
Published: October 2023

An electronic marketplace may be inaccessible, which may cause losses for the participants when they are dependent on its availability. This is the case when objects exposed to rapid price variations are being sold and bought and when alternative marketplaces are not readily available, because either the marketplace is dominant or competing marketplaces have time-consuming access procedures. Another example of dependency is when the participant is buying or selling continually and has adopted its logistic system to a continuous flow of small deals in the marketplace.
Final Remarks
Authors: Ramberg Christina
Published: October 2023

This study has focused on the need for an Internet marketplace to ensure that 19.01 there is trust and confidence in it. Because of the globalization of trade and the reduced practical means for national states to influence cyberspace with regulations and enforcement of regulations, the marketplace must establish confidence itself without the traditional help of legislation and national institutions. The main tools a marketplace can use to establish trust and confidence are the membership terms, the conditions of sale, the technological infrastructure and the dispute resolution forum. All these should interact and be synchronized or co ordinated to achieve optimum efficiency. Trust must be established in all activities undertaken by a marketplace, which can include pre- and post-trade information, order routing, order execution, matching, clearing and settlement.
La Copropriété
Authors: Dyson Henry
Published: October 2023

A very large proportion of French families live in parts of buildings either originally built as blocks of flats or in buildings at one time in single occupation but subsequently converted into flats. It is said that historically this was an arrangement which greatly pleased those who governed the country since each such building needed some permanent servant who could organize its security, the enforcement of its internal regulations and its general upkeep and organization but particularly who, by reason of his and his wife’s continuous presence, could monitor the comings and goings of the occupants and their visitors. Certainly, for a very long period, the concierge was a most trusted and fruitful police informer in addition to keeping each occupant of the block fully au fait with the affairs of all his neighbours.
Powers Of Attorney
Authors: Dyson Henry
Published: October 2023

The equivalent in French law of the Powers of Attorney Act 1971 are C.civ.arts.1984 to 2010. Unfortunately, the Code does not provide for a simple general power such as is to be found in Schedule 1 to the English Act. It is worth while noting that the words mandat and procuration are interchangeable but, whilst perhaps the latter is more commonly used as a description of the document, the donor and donee mentioned in it are called mandant and mandataire respec tively. A power of attorney is also sometimes called a pouvoir but this term seems to be more used in current parlance for a proxy to attend company and copropriete meetings and the like.
Donation-Partage And Donation De Biens A Venir
Authors: Dyson Henry
Published: October 2023

It might safely be assumed that the laws of a country whose citizens’ ability freely to dispose of their assets by will is as circumscribed as it is in France by the existence of the reserve would not provide its practitioners with much trouble in the administration of estates of deceased persons. One of the leading notaires, with much experience of probate work, considers that very many administrations lead to hard fought family disputes and that the reason lies precisely with the reserve. This is because, whilst there is intended to be equality of inheritance between issue, the rule of the reserve, as is explained in Chapter 28, is based on the limitations placed on what proportion of ‘gifts whether made inter vivos or by will’ (C.civ.art.913) an individual may make without impinging on what his issue are entitled to inherit.
The Executeur Testamentaire
Authors: Dyson Henry
Published: October 2023

Thus, it is on the h  éritier b  én  éficiaire, by which is meant the lawful heir in an intestacy or the l  égataire univerlor l  égataire à titre universe/ if there is a will, that is imposed the burden of the administration of the estate and of accounting for his actions to the creditors and the body of the beneficiaries. This is a far cry from what is to be found in the Administration of Estates Act 1925 or the Trustee Act 1925 designed to protect the rights of creditors of a deceased person and his executors. In an English estate it is a matter of due administration that the debts of the deceased are paid by the personal representatives before distribution to the beneficiaries.
Saisine
Authors: Dyson Henry
Published: October 2023

The concept of saisine is not difficult to comprehend. What is strange to the English lawyer is that those in whom it is vested are expected to administer the estate in effect as trustees for themselves beneficially but when the administration is completed find themselves as beneficial tenants in common without the inter position of any trustees. Although the atmosphere in which administration takes place in France is different from the manner in which it proceeds in England, one can liken the situation to that of an English estate in which a surviving widow and one child of the deceased are both sole beneficiaries and the two executors. The English system enables them to distinguish between themselves in their capacity as executors and as beneficiaries. The French system can make no distinction since they do not acquire the former capacity.
Immigration and the Extension of Free Movement to Eastern Europe
Authors: Boeri Tito , Hanson Gordon , McCormick Barry
Published: October 2023

This chapter explores the likely impact of enlargement on the levels of migration into the current EU countries. In past enlargement rounds, the EU has extended the free movement of labour to countries with similar per capita incomes and factor endowments. Even in the case of the Southern Enlargement, differences in income levels were moderate compared with the gap in per capita income levels that the EU will face in the context of the eastern rounds. Figure 4.1 displays the population and PPP-GDP figures of the EU-15, the ten accession candidates from Central and Eastern Europe1 (CEEC-10), and a set of other countries, which may apply for accession in the future. Turkey already possesses a candidate status. The total population of ail ten accession candi dates from Central and Eastern Europe amounted to 104 million persons in 2000 and that of the southern EU countries (Greece, Spain, and Portugal) 59 million at the time of their accession.
The Political Economy of Immigration Policy
Authors: Boeri Tito , Hanson Gordon , McCormick Barry
Published: October 2023

As the previous sections have made clear, immigration has important—if contested—effects on the US economy and so on this basis alone is an import ant political issue. Immigration is also, however, about deciding membership in a political community and, as such, is one of the most fundamental and con troversial political choices facing national policymakers. Given the critical economic and political issues at stake, what are the factors that have shaped US immigration policy over recent decades?
Conclusion
Authors: Boeri Tito , Hanson Gordon , McCormick Barry
Published: October 2023

Setting immigration policy in any country raises a dizzying array of interrelated questions. Immigration may have substantial implications for the economic welfare of both those countries that send immigrants and those that receive them. Aggregate impacts are just a starting point, however, as many of immigration’s biggest effects are distributive. The interests of native citizens can conflict with those of immigrants; in addition, interests can conflict among different groups of natives. These distributive battles have always been a feature of the politics and economics of immigration. However, the rise of the modern welfare state has introduced new sources of economic conflict and cooperation that substantially alter how individuals perceive immigration affecting their interests.
Leaders and Intermediaries as Economic Development Agents in Producers’ Associations
Authors: Bianchi Tito
Published: October 2023

The development field is currently dominated by two powerful and interconnected ideas: the idea of participation, and the idea of a bottom-up approach. The idea of participation emphasizes the process of development, and claims that development is more likely to be successful if as many as possible of its beneficiaries are actively involved in improving their own conditions. The bottom-up approach—which has a parallel in fiscal decentralization in public finance—maintains that the beneficiaries should choose democratically the means and objectives of the development strategies that concern them.
Conclusions
Authors: Heyer Judith , Stewart Frances , Thorp Rosemary
Published: October 2023

This book has explored how a focus on group rather than individual behaviour enriches our understanding of development outcomes and policies. We started with the recognition that the magnitude of activities within groups greatly outweighs that of interactions between groups, yet most economists’ models treat groups as quasi-individuals. This book aimed to challenge this by using different theoretical perspectives to explore within-group behaviour, focusing principally on economic activity. A driving motivation behind the study is the need to deepen our insight into the consequences of the shift to the market-dominant development paradigm affecting the majority of developing countries today, since this appears to be a major influence on group functioning and development outcomes. To investigate this relationship we studied both how macro-paradigms affect the mode of group behaviour at the micro-level, and how the modes of functioning (P/C, COOP, or M) relate to efficiency and equity outcomes.
Estimation of Stochastic Volatility Models with Diagnostics
Authors: Gallant Ronald , Hsieh David , Tauchen George
Published: October 2023

Efficient method of moments (EMM) is used to fit the standard stochastic volatility model and various extensions to several daily financial time series. EMM matches to the score of a model determined by data analysis called the score generator. Discrepancies reveal characteristics of data that stochastic volatility models cannot approximate. The two score generators employed here are ‘semiparametric ARCH’ and ‘nonlinear nonparametric’. With the first, the standard model is rejected, although some extensions are accepted. With the second, all versions are rejected. The extensions required for an adequate fit are so elaborate that nonparametric specifications are probably more convenient. The stochastic volatility model has been proposed as a description of data from financial markets by Clark (1973), Tauchen and Pitts (1983), Taylor (1986, 1994), and others.
Large-sample Properties of Parameter Estimates for Strongly Dependent Stationary Gaussian Time Series
Authors: fox Robert , Taqqu Murad S
Published: October 2023

Two examples, fractional Gaussian noise and fractional ARMA’s, are desqi.bed at the end of this section. We will estimate simultaneously all the unknown parameters symbolized by the vector 0, and not just the exponent a(0) in isolation. This work was previously published as Fox, R. and Taqqu, M. S. (1986), ‘Large-sample properties of parameter estimates for strongly dependent stationary Gaussian time series,’ Annals of Statistics 14, 517-32. Reproduced here by kind permission of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
The Estimation and Application of Long-memory Time Series Models
Authors: Geweke John , Porter-Hudak Susan
Published: October 2023

In the most widely applied models for stationary time series the spectral density function is bounded at the frequency A = 0 and the autocorrelation function decays exponentially. This is true in stable autoregressive moving average models, and it is characteristic of estimates obtained by nonparametric spectral methods, for example.
Consciousness of Change
Authors: Woolf Daniel
Published: October 2023

Anxiety About the accelerating pace of change has been a defining mark of modern culture for over a century. Long before the post-atomic doomsday scenarios of the 1950s and 1960s, and the current frenetic developments in information technology, Henry Adams, attempting to measure the ‘velocity’ of his tory according to the laws of thermodynamics, expressed the view that the world would ‘break its neck’ from over-acceleration by 1950. As a modern historian commented a few years before the computer revolution of the 1980s, ‘nothing defines our age more than the furious and relentless increase in the rate of change’.’ This chapter will deal with the experience of change between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the pace was far slower than in Henry Adams’s time, but also more noticeable than it had been in the past.
Varieties of Antiquarianism
Authors: Woolf Daniel
Published: October 2023

There is a crucial difference between an all-encompassing veneration of things in general because they are old-and therefore safe and familiar, unlike new things-and the love of specific objects whose oldness makes them rare and exotic. The first, as we have seen, is a general characteristic of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, shared in broad terms by all levels of society. The second, however, is a much more historically specific attitude, and one which is unlikely to develop in a society that is both marginally literate and geographically insular. A society that has little exposure to things that are very new need not devise any special mental shelf or ‘closet’, nor any corresponding discursive space, in which to store the very old; it can keep or throw out past traditions as present needs demand. But what happens when that same society undergoes a period of rapid cultural, technological, or economic change? Beset by newness, the initial reaction of most people will be exactly that outlined in Chapter 2: a reflexive appeal to the old ways as the standard and a counter-offensive against novelty.
Biology
Authors: Crawford Robert
Published: October 2023

The day I received Robert Crawford’s poem, my initial impression of ‘Biology’ was that it lacked logic, the essence of science. The lack of logic made it alien to me as a written communication. It would never get past peer review by a picky scientist. Alienation came too from the use of words out of context, ‘lost in translation ‘ from science to poetry. Words such as ‘carnitine’, a specific recognition molecule in the cell, jump out from amongst the non-specific terms around them; abstruse nomenclature and central themes of molecular biology are mixed at random. Scientist and poet in this project were given the impossible task of sharing, over one lunch, the sense of mystery and challenge of science and the sense of music and ideas in poetry, each in their own particular style. The time was much too short and our conversation could easily have stretched over several meetings when the opportunity to focus on issues and clarify connections would have been possible. I had expected the language of science to be a hurdle, as it is to students new to biology, but Robert took the dialect in his stride.
Testament and Confessions of an Informationist
Authors: Herbert W N
Published: October 2023

I am one of those unfortunate souls who hear voices, usually indistinct, opinionated ones, which assail me when I wake up. My radio alarm afficts me with a particular kind of information: the incessant voices of Middle Britain, for some years well exemplified by the writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg on his BBC Radio programme Start the Week. Not so long ago I heard him yet again setting scientist against religious commentator whilst reserving writer (in this case Will Self) to throw in the cultural kedgeree. It was the usual scientist’s argument that science is based on facts whereas religion is based on ideas, while Will Self claimed that his fiction occupied a parallel realm entirely. Listening dejectedly, I concluded that science appeared to be a bleak and doctrinaire dimension, populated by those so sure of their own rightness that they feel no need to pause and consider whether a fact is in fact all that different from an idea in the first place.
Circadian
Authors: Glenday John
Published: October 2023

Joining John Glenday for lunch was a real privilege, which was much more a meeting of minds than a clash of cultures. I described what it is like for me to go about making scientific discoveries, and he did the same for constructing poems. It was amazing to find how close the two activities are. John seemed to have a keen awareness of and care for the world around him and a desire to understand what is going on in depth and then to wrestle with ways of communicating his insights in new and pithy ways. For me as a theoretical solar physicist there is a strong desire to understand the enormous complexity and subtlety of the many processes going on in the Sun.
Once I Looked into Your Eyes
Authors: Muldoon Paul
Published: October 2023

I won’t pretend I can write like Paul Muldoon. But I might be able to make more interesting pictures. Many of the spectacular achievements of twentieth-century science followed a simple paradigm. As new directions in basic atomic or molecular physics matured, they were adopted by chemists and applied physicists. This work in turn enabled applications in biological, clinical, and environmental science. The centres I direct at Princeton (including POEM, the centre for Photonics and Electronic Materials) support this process by bridging the gaps between innovation, technology, and application. Imaging technologies provide many of the best-known illustrations of this evolution. Fifty years ago, measurements of the magnetism created when atomic nuclei ‘spin’ were at the forefront of esoteric physics research, with no conceivable application. Gradually the applications became clear, and by the 1960s every modern chemistry department had ‘nuclear magnetic resonance’ spectrometers. By the 1980s most hospitals had ‘magnetic resonance imagers’ ( ‘nuclear’ was dropped to avoid scaring patients) which give beautifully detailed images of soft tissue.
The Art of Wit and the Cambridge Science Park
Authors: Milne Drew
Published: October 2023

C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures suggests that ‘Cambridge is a university where scientists and non-scientists meet every night at dinner.’ Dining at ‘High Table’ provides a forlorn example of the shared life-world in which natural scientists and literary intellectuals resist dialogue. Cambridge is also a town in England, and many poets who live and work there, such as Tom Raworth, John James, and Peter Riley, do so without reference to Cambridge University as much more than a local irritation.
On Sharing NATO Defence Burdens in the 1990s and Beyond
Authors: Sandler Todd , Murdoch James C
Published: October 2023

In little more than four months, the Communist regimes in Europe, which had posed the greatest threat to European security for 40 years, unravelled as the Berlin Wall tumbled on 9-10 November 1989, a democratic coalition government formed in Czechoslovakia on 7 December 1989, Ceausecu’s regime collapsed on 22 December 1989 and the first free elections in a generation took place in East Germany on 18 March 1990. These events were followed by a unified Germany joining NATO (3 October 1990), the official disbandment of the Warsaw Pact (1 July 1991) and the demise of the Soviet Union (20 December 1991).
Revenue sources
Authors: Pestieau Pierre
Published: October 2023

In this chapter we look at the alternative sources of financing social protection in the European Union. The main source is payroll taxation. Two issues are often raised: that of the regressivity of payroll taxation and that of enlarging a tax base that is increasingly restricted to salaried work. presents the structure and the evolution of social protection financing EU12. Together, employer and employee social insurance contributions form the largest source of finance in European countries. In 2000, employers’ and employees’ contributions accounted for more than 70 per cent of total receipts of social protection in the majority of countries. Notable exceptions
Welfare state and economic efficiency
Authors: Pestieau Pierre
Published: October 2023

European countries have experienced considerable improvements in well-being and standards of living over the past 50 years. This evolution includes widespread access to social protection benefits, a high degree of income redistribution, a reduction in absolute poverty and an increase in economic security for everyone. Such achievement can be attributed to the development of modern welfare states and to several decades of unprecedented economic growth. Yet, over the last decade, most EU economies have experienced declining growth and increasing unemployment. Economists, like most people have a short memory. They quickly forget the positive benefits brought about by the welfare state in terms of providing security and alleviating poverty and they blame its current state for slower growth. A number of economists now believe a retrenchment in social spending is necessary to revive economic efficiency and economic growth.
Efficiency of the welfare state
Authors: Pestieau Pierre
Published: October 2023

In general, when one considers the concept of efficiency coupled with the welfare state, one immediately thinks of the effects on the efficiency of the economy of the welfare state, notably the taxes implied and the benefits generated. This question has been widely discussed in recent works.É One of the main charges addressed to modern welfare states is that they impair economic performance and international competitiveness. It was the topic of Chapter 7. Another charge, just as widespread, is their inefficiency in providing social services, and their responsibility for the proliferation of costly transfer programs that miss their target populations. This second charge is thus different from the first one, although not totally unrelated. It concerns the economic efficiency of the welfare state per se, and it is the topic of this chapter.
Two-Date Models: Complete Markets
Authors: Milne Frank
Published: October 2023

In the early 1950s Arrow and Debreu introduced a simple extension to the existing theory of a competitive equilibrium. Consider two dates: today there is certainty and tomorrow there is uncertainty, with ω= I, ... , Ω states of the world. To make life simple, assume there is only one physical commodity, at each date/state (Figure 2.1).
Incomplete Markets with Production
Authors: Milne Frank
Published: October 2023

Our first modification towards reality is to realize that we do not see a complete set of markets. There are several reasons why we do not see markets for some states of the world. One example is the existence of transaction costs in operating markets. For the moment we will not model these costs explicitly, but just assume that certain asset markets exist, and some do not. (A more complete theory would incorporate transaction costs and deduce market activity endogenously.)
General Asset Pricing in Complete Markets
Authors: Milne Frank
Published: October 2023

To introduce more complex assets with multiple pay-offs, we require a construction that introduces asset markets explicitly. At the same time, the construction should be relatively simple to reveal the basics of the general argument.
The General Model and Asset-Price Characterization
Authors: Milne Frank
Published: October 2023

In this part, we extend the basic multiperiod model in a number of dimensions. The model allows for multiple physical commodities; the basic asset space is reoriented to a stochastic factor structure to allow a rewriting of our results more in conformity with a continuous-time model and we discuss stochastic interest rate models. In Part 4 we introduce money and multiple currencies to deal with basic monetary and international financial results; we show how transactions costs and other trading restrictions can be introduced into the model; and finally, we discuss real options and the basic elements of American options.
Orthonormal Bases, Factor Pricing, and Multibeta Asset Pricing
Authors: Milne Frank
Published: October 2023

An important component of most asset-pricing models is the notion of factors pricing. That is, that there are a few basic identifiable random variables that underly the economy, and that asset valuation can be based upon these variables.
Introduction
Authors: García Brígida , Anker Richard , Pinnelli Antonella
Published: October 2023

Women’s increased participation and changing position in the workforce is one of the most significant transformations the world has experienced in recent decades. This is occurring in the context of major economic and labour market changes such as globalization, flexibilization, and in formalization of production, high unemployment and underemployment in many countries, high rates of part-time and intermittent employment, economic insecurity, and the restructuring of economic systems. These new labour market conditions affect women’s and men’s demographic behaviour in complex, new ways that have not been adequately analysed or understood to date.
Divorce and Professional Careers in Russia During the Transition Towards Market Economy
Authors: Festy Patrick , Kortchagina Irina , Mouratcheva Olga , Prokofieva Lidia
Published: October 2023

Russian society has for decades shown a blend of archaism and modernism which contrasts with the industrialized countries of the West. The modern features include women’s very high educational achievements and their systematic participation in the labour force, as well as an exceptionally high divorce level which was reached long before Sweden, Great Britain, or other countries followed suit. These elements are brought together in the present study, in which men’s and women’s career patterns during married life, then after a divorce, are compared, and the implications of the economic and political upheavals of the 1990s are investigated.