Comment on William C. Brainard and Herbert E. Scarf''s "How to Compute Equilibrium Prices in 1891"

A bstract .   In commenting on Brainard and Scarf's essay, the engineer and physicist K. R. Sreenivasan considers why Fisher resorted to hydraulic machines in the first place.     

"Breed Out the Unfit and Breed In the Fit"

A bstract    Fisher's virulent positions on such themes as "race degeneration", the necessity of sterilization measures for certain categories of the American population, and his urgent call for the control of the genetic quality of new immigrants are hardly consistent with the opalescent subtlety of academic disputes over the nature of capital and interest. Although Fisher repeats it often: in his work, this question of the nature of capital and interest is directly linked to eugenic assumptions and analysis. This second body of Fisherian work illuminates the strong epistemological and theoretical references in Fisher's work as an economist. This paper addresses this question through three major themes: the constant denunciation of a «racial decay>> of the American population and its corollary: the project of setting up a «scientific humaniculture>>; the plea against the eugenic effects of World War I, and the then haunting question of the closing of the «Golden Door>>.     

Fisher, Keynes, and the Corridor of Stability

A bstract .   This chapter draws on the debt-deflation process of Fisher (1933 ) as well as on Keynes (1936 , chapter 19) and Tobin (1975 , 1980 ) to explore the concept of a corridor of stability, where an economy will be self-adjusting only for demand shocks small enough to leave it within that corridor.     

Irving Fisher's Spendings (Consumption) Tax in Retrospect

A bstract .   Irving Fisher wrote a significant number of papers towards the end of his career on the design of the U.S. tax system. These writings culminated in a book that he wrote with his brother Herbert in 1942. Fisher thought that the double taxation of saving under an income tax was extremely harmful to the economy and he therefore proposed a "spendings" tax or what he referred to as a "real income" tax. Even though he disliked the terminology, he advocated what today would be referred to as a progressive consumption tax. Fisher's analysis was both theoretical and practical. His 1942 book contained a proposed tax return that implemented his ideas. His analysis is surprisingly modern and relevant today. This paper presents the Fisher proposal and examines the current U.S. tax system in light of his tax views. We argue that Fisher would find that the U.S. tax system lacks intellectual coherence, is economically inefficient, and unnecessarily complex.     

Information loss for 2 × 2 tables with missing cell counts: binomial case

We formulate likelihood-based ecological inference for 2 × 2 tables with missing cell counts as an incomplete data problem and study Fisher information loss by comparing estimation from complete and incomplete data. In so doing, we consider maximum-likelihood (ML) estimators of probabilities governed by two independent binomial distributions and obtain simplified expressions for their covariance. These expressions reflect well the additional uncertainty arising from the unobserved data compared to complete data tables. We also discuss an approximation to the expected conditional variance of the unobserved entries and ML parameter bias correction. An empirical example is used to demonstrate the results.     

对《就业、利息和货币通论》的几点思考

阅读《就业、利息和货币通论》是一个困难的过程,但是也有所获益。以下就《通论》的一些内容作思考,并结合中国实际,来探讨《通论》中是否有可供我国借鉴的一些方面。     

Resource Configuration in Family Firms: Linking Resources, Strategic Planning and Technological Opportunities to Performance

abstract    We apply the resource-based view of the firm to the study of family firms by investigating how a family specific resource (reciprocal altruism) and a firm specific resource (innovative capacity) contribute to family firm performance. We then examine how the impact of these resources is moderated by strategic planning and technological opportunities. Our findings suggest that family firms can benefit from emphasizing the positive aspects of kinship and from developing innovative capacities. As such, we demonstrate that not only do firm specific resources contribute to family firm performance, but also that family relationships can be a source of competitive advantage for a family firm. In addition, we found a heightened importance of reciprocal altruism in environments rich in technological opportunities, and that strategic planning is more important for those family firms that lack innovative capacities.     

An Organizational Justice-Based View of Self-Control and Agency Costs in Family Firms

abstract    By integrating insights from two seemingly disparate literatures – economics and organizational justice – within the general agency framework, we advance propositions that suggest a fine-grained explanation of agency costs at family firms. In so doing, we account for the differential effects of the controlling owners' self-control (i.e. the governance mechanisms they adopt and how they administer those mechanisms) on the justice perceptions of the family and non-family employees. Our integrative view allows us to strike a realistic balance between the overly optimistic views about family firm governance that have been expressed by agency scholars and the overly pessimistic views expressed by management scholars in the past few years.     

CorelDraw教学中如何培养学生的学习兴趣

学习兴趣不是天生的,而是在后天的生活过程中逐渐形成和发展起来的。兴趣可以成为学习的原因,同时兴趣又是在学习活动中产生的,可以作为学习的结果。兴趣是激发学生学习积极性的动力,也是激发学生创造力的重要条件。本文结合作者的教学实际,探讨CorelDraw教学中如何培养学生的学习兴趣。     

Fisher's "Inverse Probability" of 1930

In 1930 R. A. Fisher put forward the fiducial argument. This paper discusses the argument and its origins in Fisher's earlier work. It also emphasises the contribution of Mordecal Ezekiel to the 1930 publication.     

Information and Economics in Fisher's Design of Experiments

In 1951 R. A. Fisher described what had been achieved in the 20th century so far: “we have learnt (i) To conserve in its statistical reduction the scientific information latent in any body of observations. (ii) To conduct experimental and observational inquiries so as to maximise the information obtained for a given expenditure.” This paper asks what Fisher meant and, in particular, how he saw his work on experimental design as contributing to the objective of maximizing information for a given expenditure. The material examined ranges from detailed work on issues like “the information lost in measurement of error” to polemics against decision theory .     

应用Fisher线性判别分析法评估物流规划项目

讨论了如何利用Fisher线性判别分析方法对物流规划项目进行评估,以某物流园区规划为实例,采用Fisher判别方法进行了实证分析.经过实证分析表明,Fisher判别方法是一种较为可信、便捷的评估方法,借助SPSS等数学工具,可以大大减少专家评估物流规划项目的工作量.     

Metonymy in Language about Organizations: A Corpus-Based Study of Company Names

abstract    In this paper, I examine the use of metonymies in people's talk about organizations. Drawing upon a corpus of natural talk extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) I identify recurring categories of metonymies that appear to be a central part of people's talk about organizations. These categories of metonymies involve substitutions where an organization stands in for its members, its products, its facilities, its stock or shares or a company-related event. I also found that metonymies in each of these categories are used as basic metonymic expressions that are only partially connected to metaphorical expressions and interpretations of organizations. Where those connections exist, the use of metonymies follows a metaphor-from-metonymy linguistic pattern (where a metaphorical meaning arises from the use of a metonymy) rather than a metonymy-within-metaphor pattern (where a metonymy is part of a metaphorical expression). I elaborate on the implications of these findings for our understanding of how organizations are discursively constructed and understood through metonymic language.     

Observations on The "Vanity of the Philosopher"

A bstract .   The purpose of this essay is to identify certain points at which the presentation in Vanity appears incomplete or in error, especially as regards the interpretations of Mill and Spencer. It is shown that, while the authors have stated their case well, certain mischaracterizations, misstatements, and omissions seem to allow an alternative overall interpretation. However, another look suggests that, despite these discrepancies, the given interpretation is quite valid.     

Generalized two-sample U-statistics for clustered data

In this paper we investigate two-sample U -statistics in the case of clusters of repeated measurements observed on individuals from independent populations. The observations on the i -th individual in the first population are denoted by     , 1 ≤  i  ≤  m , and those on the k -th individual in the second population are denoted by     , 1 ≤  k  ≤  n . Given the kernel φ ( x ,  y ), we define the generalized two-sample U -statistic by
We derive the asymptotic distribution of U _{m , n} for large sample sizes. As an application we study the generalized Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon rank sum test for clustered data.     

'Citibankers' at Citigroup: A Study of the Loss of Institutional Trust after a Merger

abstract    In this paper, we present the results of a study of the loss of institutional trust following a merger. Specifically, we focus on how issues of organizational identity and identification processes contributed to the loss of institutional trust among a group of employees of Citigroup after its creation through the merger of Citicorp and Travelers. Our study makes two important contributions. First, we propose and demonstrate empirically that institutional trust, like interpersonal trust, can be identity-based. Second, adopting a narrative approach to organizational identity, we explore institutional trust in a post-merger context, highlighting how institutional trust is initially undermined after a merger by the ambiguity of the new organization's identity; and how later, once the identity of the new organization becomes less ambiguous, institutional trust can continue to be undermined by the absence of employees' identification with the new organization, especially among those who were highly-identified with their legacy organizations.     

Comment on Robert Hall's "Controlling the Price Level"

A bstract .   James Tobin discusses Fisher's compensated dollar plan and Robert Hall's proposal for controlling the price level.     

Comments on "Echoes of Henry George in Modern Analysis"

A bstract .   These comments were presented at a session entitled "Echoes of Henry George in Modern Analysis" held at the 2002 meetings of the Southern Economic Association.     

Corporate Social Responsibility, Public Policy, and NGO Activism in Europe and the United States: An Institutional-Stakeholder Perspective

abstract    Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an increasingly pervasive phenomenon on the European and North American economic and political landscape. In this paper, we extend neo-institutional and stakeholder theory to show how differences in the institutional environments of Europe and the United States affect expectations about corporate responsibilities to society. We focus on how these differences are manifested in government policy, corporate strategy, and non-governmental organization (NGO) activism towards specific issues involving the social responsibilities of corporations. Drawing from recent theoretical and empirical research, and analysis of three case studies (global warming, trade in genetically modified organisms, and pricing of anti-viral pharmaceuticals in developing countries), we find that different institutional structures and political legacies in the US and EU are important factors in explaining how governments, NGOs, and the broader polity determine and implement preferences regarding CSR in these two important world regions.