Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Residential And Business Broadband Prices Part 1: An Empirical Analysis Of Metering And Other Price Determinants, Scott J. Wallsten, James Riso

Scott J. Wallsten

For this project, we assemble a new dataset consisting of more than 25,000 residential and business broadband plans from all OECD countries from 2007–2009. We explore three issues: the relationship between plan components—such as metering—and consumer prices, price changes over time, and how broadband prices vary across countries.

This paper, part 1 of the project, discusses pricing for broadband plans and, specifically, the relationship between plan components and pricing. We find that residential broadband plans with data caps—plans in which consumers pay a base price for a set amount of data—cost less than plans with unlimited data, other things being …

Border Militarizonaion And Health: Violience, Death And Security In Mexico And The United States, Jeremy Slack, Daniel E. Martinez, Scott Whiteford, Alison Lee

Scott Whiteford

Authors examine violence as a health issue on the U.S./Mexico border, with a special focus on border enforcement and security.

Controlling Shareholders: Benevolent “King” Or Ruthless “Pirate”, Sang Yop Kang

Sang Yop Kang

Unfair self-dealing and expropriation of minority shareholders by a controlling shareholder are common business practices in developing countries (“bad-law countries”). Although controlling shareholder agency problems have been well studied so far, there are many questions unanswered in relation to behaviors and motivations of controlling shareholders. For example, a puzzle is that some controlling shareholders in bad-law countries voluntarily extract minority shareholders less than other controlling shareholders. Applying Mancur Olson’s framework of political theory of “banditry” to the context of corporate governance, this Article proposes that there are at least two categories of controlling shareholders. “Roving controllers” are dominant shareholders with …

How Has The Recommendation (Bao Song) System Changed The Perception Of The Objective Of Education Among Chinese Upper Middle School Students Seeking Admission To Universities?, Shin Yuan Tan

Shin Yuan Tan

No abstract provided.

Informal Workers And Their Rights, Srijit Mishra

Srijit Mishra

The four fundamental principles and rights at work are intrinsic and with a pragmatic relevance that also find resonance in the Constitution of India through its Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles. Our interpretation through a Rawlsian prism also adds to our understanding of these four fundamental principles. An evaluation of the Indian context points out that more than 90 per cent of the workforce is informal workers and that the proportion of informal workers is also increasing in the organised sector. Further, our analysis indicates shortcomings in the four fundamental principles. Their freedom to organise is limited as most work …

Youth Homelessness: Prevalence And Mental Health Correlates, Staci M. Perlman, Joe Willard, Janette Herbers, J.J. Cutuli, Karin M. Eyrich Garg

Staci Perlman

No abstract provided.

Young Children’S Difficulty With Indirect Speech Acts: Implications For Questioning Child Witnesses, Angela D. Evans, Stacia Stolzenberg, Kang Lee, Thomas D. Lyon

Stacia N. Stolzenberg

Prior research suggests that infelicitous choice of questions can significantly underestimate children’s actual abilities, independently of suggestiveness. One possibly difficult question type is indirect speech acts such as “Do you know…” questions (DYK, e.g., “Do you know where it happened?”). These questions directly ask if respondents know, while indirectly asking what respondents know. If respondents answer “yes,” but fail to elaborate, they are either ignoring or failing to recognize the indirect question (known as pragmatic failure). Two studies examined the effect of indirect speech acts on maltreated and non-maltreated 2- to 7-year-olds’ post-event interview responses. Children were read a story …

Children's Memory For Conversations About Sexual Abuse: Legal And Psychological Implications, Thomas D. Lyon, Stacia N. Stolzenberg

Stacia N. Stolzenberg

No abstract provided.

Conservatism, Stefan Andreasson

Stefan Andreasson

No abstract provided.

Research Proposal_ Cc6307_Valerie Chia, Valerie Chia

Valerie Chia

No abstract provided.

Literature Review: An Investigation Into The Determinants Associated With Marital Quality In Urban China, C V

Valerie Chia

No abstract provided.

River Basin Mangement In The Twenty-First Century: Understsanding Perople And Place, Victor Roy Squires Dr

Victor Roy Squires Dr

This book is novel approach to the problems of river basin management. Its contributors live and work in river basins across the globe, they draw on decades of experience in both developed and developing countries. The perspectives they bring include those of the social scientists, ecologists, hydrologists and policy makers. IWRM is placed in the context of a short history of IWRM ideas and concepts, a discussion of some parallel concerns which supported the development and adoption of these ideas.

Digital Content Delivery In Higher Education: Expanded Mechanisms For Subordinating The Professoriate And Academic Precariat, Wilhelm Peekhaus

Wilhelm Peekhaus

This paper suggests that the latest digital mechanisms for delivering higher education course content are yet another step in subordinating academic labor. The two main digital delivery mechanisms discussed in the paper are MOOCs and flexible option degrees. The paper advances the argument that, despite a relatively privileged position vis-à-vis other workers, academic cognitive laborers are caught up within and subject to some of the constraining and exploitative practices of capitalist accumulation processes. This capture within capitalist circuits of accumulation threatens to increase in velocity and scale through digital delivery mechanisms such as MOOCs and flexible option programs/degrees.

We The Peoples: The Global Origins Of Constitutional Preambles, Tom Ginsburg, Daniel Rockmore, Nick Foti

Tom Ginsburg

We like to think that constitutions are expressions of distinctly national values, speaking for “We the People.” This is especially true of constitutional preambles, which often recount distinct events from national history and speak to national values. This article challenges this popular view by demonstrating the global influences on constitutional preambles. It does so using a new set of tools in linguistic and textual analysis, applied to a database of most constitutional preambles written since 1789. Arguing that legal language can be analogized to memes or genetic material, we analyze “horizontal” transfer of language across countries and “vertical” transfers within …

The Growth And Transformation Of The Temporary Job Market, Travis J. Begin

Travis J Begin

The temporary job market is likely to grow as the economy evolves. This descriptive analysis discusses from a labor supply and demand perspective the determinants of temporary employment, where it developed, who it pertains to, and in which industries and occupations it is utilized. In addition, statistical analysis provides an insight into the temporary employment form in international labor markets. This provides a framework to predict the future of temporary employment as the economy evolves.

Book Review: Nanotechnology And Development: What’S In It For Emerging Countries? (Preprint), Thomas Woodson

Thomas Woodson

No abstract provided.

Cecl: A New Baseline And A Non-Compositional Approach For The Sick Benchmark., Yves Bestgen

Yves Bestgen

This paper describes the two procedures for determining the semantic similarities between sentences submitted for the SemEval 2014 Task 1. MeanMaxSim, an unsupervised procedure, is proposed as a new baseline to assess the efficiency gain provided by compositional models. It outperforms a number of other baselines by a wide margin. Compared to the word-overlap baseline, it has the advantage of taking into account the distributional similarity between words that are also involved in compositional models. The second procedure aims at building a predictive model using as predictors MeanMaxSim and (transformed) lexical features describing the differences between each sentence of a …

Sentence-Initial Adverbials And Text Comprehension., Yves Bestgen, Sophie Piérard

Yves Bestgen

In the last thirty years, numerous linguists have stressed the discourse functions of adverbials. More specifically, sentence-initial temporal and spatial adverbials are often seen as signals that highlight the beginning of a new discourse unit for which they provide the setting. These expressions are thus supposed to affect the reading processes. This paper reports psycholinguistic experiments in which the impact on comprehension of sentence-initial adverbials has been specifically studied. In the first section, we summarize the two discourse functions these adverbials should play according to linguistic theories: signalling the beginning of a new textual unit (the segmenting function) and setting …

Extraction Automatique De Collocations : Peut-On Étendre Le Test Exact De Fisher À Des Séquences De Plus De 2 Mots?, Yves Bestgen

Yves Bestgen

In textual statistics, as in natural language processing and corpus linguistics, the study of sequences of contiguous words that occur together more often than by chance is a major topic of interest. In the case of pairs of words, Fisher's exact test is becoming the reference index to identify them. The objective of this study is to propose a generalization of this index to the analysis of trigrams and longer sequences using a Monte-Carlo procedure. The results of an initial evaluation suggest that this approach could complement other indices, but also that it has a major drawback: a large number …

Quantifying The Development Of Phraseological Competence In L2 English Writing: An Automated Approach, Yves Bestgen, Sylviane Granger

Yves Bestgen

Based on the large body of research that shows phraseology to be pervasive in language, this study aims to assess the role played by phraseological competence in the development of L2 writing proficiency and text quality assessment. We propose to use CollGram, a technique that assigns to each pair of contiguous words (bigrams) in a learner text two association scores (mutual information and t-score) computed on the basis of a large reference corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Applied to the Michigan State University Corpus of second language writing, CollGram shows a longitudinal decrease in the use of collocations …

Model Uncertainty And Intertemporal Tax Smoothing, Yulei Luo, Jun Nie, Eric R. Young

Yulei Luo

In this paper we examine how model uncertainty due to the preference for robustness (RB) affects optimal taxation and the evolution of debt in the Barro tax-smoothing model (1979). We first study how the government spending shocks are absorbed in the short run by varying taxes or through debt under RB. Furthermore, we show that introducing RB improves the model's predictions by generating (i) the observed relative volatility of the changes in tax rates to government spending, (ii) the observed comovement between government deficits and spending, and (iii) more consistent behavior of government budget deficits in the US economy. Finally, …

The Production Function Of Top R&D Investors: Accounting For Size Andsector Heterogeneity With Quantile Estimations, Sandro Montresor, Antonio Vezzani

Sandro Montresor

This paper aims at showing how quantile estimations can make the analysis of the firm’s production function better able to deal with the innovation implications of production. In order to do this, we provide evidence of how top world R&D investors differ in the production impact of their inputs and in their rate of technical change. We use the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard and carry out a quantile estimation of an augmented Cobb–Douglas production function for a panel of more than 1000 companies, covering the 2002–2010 period. The results of the pooled sample are contrasted with those obtained from …

Türkiye’Nin Kuzey Afrika Ve Ortadoğu Bölgesindeki Gücü: Zorlayıcı Olmayan Gücün Imkân Ve Sınırları, Talha Kose

Talha Kose

u çalışma, Türkiye’nin son yıllarda uluslararası arenadaki gücüne dair tartışmaları kuramsal bir bakış açısı ile incelemektedir. Zorlayıcı olmayan gücün değişik formları Siyaset Bilimi ve Uluslararası İlişkiler disiplinlerinin içerisindeki farklı kuramsal okullar tarafından ele alınmaktadır. Yumuşak güç, ekonomik entegrasyon, kültürel diplomasi ve uyuşmazlık çözümleri gibi dış politika enstrümanları, zorlayıcı olmayan gücün ön plana çıkan uygulama alanlarıdır. Gücün zorlayıcı olmayan formlarının, Dünya siyasetinde ve özelde de “Arap Baharı” süreci ile otoriter rejimlerin tasfiye olduğu Kuzey Afrika ve Ortadoğu bölgesinde daha önemli hale geleceği iddia edilmektedir. Türkiye’nin bu bölgeye dair zorlayıcı olmayan gücü, bu gücün kaynakları ve sınırları eleştirel bir şekilde ele alınmıştır. …

Financial Education Interventions Targeting Immigrant Populations: Results From A Randomized Control Trial In The United States, Silvia Helena Barcellos, Leandro Carvalho, James P. Smith, Joanne Yoong

Silvia Helena Barcellos

No abstract provided.

Information About Self-Control And Intertemporal Choices, Silvia Helena Barcellos, Leandro Carvalho

Silvia Helena Barcellos

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Medicare On Medical Expenditure Risk And Financial Strain, Silvia Barcellos, Mireille Jacobson

Silvia Helena Barcellos

We exploit the discontinuity in Medicare coverage at age 65 to estimate the current impact of Medicare on medical expenditure risk and health care-related financial strain, heretofore underexplored issues. Using 2007 to 2010 data, we find that at age 65 out-of-pocket expenditures drop by about 33% at the mean ($326) and 53% ($1730) among the top 5% of spenders. We also find large reductions in several measures of financial strain: problems paying medical bills, related collections agency contacts, the amount owed in medical bills and borrowing or using savings to pay these bills all drop by about 30 to 35% …

Legitimation, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Mark C Modak-Truran

This article identifies three different conceptions of legitimation - pre-modern, modern, and post-secular - that compete both within and across national boundaries for the coveted prize of informing the social imaginary regarding how the government and the law should be legitimated in constitutional democracies. Pre-modern conceptions of legitimation consider governments and rulers legitimate if they are ordained by God or if the political system is ordered in accordance with the normative cosmic order. Contemporary proponents of the pre-modern conception range from those in the United States who maintain that the government has been legitimated by the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to those …

Political Authority In Islam, Muqtedar Khan

Muqtedar Khan

The chapter is a survey of various approaches to political authority in Islamic thought.

Political Authority In Islam, Muqtedar Khan

Muqtedar Khan

The chapter is a survey of various approaches to political authority in Islamic thought.

Turkey’S Quest For A “New International Order”: The Discourse Of Civilization And The Politics Of Restoration, Murat Yesiltas

Murat Yesiltas

This article argues that the increasing emphasis of civilization in Turkish foreign policy discourse fundamentally affected Turkey’s criticism of the current international order. Political elites during the Justice and Development Party era have framed their critiques of international order in the context of the “politics of restoration”; the political discourse seeks to re-construct Turkey’s national, regional and international political discourse and engagement. They have also re- contextualized the politics of restoration along the axis of a discourse of the “New Turkey”. In this sense, the “New Turkey” discourse reproduced the civilizational identity part of Turkey’s international order narrative by blending …