Negotiating Territorial Belonging: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Mongolia's Kazakhs

Existing for multiple generations in the western-most aimag (province) of Mongolia, the Kazakh-Mongolian community has succeeded in preserving traditional Kazakh culture and language to a far greater degree than any other Kazakh community in the world. To date, this group has abstained from overtly integrating into Mongolian society, while watching approximately half of their community migrate to the newly sovereign state of Kazakhstan. What is the fate of dispersed peoples who refuse to answer the call of a beckoning kin-state? Can minority ethnicity be sustained by small-scale homelands within nationalising host-states? This article applies a transnational social field approach in analysing the multi-faceted and multi-cited discourses of inclusion and exclusion through which this community is currently negotiating its place in the world.     

Diasporic Stances: Comparing the Historical Geographic Antecedents of Korean and German Migration Decisions in Kazakhstan

This essay explores the historical geographic antecedents of migration decisions among Koreans and Germans in Kazakhstan as evidence of the importance of space-time approaches to socio-political phenomena. Both groups came to Central Asia under similar circumstances as ‘punished peoples’ but reacted very differently to Kazakhstan's independence. Koreans have largely opted to remain in Kazakhstan and re-imagine themselves as hybrid members of the Korean diaspora and the Kazakhstani civic nation. The majority of Germans, by contrast, have opted to migrate to Germany and abandon Kazakhstan. I argue that despite significant similarities in their historical geographic experiences within Tsarist Russia and the USSR, the unique spatio-temporal biographies of each group have configured their respective homeland conceptions differently. Contingency, rather than some a priori pattern of territorialisation, is clearly evident in each group's receptivity to migration possibilities.     

The no-choice option and dual response choice designs

Choice set designs that include a constant or no-choice option have increased efficiency, better mimic consumer choices, and allow one to model changes in market size. However, when the no-choice option is selected no information is obtained on the relative attractiveness of the available alternatives. One potential solution to this problem is to use a dual response format in which respondents first choose among a set of available alternatives in a forced-choice task and then choose among the available alternatives and a no-choice option. This paper uses a simulation to demonstrate and confirm the possible gains in efficiency of dual response over traditional choice-based conjoint tasks when there are different proportions choosing the no-choice option. Next, two choice-based conjoint analysis studies find little systematic violation of IIA with the addition/deletion of a no-choice option. Further analysis supports the hypothesis that selection of the no-choice option is more closely related to choice set attractiveness than to decision difficulty. Finally, validation evidence is presented. Our findings show that researchers can employ the dual response approach, taking advantages of the increased power of estimation, without concern for systematically biasing the resulting parameter estimates. Hence, we argue this is a valuable approach when there is the possibility of a large number of no-choices and preference heterogeneity.     

Asymptotics of the price oscillations of a European call option in a tree model

It is well known that the price of a European vanilla option computed in a binomial tree model converges toward the Black-Scholes price when the time step tends to zero. Moreover, it has been observed that this convergence is of order 1/ n in usual models and that it is oscillatory. In this paper, we compute this oscillatory behavior using asymptotics of Laplace integrals, giving explicitly the first terms of the asymptotics. This allows us to show that there is no asymptotic expansion in the usual sense, but that the rate of convergence is indeed of order 1/ n in the case of usual binomial models since the second term (in     ) vanishes. The next term is of type   C ₂( n )/ n   , with   C ₂( n )  some explicit bounded function of n that has no limit when n tends to infinity.     

Phillips curves in West-Germany 1975–1985: On the role of the deutsche bundesbank as an expectation determining institution

Summary For the Federal Republic of Germany and for the period 1975–1985, the present study supports Friedman’s conjecture that a rise of the expected rate of inflation raises the rate of growth of money wages by the same amount, i.e. has no effect on employment. At all events, a systematic swap of “higher employment for higher inflation” was thus unlikely to succeed in the Federal Republic during the period under review.