Responsibility within civil society and range of urban poverty

The decentralized, subsidiary action of the urban poor within the neighborhood articulates the responsibility of these citizens within the metropolis. This article makes use of the work of J. Habermas, R. Blank, and W.J. Wilson in order to show how such citizen action on the part of the poor can, in the face of devastation, be resistant, communal, located action. Collaborative engagement assists them in coming to their own vision and in determining their world’s material and symbolic framework. In their collaboration and through the resulting interpretive community, they achieve a responsibility which engages them in caring for the future of the common life. Upon the basis of their action from within their neighborhoods, the urban poor, as they rebuild their neighborhoods, move into civil society so that the entire metropolis may benefit.     

水域山新产品全国发布引领中国生态健康产业

6月28日，2011年沙棘生态论坛暨水域山沙棘果汁新产品新闻发布会在北京隆重举行，多名相关领导和行业专家与内蒙古水域山饮品有限责任公司董事长刘志峰、水域山沙棘果汁产品代言人张涵予等出席论坛，一起深入探讨了中国沙棘生态产业的发展现状以及未来趋势，并共同见证了水域山沙棘果汁新产品的全国正式发布，为国内果汁饮料市场以及生态健...     

Legislative organization and congressional review of agency regulations

Although researchers have demonstrated that legislators possessa variety of instruments with which to limit bureaucratic discretion,it is not clear to what extent these instruments are used bylegislators whose preferences are representative of chambermajorities. This article examines the role that committee membership,preferences, and other factors play in legislators' use of congressionalreview, a new instrument through which agency regulations canbe nullified by joint resolutions of disapproval. It uses logisticregression to demonstrate that in the 105th House of Representatives,legislators were more likely to seek to disapprove agency regulationsthe greater the divergence of their preferences from the medianmember of the committee of jurisdiction. Committee membership,however, did not affect the use of congressional review. Theseresults, which diverge from previous research in several respects,underscore that it is not yet possible to draw definitive conclusionsabout the connection between the organization of Congress andlegislative-executive relations that hold across policy areasand instruments of political control.     

Globalization and labour-market adjustment: how fast and at what cost?

In this paper we argue that the flexibility of an economy'slabour market plays a role in determining the gains from tradeliberalization, the level of short-run adjustment costs, andthe relative value of these two measures. To do so, we describethe model introduced in Davidson and Matusz (2000) which allowsus to solve for adjustment costs when workers vary accordingto ability and jobs differ in terms of the skills that theyrequire. We then report results based on simulations of thismodel. We find that economies with sluggish labour markets havethe least to gain from liberalization. The reason is that whilethe removal of trade barriers creates large benefits, they arealmost completely offset by large short-run adjustment costs.In contrast, we find that with either very flexible or veryslothful labour market gains from liberalization are alwayssignificantly larger than the short-run adjustment costs.     

Survivorship bias in performance studies

Recent evidence suggests that past mutual fund performance predictsfuture performance. We analyze the relationship between volatilityand returns in a sample that is truncated by survivorship andshow that this relationship gives rise to the appearance ofpredictability. We present some numerical examples to show thatthis effect can be strong enough to account for the strengthof the evidence favoring return predictability.     

向网民派发十亿元数字星空逆市挺进团购

7月12日,“团到惊喜——数字星空团购业务上线暨中小商户成功团购论坛”主题发布会在北京钓鱼台国宾馆隆重举行．而开创业界先河的“向网民派发十亿现金”豪礼活动也同步展开．在现场数百位来宾及媒体记者的见证下，这家以“团商品”与“团服务”并重的综合性团购网站开始面向亿万网民与千万中小商户提供可信赖的团购服务以及可持续的成长服务...